Oh, just out here picking up abandoned bikes from the side of the highway, muling them home using human power, fixing them up and giving them away, as per usual #SolarPunk#buynothing#RightToRepair
An EU-wide #RightToRepair has been adopted by the EU parliament with 584 votes in favour, 3 against and 14 abstentions. The directive now goes to the council and after it is officially published, member states have 24 months to implement it in national law.
One of the world's richest companies is now under fire from the #UnitedStates govt. #Justice & 16 states filed a #lawsuit against the Silicon Valley giant on Thurs, accusing the company of abusing its #power as a #monopoly to edge out rivals & ensure customers keep using its products.
Sidebar: I’m a proud member of the #RightToRepair movement & contributor to #iFixIt —on the #hardware side. I’m also a longtime #Apple user. Not only has Apple made its various OS versions incompatible w/other manufacturers, they made their older Apple products incompatible w/new ones, forcing consumers to buy new (aka #PlannedObsolescence#economic theory). They’ve not only done this by abandoning USB, but even the screw drive type. I can’t tell you how many different tiny screwdrivers I have!
One of my best memories from HS library was helping students with their #righttorepair projects - for gov class, for Model UN, and more. And they absolutely were fans of @pluralistic
TIL: The #Cricut3 apparently has a requirement to be online before you can use the software.
Also, if you claim warranty, they'll send a new unit out and ask you to bin yours. At the same time they'll ban your old unit from being used with their software. So, no repairs for the Cricut.
Another tool off the shopping list, I guess.
There's a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they're not pro-monopoly - they're just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can't hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the weather.
Some of those self-avowed members of the "#CultOfMac" are willing to take the company's pronouncements at face value and will dutifully repeat Apple's claims to be "protecting" its customers. But even that credulity has its breaking point - Apple can only poison the well so many times before people stop drinking from it. Remember when the company announced a miraculous reversal to its war on #RightToRepair, later revealed to be a bald-faced lie?
If you've ever read about design, you've probably encountered the idea of #PavingTheDesirePath. A #DesirePath is an erosion path created by people departing from the official walkway and taking their own route. The story goes that smart campus planners don't fight the desire paths laid down by students; they pave them, formalizing the route that their constituents have voted for with their feet.
Take #JohnDeere. While today the company is notorious for its war on its customers (via its opposition to #RightToRepair), Deere was once a leader in co-innovation, dispatching roving field engineers to visit farms and learn how farmers had modified their tractors. The best of these modifications would then be worked into the next round of tractor designs, in a virtuous cycle:
Apple's most valuable intangible asset isn't its patents or copyrights - it's an army of people who believe that using products from a $2.89 trillion multinational makes them members of an oppressed religious minority whose identity is coterminal with the interests of Apple's shareholders.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Apple isn't coy about all this! #TimApple's 2019 shareholders letter spelled it out explicitly: Apple's revenues are falling because its customers are fixing their phones rather than replacing them:
I'm very glad to see farmers win the right to repair their tractors. It's a win for consumers against bogus #IP objections from manufacturers. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64206913
"Three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it."
But it adds this proviso: "Legislation should acknowledge the risks borne by unskilled repairers and allow original equipment manufacturers (OEM) to provide parts assemblies rather than individual components to reduce the risk of injury."