Disposability & Repair in the Digital Age
The rise of the right to repair movement and disposable technologies will result in better technology and happier consumers. What happened?
For decades a fridge, dishwasher, oven, well, just about any appliance, would often have a lifespan of twenty plus years and was relatively easy to repair, often by ourselves. Remember Maytags advertising where the repair guy was so bored? Maytag still says they’re dependable, but that repair guy branding? Gone. Why? The same reasons for most all other appliances and devices; built-in disposability and life-span.
An article by another Medium writer on paper coffee cups, got me thinking that it was a perfect metaphor for so much of consumer electronics and where we may have been heading with regard to these technologies in the future. The good news is that particular dystopian consumer future may not be as determined as its creators had hoped for.
Looking back, home appliances were the canary in coal mine when it comes to understanding where consumer technology was heading for years. The ultimate goal was probably as futurist Kevin Kelly laid it out in his 2016 book “The Inevitable”, in which the underlying theme is that essentially, people will no longer own things. Everything will be a subscription. From food and clothes to computers, furniture and well, everything.
A signal that this was a model many a corporation seemed to agree on was the rise of Netflix and streaming services, the decline of cable television, the rapid rise of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) sector then Platform-as-a-Service (think AWS, Oracle and Azure), now Data-as-a-Service and that is a slippery slope to Everything-as-a-Service. Kelly was onto something. Until he wasn’t.
Streaming services seemed like entertainment manna from heaven. No ads. Binge watching. A cultural activity even before the pandemic. And then it wasn’t. The barriers to entry to become a streaming service were fairly low for existing media companies. They had back catalogues for nostalgia. Netflix had proven creating your own new content was possible, perhaps profitable?
Until it wasn’t. Low barriers meant competitors piling on fast, spending to get hit shows and movies was almost like a Silicon Valley tech hype bubble on steroids. It created a mess. Rights agreements and media brands clawing back their shows, like Disney dropping Netflix to build their own streaming channel. Paramount their own channel. Ads have crept back in, unless you want to pay higher monthly fees. Now, to watch a full slate of shows? You pay more for faster internet and all those subscription services than you did for cable. Often, you have to subscribe to multiple streaming channels unlike cable.
Consumers then started to watch a season or a few if it was the case, then drop the subscription. So to drag out subscriptions as long as possible, streaming channels reduced trial periods, upped their prices and started dribbling out episodes weekly, rather than all at once.
So that model is failing in the subscription world. Expect to see some streaming channels shutter or get acquired. In times of inflation, when many people still have DVD players, expect consumers to choose food over Netflix.
Subscriptions are cheap, until they aren’t. The cost of being entertained has risen where usually market pressures would see a price reduction. Toss in inflation and weird economic dynamics, subscriptions are on the chopping block. At home and in businesses.
The fashion industry tried subscription clothing models as well. Pay a fee and get new clothes every month. Hyper-fast, fast fashion. Most have or are failed. The pandemic did drive most of us online, we bought a lot there. Many industries, failing to understand human behaviour, assumed this would all stay the same. If businesses had consulted some cultural anthropologists or sociologists, they would have realized that idea was fantasy.
The very ease by which subscriptions can come and go, that they don’t at all create any sense of brand loyalty and in fact, may reduce perceived value over time, is a cultural behaviour. We still prefer ownership over borrowing.
The Right to Repair Movement
The second and perhaps most important and beneficial issue to impact consumer technologies? The right to repair. This is a prime example of when culture pushes back on a technology and the market that creates and operates that technology, or in this case, a whole bunch of different technologies across multiple industries. And it’s working.
It is believed that the right to repair movement originated with car makers who created proprietary software to limit access to diagnostics, thus forcing consumers to use dealers and their own parts. Farming equipment manufacturer John Deere tried the same approach. Both lost in court. The Fair Repair Act is in front of Congress. It has stalled as the current daycare occupants are refusing to leave the premises.
Those initial losses however, didn’t deter makers of smartphones, watches, tablets, computers and well, even appliances. It seemed that the concept of paying for devices forever and subscriptions as a business model, was going to stick around. Kevin Kelly’s prediction seemed to be coming true. Humans decided otherwise.
I may seem to be picking on Kevin Kelly. I’m not. I think he’s quite brilliant and even he has said, predictions are always going to be wrong. His work, like many other futurists, is important. They help us understand where we might go. Which helps us understand today.
My only challenge with just about every futurist is that they rarely seem to spend much time understanding humans. More specifically, humanity’s most powerful force; culture. And sociocultural systems. Human’s always do unexpected things.
The right to repair is an argument and a statement by culture more than it is a movement. The movements around the world simply put the argument into action. The argument is that society doesn’t like the subscription model. And they don’t like the low quality products that are an inevitability of a subscription based economic model.
To society, such disposability hits several collective nerves to varying degrees in society. These nerve points are; bad for the planet with waste, consumers being seen as less-than-human by corporations, feeling disrespected, economic entrapment, reduction in choice, increasing the economic divide and devalued.
We also see this argument further expressed by Yanis Varoufakis and the concept of techno feudalism emerging in capital markets.
Meanwhile, appliance and consumer technology companies pump out advertising extolling brand values that the general public see as untrue. It’s why we see terms such as greenwashing. What brands promise versus what they deliver is no longer seen as being aligned. This is well explained by a leading thinker on branding and marketing, Joel Kelly on building a brand based on values.
The right to repair movement has gained traction across several countries including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the European Union. While the manufacturers claim issues such as protecting proprietary and intellectual property, quality, safety and security, these arguments haven’t really held up.
Technology companies will often say that the markets will figure things out, so regulation isn’t really needed. Until they need regulation to protect their profits. And the right to repair is the market reacting, as culture, using the sociocultural systems that have been put in place to protect their interests in the market. It goes both ways.
Our future isn’t necessarily not owning things and being owned by a brand. It’s more than likely to actually be more open, freer markets. Instead of these technology companies complaining, you’d think they’d be celebrating. It just means the lazy business model isn’t what the market wants. What it wants is to participate in its future and to be free to choose. The reality of the outcome of right to repair will be higher quality products that are better for the planet and for society.