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How to create a culture where we repair things rather than throw them away
(opencollaboration.wordpress.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2022
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I'm based at India. There is so much competition here that I find, in the system itself, there is extreme deception. eg. To repair laptop hinges, one just has to make sure that metal and plastic is stuck together and things aren't broken. That's an easy task which can be done in half an hour. Yet, even if the repairing person is free, he'll tell you that it would take 5 hours so you keep the laptop and go away. Then he'd do the work and pose as if it's super difficult. He just has to apply some adhesive.
Everyone presents here as if solutions cannot be implemented without them and they charge higher than normal amounts as if there's no tomorrow. Issue is that these people itself in the system are trying to make repairing tougher for you. Ofc, it's just flawed capitalism at work!
In the U.S. some states are implementing "Right to Repair" laws. The problem is that corporations are more interested in exploiting people for profit rather than making the world a better place. As Cory Doctorow has said, companies want us to rent our daily existence rather than actually own anything. The more we are at someone's mercy to provide us our daily needs, the more they are able to profit. It's also cheaper and easier to just swap out parts rather than troubleshoot or fix anything. If companies were held accountable for poor quality and products breaking, maybe they'd take more pride in building products that last. Don't confuse capitalism with laziness or greed. Greed and laziness occurs in counties that are not based upon capitalism.
The whole way of capitalism is, there's problem xyz. If you want it solved for you, pay me $100. If someone solves it for free, he stays broke. The posers of problem win, the solvers of problem lose. That's capitalism. Sometimes, the solvers of the problem are themselves the posers of the problem.
Another view is that capitalism has produced an externality of sorts (broken items with little hope of repair), and it's time for government to catch up and start regulating that externality the same way it deals with something like emissions. If the price of throwing things away was more accurately priced into items, there would be more economic pressure to be repairable.