have you come across Harun Šiljak's fantastic piece in the Science for the People magazine titled
'Opening This Article Voids Warranty'?
"Repair is not an auxiliary, optional part of the economy. Repair is care, at every stage of the supply chain, and at every scale. Those in dire need of repair for their devices are, just like Terry Pratchett’s Theory of Economic Injustice predicts, in the crosshairs of widening economic inequality.4 Already-impoverished consumers are encouraged to buy ever-newer products (and other planned obsolescence mechanisms have co-evolved with the boom of overproduction for the Global North). These products are notoriously hard to repair by design and require repeated purchases, exposing the long-term scheme of the manufacturers. Mineral extraction necessary for the manufacture of new hi-tech devices inflicts death and immiseration on surrounding populations.5 A community that sees no value to repair is a community that cannot respond to the crisis of capitalism, and is merely its hostage. Repair, as an act of reclaiming technology, is ongoing in the Global North and South with complementary driving forces and problems."
[...]
"A classic strategy of anti-repair design is avoiding modularity. If the parts of the device are strategically bundled together so that failure of one part requires replacement of a whole unit, it is not “repair” anymore. While it happens with mechanical components as well, the electronic version of this strategy is worthy of closer examination. Unlike a gearbox whose miniaturization still results in an assemblage of separate gears that might be smaller and harder to replace, miniaturization in electronics was driven by manufacture of monolithic semiconductor structures. Control systems that have previously been implemented with, for example, a collection of discrete transistors and diodes (basic electronic components that are easily replaceable) have been revamped as embedded systems: for the same functionality they now use a microchip with software running on it. Access to the software is not provided. Access to the chip itself is not provided as it is commonly “globbed” (covered with a black blob of epoxy). On top of this, the manufacturer takes precautions to prevent you from replacing the entire controller with a different, customized controller on your own. Here I return to the robotic arm: what kind of a controller do you want such a mechanism to have? The odds are that the same arm might be deployed in a myriad of different settings and scenarios, and needs tweaking of the controller. The “body without organs” controller under the blob of epoxy offers no modularity, no chance to expand, reduce, or in any other way customize inputs, outputs, or processing capabilities. The individual components that might be at a higher risk of damage (e.g. transistors) don’t exist anymore, so every failure takes the entire block of silicon down with it. And finally, if product support is discontinued, the manufacturer goes out of business, or chooses to change the business model into selling a service rather than a product, the controller is expected to become an unusable brick. To make things worse, by making non-standard interfaces with mechanics and/or placing restrictive licenses on its software, the brick is supposed to be irreplaceable, hence rendering the entire robotic arm unusable (even if the mechanics are perfectly sound).
The loss of repairability is not a consequence of technological progress or increasing complexity—it should arguably be the opposite. Complex systems science pioneer W. Brian Arthur explains the two primary mechanisms of improving a technology: “internal replacement,” or changing the existing parts; and “structural deepening,” which means adding new components.10 Neither of these require that new parts and components cannot be modular, replaceable, and repairable. Complexity, in fact, is all about modularity and heterogeneity and can be an argument in favor of repair. The concepts of internal replacement and structural deepening, if anything, are the philosophy of repair as a creative process. New parts or mechanisms that come from repair contribute to an invention: potential new applications of the device, a new approach to manufacturing, and personalization of the item. A creatively repaired device is where the social network merges with the technological one. However, that is not in the interests of the manufacturing lobby: this network is one of capital accumulation.
The other aforementioned strategy of disabling repair is the legal one. To keep this grip of capital on the technology and knowledge of manufacturing and repair, the opponents of repair create the illusion of illegality: Looking under the hood should be taboo, understanding how things work should be perceived as illegal, and the concept of patents and protection of intellectual property should be regurgitated as respect for science and protecting the world from anarchy. Big manufacturers such as Apple also grasp at other legal straws such as privacy concerns.11
Bogus legal barriers run against the basic principles of science and engineering. Take, for example, the concept of reverse engineering. Finding out how a piece of hardware or software works by observing its inputs and outputs is an essential part of repair in modern technological systems. Often portrayed as illegal, this activity does not go against trade secrets laws. Instead, it becomes an issue concerning terms and conditions agreed to by user and manufacturer.12 Among legal contracts, “terms and conditions” represent a world of their own, with clauses that are often void, unenforceable, or plain illegal.13 The “opening box voids warranty” stickers mentioned earlier are a blatant example, but not the only one. Through lobbying, manufacturers erect new legal barriers where previously there had been none: when the Unitron Mac 512, a Brazilian clone of the Apple Macintosh was developed in the mid-eighties, it infringed no laws in Brazil. Only after heavy lobbying from Apple and threats of sanctions from the US government did the Brazilian government introduce a completely new “software law” to stop the sale of the reverse-engineered Macintosh.14"
source: https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/vol24-2-dont-be-evi...