| I agree, strongly, and am the happy owner of a Framework as my main computer. I’m about to make a somewhat pedantic observation but do not want it to detract from your main point - yes, it IS up to us to push this along. Now for the pedantry. I think the repairability concern is more about owner-user agency & rights, not material efficiency /sustainability. The latter is very important of course, but we should expect it to follow from ownership. This isn’t a disagreement - I think you’re saying the same thing - just a difference in emphasis. Imagine a population of users who, when replacing broken parts, would actually just toss them in the local river rather than properly recycling them; and imagine a corporation who sells unrepairable electronics, and touts “green” and perfectly upcycles every last bit of silicon from returned devices. (Scooping the effiencies for themselves, of course.) On principle, I would still prefer the former scenario of users with the rights to do what they wish with their goods, than the scenario where corps essentially rent out their manufacturing expertise under the guise of selling. Luckily, that’s an abstract thought experiment and not likely to actually occur. But corps WILL try to convince us of their benevolence and sell us the latter scenario. We need to steel against it because, like you are emphasizing, we can’t trust the profit incentives to ultimately align. As a side note, we need non-corp entities (or at least, much smaller businesses) to handle proper electronics recycling - after all, that river-dumping scenario is not great! They exist but it’s not as easy to use them; for instance, unlike paper/glass/etc recycling in most US cities, they typically don’t come to your house to pick things up (at least in the places I’ve lived). Some shops will take this part but not that. The whole ecosystem has a LONG way to go before competing with the gravity well of the big corps. But I don’t have confidence that we can somehow get them aligned with human interests without the emphasis on individual agency and rights. And this is just based on the sustainability issue; right-to-repair is related other ownership concerns, e.g. DRM and data privacy, neither of which are directly related to material sustainability. |