Raise the Hammer

I love that quote "Repair and Repurpose are two more "R"s along with Recycle Reduce and Reuse". That's how I was brought up and it saves me a fair chunk of change :)

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So true Frank, though sadly more and more devices are either too complicated to repair yourself or prevent you from fixing them by design (i.e. the iPod). At least there are sites like instructables.com with tons of step-by-step guides to make all sorts of cool and/or practical stuff.

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UrbanRenaissance wrote:

more and more devices are either too complicated to repair yourself or prevent you from fixing them by design

It's even worse in the USA, where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) actually makes it a felony to study or tinker with many high tech tools and software applications, under the outrageous legal rubric of "anti-circumvention". (In fact it's even a felony to explain to someone else how they might do so.)

It's as if it were illegal to open up your lawnmower and study how it works, never mind lend it to your neighbour.

This closed regulatory environment is very bad for innovation, and in the long run it doesn't even serve the interests of the paranoid, old-economy industries who pushed so hard for it.

But that's not stopping the Canadian music and film industries from trying to push the same legal framework here in Canada, which the Canadian government seems only too eager to implement if given the chance.

They've even gone so far as to manufacture a phony 'consensus' on copyright reform by funding ostensibly 'independent' studies that all bang the same drum:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/...

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Things like the American DCMA are only going to become more prevalent if we keep allowing those who don't understand technology to make the rules governing its use.

Ryan wrote: "It's as if it were illegal to open up your lawnmower and study how it works, never mind lend it to your neighbour. "

I doubt anyone in the American congress/senate even considered the above fact before voting on the DCMA.

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Thanks for mentioning that instructables site. I love it!

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As much as I hate to defend the ideas behind the DMCA, the lawnmower analogy falls a little flat. Imagine if I bought a lawnmower, brought it home and was able to give everyone I knew a fully functioning, exact copy of the mower.

The problem is there there is a huge amount of money invested in doing things the way they've been done and the last thing huge and highly profitable corporations want to acknowledge is that they are rapidly being made redundant. Conceptually, it's the same principle as people being put out of work by improved automation, but we feel a lot less sympathy for them. The key difference is that they've got the political clout to resist.

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Brandon wrote:

Imagine if I bought a lawnmower, brought it home and was able to give everyone I knew a fully functioning, exact copy of the mower.

Then I'd say it was time to find a new business model. :) Companies can only justify passing along the cost of manufacturing and distributing their products when it actually costs money to manufacture and distribute them.

Back when phonographs and records were first invented, the live musical concert industry went ballistic, warning that these recording "pirates" were stealing their property and would put them out of business. (Actually, it goes back even farther: the industry said the same thing about Player Pianos.)

The government responded with an entirely sensible system of cheap licencing rights so that everyone could go on making money. In fact, everyone started making a lot more money, because the market for music sales grew so much bigger.

Same thing happened with radio, cassettes, VHS, CD writers, DVD writers, and so on.

Remember MPAA president Jack Valenti giving testimony to the US Congressional Committee on the Judiciary? "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."

http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm

Thanks to a sensible government and a cheap licencing framework, the motion picture industry enjoyed a golden age of record sales thanks to VCRs and, later, DVDs.

Making the transmission and distribution of content cheaper and more abundant is always a money-maker once industry figures out how to leverage it.

The internet is no different, but instead of updating IP framework to allow cheap licencing and distribution, lawmakers panicked and started passing more restrictive copyright laws with a generous dollop of anti-circumvention on top.

As a predictable result, the industries trying to save their old business models have neither stopped "piracy" nor saved their own bottom lines.

In fact, the only music market that is actually growing in revenue is online music sales - and I fully expect that revenue growth would be far greater if the music industry committed to high-bitrate MP3s (i.e. no DRM) for around 25 cents each.

That, at least for me, is the point at which the cost of music falls below the opportunity cost of sourcing music by other means.

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Yeah, but you haven't spent millions upon millions of dollars investing in any particular industry, nor do you have a revenue stream in the billions of dollars that is threatened. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and say "Adapt or die", it's different when you're the one being told to die for the betterment of the species.

I'm having a hard time accepting the fact that I'm defending the RIAA, but I can honestly see where they're coming from.

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That's just the thing: I don't want the recording industry to die. I want them to adapt, and I believe that they can adapt and even thrive if they just come to terms with how their business has changed.

As I noted above with previous examples, they've adapted to new technology several times in the past (albeit dragged kicking and screaming each time).

The music business could make a lot of money off people like me if they sold high-bitrate MP3s at 25 cents each. I would gladly pay for a guaranteed successful download with high quality audio files (no bad rips, no trojans, no decoys).

It's not as if no one's making money on the internet. What's changed is what people are willing to pay for. What used to be scarce and valuable is now cheap and abundant; and what used to be impossible is now scarce and valuable.

Look at Amazon, for example: while most retailers are losing money, Amazon's revenue is still growing.

http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blo...

This is at least in part because Amazon is providing a valuable data service - user-optimized search, dynamic product recommendation, organized user feedback - that is entirely separate from the business of packaging items and shipping them to your house.

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I too can see why the RIAA does what it does but it doesn't make them right nor do I think it will be successful. The RIAA and its ilk are currently where the auto industry was a few years ago. Using a failing business model and continually ignoring all the indicators from their consumers about the kinds of products they want.

A smart record label would start changing itself to expect less revenue from actual album sales and more from merchandise and concerts while making the physical copy of the album more worthwhile. Why would I pay $25 for a cd when I can download the songs for $0.99 each on iTunes if the only difference is a crappy piece of paper with song names and legal bs?

As MC Lars said... "Its 2006, the consumer's still pissed Wont take it anymore so I'm writing a list Don`t try to resist this paradigm shift The music revolution cannot be dismissed $18.98 Iggy Pop CD? What if I can get it from my sister for free? It's all about marketing Clive Davis, see? If fans buy the shirt then they get the mp3 Music was a product now it is a service Major record labels why are you trying to hurt us? Epic's up in my face like, "Don't steal our songs Lars," While Sony sells the burners that are burning CD-R's So Warner, EMI, hear me clearly Universal Music, update your circuitry They sue little kids downloading hit songs They think that makes sense When they know that it's wrong! " ["Download This Song" by MC Lars, "The Graduate" - 2006]

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@Ryan Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow wrote a recent article about how the music industry screwed themselves locking in with iTunes b/c they raised the economic barrier to entry so high they created a virtual monopoly and now iTunes has alot of power.

Funny you mentioned Amazon, they're already halfway there (selling 256 bit MP3 but price still too high at $0.99 each), they're just about the only company with deep enough pockets to go head-to-head against Apple.

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But what about in the instance of, true example, I just cracked the housing that surrounds the spool on my weed whacker. Wouldn't it be better to manufacture the replacement part than to buy a whole new model? And no, I can't get the replacement (I tried) from the company because that model isn't made anymore.

I'm intrigued. I've read about hackerspaces, didn't realize we had on in the city. Checking it out soon!

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So it should be illegal for me to take apart my mp3 player to fix the stereo input jack because the company that makes it has spent a lot of money developing the technology? Maybe it broke because of a poor design, and maybe they spent money developing an input jack that would break after 100 uses... ?

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This is exciting to see. Hands-on repair work is a budgetary necessity in our house, that's for sure. It's good to think of it as a creative endeavour rather than a necessary evil --she said, contemplating the family washing machine in pieces in the basement as her husband surfs online looking for manuals and diagrams, teaching himself how to run diagnostics on the various electronic components. Meanwhile, we do our bit to keep the attendant at the local laundromat employed. Win-win.;) Anyone see this book excerpt in the New York Times, from Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford? http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazi...

It's a book about the value of working with your hands, and has some interesting things to say about the down side of too much emphasis on a so-called knowledge-based economy. I haven't yet gotten hold of the book itself.

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That excerpt was an awesome link! Having been a manager at an office for years and getting absolutely zero satisfaction from my work, being stressed out much of the time and finally deciding it wasn't worth it I decided to go back to school to get my degree in a technical trade field. My first co-op job paid more than my office job, and I now truly love what I do for a living. I was able to identify COMPLETELY with what the author was saying. I'm definitely going to pick this book up, sounds like an amazing read! Thanks for the link!

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I just saw another article (in an old issue of wired, maybe?) that mentioned the Shop Class as Soulcraft -- i'd like to pick it up. My immediate family does everything from carpentry to computers to engineering, so I think they'd enjoy it as well.

It's been interesting this summer.. all my education has been in very knowledge-based fields, but i've been doing landscaping and painting this summer in addition to my regular job. i can't and won't particularly romanticize those fields, but it has been good to do an honest day's labour. There's something valuable there.

Think|Haus is an idea I'm not sure if I have the time or particular skills to become involved with, but I sure love the concept.

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Matthew Crawford was even on Colbert the other night. I've already reserved my copy at Bryan Prince. I've been muttering for the last couple of years to no one in particular, that we couldn't go on importing all our widgets from China forever, and eventually we would have to get back to making real stuff. Everyone just patted me indulgently on the head and went on with their globalization mantras. Maybe I'll finally get a little respect at family gatherings now. Oh who am I kidding.

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I found a review of Crawford's book via via Arts and Letters Daily, on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, wherein another interesting fellow is quoted-- one Bill Brown, who works on something he calls "thing theory". Here's a quote from from the article where he's mentioned: "Bill Brown, a professor of English and visual art at Chicago, offers several explanations for the growing body of scholarship on the nature of work and objects. "When there's a blip in the economy, people start looking up from their desks," says Brown, whose own work on "thing theory" investigates the way inanimate objects form and transform human subjects. And as the world becomes more digitized — and its physical environment more degraded — people long for more contact with the material, he says." http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id...

"...we couldn't go on importing all our widgets from China forever..."-- Highwater, above

My husband was able to track down the part we need for the washing machine (see my comment above) from one place here in Hamilton, but only just-- everyone he was calling was out of them, and they were back ordered. We were looking at waiting a month to repair our own machine. Wonder where those replacement parts are coming from...

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The priority is probably getting the new parts into new machines with surplus runs heading out for repair parts.

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"The problem is there there is a huge amount of money invested in doing things the way they've been done and the last thing huge and highly profitable corporlations want to acknowledge is that they are rapidly being made redundant. Conceptually, it's the same principle as people being put out of work by improved automation, but we feel a lot less sympathy for them. The key difference is that they've got the political clout to resist."

The difference with automation is that it is still owned by the corporation, whereas internet filesharing is owned by consumers. Automation generally caused workers to lose out because it's legal status (owned by the corporation) put it into conflict with them rather than allowing them to use it to their own advantage. This then screwed consumers by driving down the quality of goods by out-producing traditional workers and artisans. The internet allows us to replace many of the corporations themselves entirely, while still giving space to consumers and producers.

I have very little sympathy for the recording industry, given how they've behaved over the last half-century. It wasn't good for musicians and it wasn't good for consumers. Any massive monopolistic bureaucracy of that sort which can be so readily trumped by MySpace deserves to be put out of its misery.

As for the Think|Haus, it's unbelivable. I'd talked about this kind of thing with people, but fully expected it to take the better part of a decade to get together. Great going.

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Interesting article, and comments. Seems to me to be headed toward the traditional divide between management and labour, and rightly so. The division between the old industrial and the new information economies is merely the stage on which the play is being performed, showing how the labour/management divide needs to adapt.

When it looked as though computerization might wipe out middle management in North American institutions and folks like Mike Harris cut back on funding for advanced education, universities responded by offering high-cost MBA courses that would train middle-managers to become corporate "leaders." Same skills, upgraded with digital-aged jargon and advanced yesmanship to make graduates acceptable to nervous corporate executives. This politicized middle management more than it had ever been and contributed in no small part to the costs of its products. But the decision-makers aren't going to take the hit for that, and so internationalized its labour workforce. Kapow:globalization.

Meanwhile improved digital communications de-institutionalized knowledge and folks who like doing and making things, as opposed to those who seek the power to tell others how to do and make things, quickly gained access to their information peers. Now we have two economies- an information-based manufactory that is growing and an overly managed mass-production economy that is in crisis. It should come as no surprise that corporate and government managers are throwing money at ways to keep the mass-production economy going, often at the expense of this new, growing manufactoring sector. Why is the funding for early-childhood education considered an insurmountable difficulty, or hiring more nurses or doctors impossible, while the auto sector gets bucks by the bucket?

Ryan asked Think/Haus folks what the city could do to support it. I'm not connected with either party, but my suggestion would be that the city, with its teams of players constantly competing to be "community leaders" should just get out of the way. Think of the Pearl Company's problems. So many of what we now consider important civic issues -- essentially issues of municipal infrastructure -- might actually be answered or at least mitigated through home workshops or Think/Haus style collectives. Do cyclists really need the city's permission to find the best and safest routes from A to B, or do they merely need the city not to interfere as cyclists gradually take over these routes?

Maybe some current infrastructure, electricity grids, water and waste treatment, can and should soon be deconstructed rather than rebuilt, the actual work done more efficiently, close to home.

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Going My Way wrote:

Do cyclists really need the city's permission to find the best and safest routes from A to B, or do they merely need the city not to interfere as cyclists gradually take over these routes?

An interesting idea, if there were a large enough group of cyclists using the same road(s) everyday, most drivers would just change their routes to avoid the "inconvenience" thus making those streets safer for the cyclists.

Perhaps create an unofficial bicycle "highway" system with a main trunk line going across the city and predefined branches going to various destinations, then encourage all cyclists to only use this system to ensure as many people as possible are using it at any given time. An added benefit would be that since there's really no physical infrastructure the branches could be created and changed organically based on factors like construction and popularity and then immediately disseminated through something like a google maps mashup and/or social networking sites.

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