If You Can't Repurpose It, You Don't Own It

What do the DIY movement, environmentalism, and intellectual property have in common? Read this post and find out! BTW, these issues have been playing bumper-cars in my brain for a while, so I would love it if you posted ideas, opinions, questions, etc. in the comments. (Yeah, you!)

Clive Thompson wrote an article in Wired Magazine recently on "How DIYers Just Might Revive American Innovation," in which he describes the decline of mechanical literacy in the US over the last several decades as a serious obstacle to solving some of the biggest problems facing our society. Americans have been steered away from putting time into developing manual skills in favor of skills offering higher economic value in the "information economy." But Thompson maintains that "when we stop working with our hands, we cease to understand how the world really works." When we can no longer “build, maintain, and repair the devices we rely on every day,” we are forced to accept the role of passive consumer. We give our power of decision-making over to ‘experts’; as Thompson puts it, “If you can't get under the hood of the gadgets you buy, you're far more liable to believe the marketing hype of the corporations that sell them.”

The ability to transcend the model based on categories of active producers and passive consumers, forming an identity as a ‘user’ and/or ‘tinkerer’ who does both, is an important element of a DIY culture. Make Magazine, one of several DIY magazines to crop up in the last few years, published the Maker's Bill of Rights (a.k.a. the Owner's Manifesto), based on the principle that, "If you can't open it, you don't own it"; the list includes such "rights" as: "Components, not entire sub-assemblies, shall be replaceable," "Ease of repair shall be a design ideal, not an afterthought," and "Schematics shall be included." However, Make had to publish the Manifesto for a reason: corporations make their products inaccessible because they want to foster dependency by keeping consumers passive so that they will constantly buy new products. And that is where the law and the environment enter the picture.

The research I’ve done for my Master’s Thesis includes a hearty helping of reading on the history and structure of Intellectual Property law (particularly copyright), and the unpleasant reality is this: as more consumer products include microchips (and thus the software to run them), fewer products are going to be legally owner-tinkerable, as more of them fall into the confusing and user’s-rights-limiting world of ‘intellectual property.’ Here’s why: when you ‘buy’ a product containing both hardware and software, you ‘own’ the hardware and a license to use the software that makes it useful. The copyright holder (usually the corporation that sold you the product) ‘owns’ the software itself. Often, these guys will enact “security measures” to ensure that users can’t use the software for any purpose not directly authorized by the corporation. And, since the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, consumers have been legally barred from circumvention of these barriers, even for purposes legally protected by ‘fair use’ rights (e.g. making a backup copy of a CD in case the one you bought breaks.) (The way that they legally get away with this contradictory crap is way too complicated to be explored here, but if you’re really interested, leave your email address in the comments and I’ll send you the explanation that’s in my Thesis Proposal.) The really key point here is that the law puts no regulations on unauthorized copying. It bans unauthorized ACCESS. Corporations, rather than the government, get to decide how far their rights extend, since they get to decide what access is authorized. As one of their goals is the continued passivity of users, it is extremely likely that they will block access to anything that they see as facilitating tinkering of any kind. (Facilitating tinkering…sounds like a crime in a sci-fi novel…hmmm. I think writing all this dense legalese is getting to me.)

Which brings me to the environment. Reusing (of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” Fame) is most often the product of at least minor tinkering. If the law stops users from the tinkering necessary to reuse, the law is harming the environment (which, in my eyes, makes it both unnatural and unjust.) Consider this: according to an article in the New York Times, “Some inkjet printers have chips in their ink cartridges that prevent operation if the cartridge has been refilled.” That’s right folks. You must buy more cartridges, use more resources, and increase profits. This example brings both major problems into focus: not only, as I mentioned above, is it illegal to disable that chip, but as Thompson points out, few Americans know how in the first place.

While the legality of tinkering for reuse is a growing problem, more waste is generated by the loss of manual skills. How many things do you throw away that your grandparents or great-grandparents would know how to fix (or that you could learn to fix with a little study), but you don’t? What else? How many pounds of greenhouse gases and carcinogens could have been prevented from entering the atmosphere and the drinking water in order to replace your belongings if you knew how to fix a clock? A printer? A chair? A shoe? What if you knew how to take in and let out clothes? Or how to build a table? (People sell wood from fallen trees all the time.) Many people in the DIY movement recognize this, and I see an increased level of manual skills in the general population as an essential part of our moving towards a sustainable society. (No. I don’t live in a tree…I’d probably fall out if I did.)

There is certainly hope. DIY is a growing movement. Many DIYers see environmental awareness as one of their primary motivations for taking more of their consumption off of the corporate path, and taking their identity from ‘consumer’ to ‘tinkerer’. ReadyMade, a DIY magazine, has a segment called the MacGyver Challenge, in which the readers send in suggestions for how to craftily repurpose a ‘broken’ object. Make Magazine and its sister publication Craft Magazine both frequently post articles on reusing articles that might otherwise be considered ‘worthless.” There’s even an entire blog devoted to eco-friendly DIY craft, Crafting A Green World. At the same time, though, I know that very few people the access and time to learn the skills that could be most empowering; those that do, need them least. If DIY does not evolve beyond a boutique movement making things like (and this is an extreme example) the Steampunk Workstation to become a grassroots movement to change the relationship between people and objects, then it won’t change a thing.

Shades of Sustainability Series Part I

The Washington Post published a fascinating article today, "Greed in the Name of Green," that dealt with the problem of people trying to save the environment by consuming more (eco-friendly) stuff. At the same time, I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about the problem of eco-paralysis, where people acknowledge the enormity of our environmental crisis, but continue to go about their lives without changing anything. I'm convinced that these two phenomena are intimately tied together by a common cause. People have no idea what a "sustainable life" would look like. It's completely unreasonable to suggest that everyone has to go live in huts and become subsistence farmers (although I've heard this argument made), and simply buying organic versions of the same crap we buy now isn't going to cut it, but no one seems to have come up with a really compelling vision of what our everyday lives will need to be like to really achieve sustainability. In an attempt to contribute, even a tiny bit, to that process, I'm starting a series on different, cool ideas on living sustainably. I'll be posting occasionally on how we are to go about it. I'm going to start with Hobbits. A family in Wales has built a "Low Impact Woodland Home" that looks remarkably like the houses in the celluloid version of Hobbiton. That is, it looks beautifully cozy enough to make me want to break into their home and put the water on for tea. I definitely think that tea ought to be part of living sustainably...because without tea, you aren't really living.