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'They're Marketing to Us That We're Too Stupid to Fix Our Stuff' Janine Jackson ([link removed])


Janine Jackson interviewed the Repair Association's Gay Gordon-Byrne about the right to repair for the March 15, 2024, episode ([link removed]) of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

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Dayton Daily News: Ohio’s gerrymandered districts let politicians ignore rural voters

Dayton Daily News (2/15/24 ([link removed]) )

Janine Jackson: The president of the Ohio Farmers Union wrote an op-ed—I saw it in the Dayton Daily News ([link removed]) —lamenting that "the needs and interests of family farmers have been ignored time after time by state and federal office holders." A key complaint: manufacturers’ refusal to share the software needed to fix their products, forcing people to deal with a limited number of “authorized” shops, or to just throw away the broken thing and buy a new one.

Joe Logan wrote:

Frustrating enough for ordinary consumers, but for a farmer in the short window of harvest time, dealing with a breakdown of a half-million-dollar piece of equipment like a tractor or combine, it can be devastating.

Farmers versus faceless corporations—sounds like a ready-made storyline. So why don't we hear it? Why is the right to repair controversial?

Gay Gordon-Byrne is executive director of the Repair Association, online at repair.org. She joins us now by phone from upstate New York. Welcome to CounterSpin, Gay Gordon-Byrne.

Gay Gordon-Byrne: Thank you very much for having me!

JJ: I think the right to repair is a keystone issue, affecting and reflecting a lot of other ideas, rights and relationships. But first, we're talking with you now because the terrain is changing, in terms of the law around people's ability to access the data and tools they need to fix, instead of replace, machines like tractors, like washing machines and, yes, like phones. The meaningful action seems to be at the state level. Can you bring us up to date on what's happening legislatively, statewise?
Gothamist: NY's right-to-repair law is in effect. Advocates figure it'll save you about $330.

Gothamist (12/29/23 ([link removed]) )

GG: Sure. We've been working with state legislatures since January of 2014, so we’ve now got a full 10 years under our belts. And over that time—I didn't get a completely accurate count, because it does keep changing—we've actually been able to introduce bills in 48 out of 50 states, and over the years, that's coming up to about 270+ pieces of legislation. So we're pretty mature now, in terms of what we know needs to be done and can be done by states, and what that wording looks like.

So we're pretty experienced at this point. We've had some good success lately. We got our first couple of bills through to the end and signed by the governor, starting in the end of 2022, in New York ([link removed](sc.Default)) . Three more states—I think I could be miscounting, because my brain's a little fried—but three more states in 2023, and we've got a bill in front of the governor in Oregon ([link removed] to state lawmakers%2C Senate,appliances and other consumer electronics.) . So things are looking good.

JJ: So when you go in at a state legislative level, what do you concretely ask for? What is that language in the bills that you put forward?

GG: It's actually pretty much consistent. There's really only one active sentence, and it says that, “Hey, Mr. Manufacturer, if you want to do business in our state, you must provide all the same materials for purposes of repair that you've already created for your own repair services.” That's pretty much it.

JJ: Right. So it means that you don't have to only go to the Apple store to fix your Apple tech. But that, though, leads me to another question, which I know you've worked on, which is some companies are kind of saying they support this, but they have important compromises involved in their compliance.

GG: Yeah, some compliance is slightly malicious. And we keep trying, every time we file a new bill, we try to basically kick that malicious idea down, and make sure that the bills, as they go forward, are more and more explicit, and eliminate some of the loopholes that have been stuffed into bills, because legislators are really not necessarily technologists. We don't expect them to be, but when a company like the big fruit company says, “Hey, I want to support right to repair in California,” they're kind of helpless. They'll take the support, and they'll give away what they have to give away to get the bill done.
Verge: Apple argues against right-to-repair bill that would reduce its control

Verge (2/9/24 ([link removed]) )

JJ: So what does that malicious compliance look like? It's a rhetorical support for the right to repair, but when it actually pans out, it doesn't look like what you're actually calling for.

GG: Yeah, the best example right now is what we call "parts pairing." ([link removed]) That's been a problem all along, and we thought we had it nailed down in our template legislation, which we wrote back in 2015, that you can't require specifically that you buy a part only from the manufacturer, and only new. And Apple got around it. They just said, “Well, we're going to make sure that if you order a part from us, it'll only work if you give us the serial number of your phone, and we preload that serial number into the part that we ship you, and that'll work, but nothing else will.”

Which is really malicious, because it eliminates the ability to even use a part that might be brand new out of a phone that's busted, and it eliminates the opportunity for a repair shop to stock any kind of inventory. It ruins the opportunity of restoring donated devices so that they can be reused, because who's going to spend $300 to buy a brand-new part when the phone is only worth $200?

JJ: The right to fix things that we've bought and paid for—it shows up a kind of conflict between one narrative that Americans are told and tell ourselves, about Americans as scrappy, as individuals who rely on themselves, and then this other, different, unspelled-out story about how, no, you're stupid, you'll probably only hurt yourself; the only responsible thing to do is to pay the company whatever they want to charge you. And you know what, why don't you just buy the latest version? Wouldn't that be easier?

Not everyone can or wants to fix their own stuff, but the idea that, even though you bought it, you don't ever really own it, it just seems like it should be a hard sell to people. So how did we get here?
Gay Gordon-Byrne

Gay Gordon-Byrne: "States have the ability to simply say, 'You can't sell this stuff...and then unsell it using an unfair and deceptive contract.'"

GG: Companies have had basically a full generation, like 20 years, to perfect their marketing. And what they're marketing to us is exactly what you said, that we're too stupid to be able to fix our stuff, concurrently with the stuff that’s “too complicated to repair”—which is also baloney, because they create the repair materials that can be used by the least technologically expensive person to make repairs for them. We're not paying people $300 an hour to repair cell phones. They're getting paid 20 bucks, if that.

So the tools that are there are made to make repairs easy and efficient and less costly for the manufacturer, but we've been told we can't do them. We've been told it's too sophisticated, it's too complicated.

And the emperor really has no clothes. And the fun part about doing this legislation is seeing the eyes light up when we talk with legislators, saying, this is actually not right. It's not legal. There are supposed to be protections and antitrust law that prevent this behavior. But the Department of Justice has had about a 40- or 50-year hiatus on antitrust. It's coming back, but it's very, very cumbersome to go that way.

So the states have the ability to simply say, “You can't sell this stuff, on the one hand, and then unsell it using an unfair and deceptive contract,” which is typically an end-user license agreement. Those agreements are of no value to anybody, except to remove your rights to fix your stuff.

JJ: Right, and they're in the tiniest print you could ever imagine. And I just, finally, for anyone who's missing it, this isn't just a consumer rights failure, which is big enough, but it's also an environmental disaster, to have industries based on buy it, throw it out, buy the new one. That's a lose/lose.

GG: It's pervasive. When we've taken a look at it and evaluated a lot of the contracts, we come to the conclusion that something more than 90% ([link removed]) of the equipment on the market today literally cannot be repaired by anybody other than the manufacturer, if it's repairable at all. And this is an environmental catastrophe. And it applies to everything that has a chip in it, which is now including toasters and blenders and coffee grinders, and all sorts of little stuff that, really, why do you have to throw it away? First of all, it's made like garbage, but second of all, you can't fix it.

JJ: We've been speaking with Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of the Repair Association. They're online at repair.org. Thank you so much, Gay Gordon-Byrne, for speaking with us today on CounterSpin.

GG: Oh, my pleasure. Anytime.


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