right to repair, planned obsolescence, declining quality

vershy versh

Well-known member
"The official story of Huaqiangbei and Shenzhen is a narrative of China’s economic miracle and socialist reform success. The messy, inconvenient fact that whatever is made will need, at some point, to be repaired rarely gets a mention. But things degrade just as they upgrade. That’s where the repairers come in. A relatively small part of the Huaqiangbei community—where most people are engaged in the trading and manufacturing of new devices—repairers are concentrated in two Akihabara Electric Town–style electronics wholesale market buildings. These lively, hectic malls specialize in second-hand phone trading and refurbishing, creating a niche demand for repairers and carving out a small place for broken objects amid Huaqiangbei’s general theme song of the new. This is a place where everything looks like a mesmerizing mishmash of a Jodi game modification, headline-grabbing shanzhai handphones, and Deng Xiaoping–style grassroots entrepreneurship. Technicians in stall after stall, together with their myriad self-developed tools, encryption-hacking devices, and informally sourced components, look at the “warranty voided if removed” warning with a side eye."

 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Pynchon's where I first came across it. As Tea alluded to, there's a story in Gravity's Rainbow about an immortal light bulb called Byron who runs up against them and tries to unite all the bulbs on the grid.


So Byron dreams of his Guerrilla Strike Force, gonna get Herbert Hoover, Stanley Baldwin, all of them, right in the face with one coordinated blast. . . .

Is Byron in for a rude awakening! There is already an organization, a human one, known as "Phoebus," the international light-bulb cartel, headquartered in Switzerland. Run pretty much by International GE, Osram, and Associated Electrical Industries of Britain, which are in turn owned 100%, 29% and 46%, respectively, by the General Electric Company in America. Phoebus fixes the prices and determines the operational lives of all the bulbs in the world, from Brazil to Japan to Holland (although Philips in Holland is the mad dog of the cartel, apt at any time to cut loose and sow disaster throughout the great Combi-nation). Given this state of general repression, there seems noplace for a newborn Baby Bulb to start but at the bottom.

But Phoebus doesn't know yet that Byron is immortal.
I've found the real Byron!

 
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