Art by Niki!
Now that we’re increasingly more aware of the inhumane levels of exploitation that the Congolese suffer for mining the cobalt we use in our tech, many well meaning people are following the growing calls for boycotting companies complicit with Israel’s siege on Gaza, and also demanding the same done with tech. And honestly? That’s not a bad idea.
Recently, I’ve grown obsessed with repair. It started with my TV having its top half go dim because of the LEDs dying. See, my options at the time were
- Buy a new TV. I have a 50 inch TCL that my mother gifted to me, and that would’ve costed me at most $500 for the current model.
- Bring it to a repair shop and think about the logistics of hauling a TV without owning a car. Also for some reason, local repair shops are just bad at responding to emails.
- Repair it myself.
And I chose option 3, and it was the best thing ever. Just get the right parts on ebay from a Chinese seller, wait a shorter time than their shipping estimation, watch a video from some guy (usually from India or the Philippines) disassemble a model that’s closest to what you have, and voila you fixed your own TV and gained the confidence to open up your own belongings.
Speaking of which; considering how TVs have only gotten thinner and easier to pry open over the years, you’d think that more people would be willing to just fix it themselves since a lot of the problems are down to the hardware. But, no. Far too often, the default choice is to just suck it up and buy a replacement because “TVs got cheaper over the years”, and yeah that’s true but that just fosters a very wasteful approach to our tech.
And of course, this isn’t just for TVs, this applies to pretty much all our tech. To an extent, I can understand being afraid of opening a phone, but it’s absurd how there are people out there who replace their phone every year.
Interestingly, the youtube channels that post these incredibly helpful disassembly videos are usually from countries where the population doesn’t have the luxury of just throwing out tech like that. A lot of the videos I looked up that repair the exact models of TVs or laptops I’ve searched for are typically in global south countries. I’ve recently fell in love with an Indonesian PC modding channel, but I honestly want to save that for another post just because I have so much to gush about.
As we’re finally assessing our unsustainable consumption that demands the dehumanization of the Congolese for their resources, maybe I can indulge in the hopium for at least a growing right to repair movement.