Thread by @IntuitMachine

The fact that our civilization does not have a right to repair is all you need to know to realize the fundamental misalignment of the economic model and that of sustainability.

The kinds of human technologies that we build are incompatible with the biological world. They are incompatible with everything else that we build. We are in a constant march towards greater and greater incompatibility.

Gone are the days where you can fix things. The only recourse is to throw broken things away. That is because corporations are incentivized to manufacture cheaply rather than building things to last.

To ensure recurring revenue, everything is built to become obsolete. Nothing is meant to last. Nothing is repairable. This is in contrast to biological systems where self-repairability is an intrinsic feature.

Not making things repairable promotes the propagation of vertically integrated monopolies. This is where companies own the entire stack. This only leads to less robustness in our system. But the key effect here is greater inequality.

If you want to address human inequality, you have to address allow widen the ability of humans to participate in the economy. The right of repair widens opportunities for participation. Vertical integration in contrast restricts opportunities only to those within the stack.

It's just a sad state of affairs when people hear about the 'right to repair' and dismiss it as something only technical folk care about. People cannot see that it is fundamental. Why can't they see it? A simple lack of education on how reusable systems like biology works.

The right of repair is directly important to decentralized production. If you want to reduce inequality, you must allow people to produce the goods and services that they need locally. But that's not possible with vertically integrated monopolies.

But why don't government's seek decentralized production? The reason is that they also don't see it as important! We live in a world where people only understand solutions that are machine like. So we concentrate production in a few places.

Enough of this concentration of production and you basically starve out entire populations. People need to migrate out of their countries or from rural areas because there is absolutely nothing to do there. They cannot grow or build anything that is competitive.

It used to be that you could competitively grow anything anywhere. That's not true anymore. Mechanized agriculture has made it competitively impossible to make a living by growing things yourself. The only survival strategy is to seek out the long tail.

I can keep going on with this rant, but I will stop. The important key point here is that without incentives for decentralized production, then we are stuck with every increasing inequality.

Only a tiny minority of people see this. So I don't expect this to change anytime soon.

@threadreaderapp unroll

The right of repair lowers the cost for everyone. It gives employment to those who can fix. It allows production to be shared. Why then do we keep discouraging this kind of an economy?