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What’s good for consumers and the planet is not always good for corporations, of course. Apple makes money if you buy a new iPhone; it makes nothing if you get your old iPhone fixed at an independent repair shop. That’s why companies of all sorts have, for decades, discouraged repair and encouraged customers to instead buy the newest, latest thing. As far back as the 1920s, Ford and General Motors began introducing new car models each year with the explicit intention of getting drivers to trade in their functional but no-longer-fashionable older flivvers. Planned obsolescence, as it became known, was celebrated as a tool to keep the consumer economy humming. 

America’s burgeoning wealth helped undermine the practice of repairing things. “In the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth,” writes Adam Minter in Secondhand, “thrift wasn’t a matter of choice or virtue. It was a necessity. The essentials of daily life—clothes, kitchenware, tools, furniture —were expensive and intended to last for years if not lifetimes. Repair was a way to ensure that they did.” But as Americans got richer and manufacturing got cheaper, fixing increasingly fell out of fashion. In 1966, according to Perzanowski, some two hundred thousand Americans worked as home appliance repairers; by 2023, that number had dropped to about forty thousand. The world of digital gear is on the same trajectory. The number of electronic and computer repair shops in the United States dropped from 59,200 in 2013 to 45,830 in 2023. 

Ironically, it’s often much easier to get electronics fixed in developing countries than in rich ones. In places like Nigeria, where many people subsist on just a few dollars a day, “the essentials of daily life” are still expensive and worth repairing. The Ikeja electronics market, where I met Baba Anwar, teems with tiny kiosks and elbow-to-elbow stalls where tradesmen will replace a broken phone screen or swap a new hard drive into your laptop while you wait. They’re not certified by any big corporations, but their skills are top-notch. Lagos is particularly renowned for the quality of its electronics repair workers, but you can find people doing the same work in cities from Delhi to Cairo—everywhere people don’t have the wasteful luxury of constantly buying new electronics. 

This is not entirely the fault of affluent consumers. The electronics industry deliberately makes their products difficult to repair. Take a look at your cell phone, tablet, or laptop. Chances are, there is no easy way to even open it up to see its components the way you can pop open a car’s hood, let alone swap in a new battery the way you can with a flashlight. That’s by design. Frequently broken parts, like cell phone screens, are held in place with glue, making them hard to remove without damaging the phone. Other parts are fastened with unusually shaped screws that require special screwdrivers. Manufacturers deliberately discourage DIY repairs with claims that they are unsafe or will void the product’s warranty.

Excerpted from Chp 10 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.