For me, right to to repair isn't just about ewaste, and preventing corporate gouging.
It's about mental health. Being able to fix your gadgets is therapeutic. Empowering. Good for the soul.
In a world full of complex technology it's easy to feel small and helpless. And maybe I'm too much of an idealist, but I think that if everyone could experience the joy of fixing or modifying a gadget now and then we'd all be a little more open minded, a little more daring. A little harder to push around.
And if you’re not going to fix it yourself, having the quiet guy with his little repair shop in the old service station or the funny woman with cool hair in the basement shop under the sandwich place is a public good whether you need something repaired or not. Those places existing are good for a community’s ephemeral spirit.
In "New York Cities Hypogeographies" (the novel I've been working on for two years) the old woman who runs the repair shop is the connection that unites the robots who are having a revolution and the people of Deep Brooklyn who are oppressed in less obvious ways by the Distributed Prison. She helps families to locate the pods of inmates and free them, and is one of the few human people aware what is really going on at the lower margin of the excavations.
myrmepropagandist
Michael Bacon
Captain of the SS El Faro