Fight to Repair Podcast

Travis Goodspeed has a unique relationship with “stuff.” A renowned “hillbilly hacker” from Tennessee, Travis is a reverse engineer and device hacker without peer. He’s best known as an outspoken advocate of “junk hacking” - the practice of probing low end, low stakes devices like children’s toys and consumer as a way to understand more complex, higher stakes technology - from enterprise systems to critical infrastructure.

But takin...

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This week we bring Ollee Means to the podcast, creator of the guilder, the platform that facilitates repair with its users spending zero money. The overarching goal of the platform is to socialize repair without any monetary exchanges. Instead, what users do is offer their services in exchange for something else.

Let’s say you know ho...

Automobiles are the only category of product where a formal right to repair exists in the U.S., thanks to a law passed in 2012 by voters in Massachusetts. But that right is under threat. After voters in Massachusetts expanded a 2012 law in November 2020 to include access to telematics data, automakers challenged the law in federal court. That has prevented its implementation for more than two years. A decision in that case is expec...

Dr. Lily Baum Pollans, the author of Resisting Garbage: The Politics of Waste Management in American Cities discusses her research on how we ended up in a world that is so disposable?

Resisting Garbage dives into the world of how cities treat garbage – specifically comparing two cities: Boston and Seattle. While Boston is compliant to our current system that recycles and disposes first, Seattle defies these dominant conventions whic...

Fixit Clinic founder Peter Mui talks about environment and social benefits of sharing knowledge on repair and working in community with others.

Thirteen years ago Peter Mui held the first ever “Fixit Clinic” – driven by his motivation to change our disposable culture and to empower people to fix the things they own. The Fixit Clinic model, built on the idea that if people have access to tools and guidance then they can fix their thi...

Dr. Emily West gets us inside the mind of Amazon to better understand how corporations are working to turn us into passive consumers.

At its core, the right to repair is a struggle with corporations over how we interact with products they sell. This week, Dr. Emily West offers Amazon as a case study to help us understand how companies are able to constrain our choices as consumers under the guise of convenience. We see many of the s...

Cory Doctorow explains how corporations are taking advantage of our increasingly computerized world through “digital rights management” to extract profits and restrict repair.

Our world is becoming digitized at breakneck speed, with manufacturers putting internet-connected computers into everyday objects from the lights in our homes to even cars and medical devices. This phenomenon, known as the “Internet-of-Things”, is making our l...

In our latest What the Fix podcast, Stacey Tenenbaum, director of the new documentary SCRAP, talks about why we need to think (hard) about what happens to our stuff when it dies.

Stacey Tenenbaum is a filmmaker who recently released her film SCRAP which “tells the story of people who each have a deep connection to objects that have reached their 'end of life.” Jack and Stacey chat about how we’ve come to our current culture of dispo...

We spoke with Nirav Patel, Co-Founder of Framework this fall, when the original Framework Laptop launched. He says that making an extremely repair-friendly laptop was not a herculean task. In fact, he said that the laptop “device” is quite well defined. Simply making one that could be easily repaired, modified and upgraded was “surprisingly straightforward.” That’s all the more reason to cast doubt on the claims of Apple and others...

In our latest episode of What the Fix!? Jack and Paul sit down with Kyle Wiens of iFixit to talk about his journey founding the company and the early days of the right to repair movement. We also talked about what’s next, including myriad state campaigns to pass right to repair laws (including one in Colorado) and a parallel effort to reign in abuses of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

News Roundup Links:

• Microsoft Funded a ...

For our inaugural episode we welcome Aaron Perzanowski, author of the book The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own to discuss just how we arrived at a point where institutions and corporations have become hostile to repair – and what tools we have at our disposal to fight back. Aaron lends his legal expertise to help us understand the role that antitrust regulations, intellectual property law, and market power play in rec...