How Corporate America Robs Men Of The Joys Of Tinkering

I recently built a coffee table. This was my first foray into woodworking, so the table is far from perfect — with slight asymmetries and an uneven finish. A level would tell me it misses the mark of an IKEA table’s engineered flatness. But if you’ve ever built something with your hands as a hobbyist, you would know my reaction looking at this table in satisfactory triumph — “Who cares?”

Unfortunately, when it comes to trying your hand at repairing your personal property, certain manufacturers do care, and they’re getting in the way of consumers and hobbyists who just want to get their own electronics, appliances, and vehicles up and running again. This assault on our property rights and agency is at the core of the national push for legislation that secures the “Right to Repair” our personal property and explains why a half dozen states have already codified such a law.

There are innumerable legal and philosophical arguments that support the right to repair, which the Texas Public Policy Foundation addresses in a recent research paper. But I want to return to the coffee table illustration for a moment and pull on the thread of tinkering.

In simple terms, tinkering is the playful relative of engineering. This is where children learn firsthand how things work — what tools can do and the properties of different materials. Tinkering usually starts small with LEGO bricks, but in the case of almost every successful inventor and builder — people like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc. — it quickly graduates into taking tech apart and putting it back together, deconstructing a car engine, and other engineering-like activities.

The problem is that many large corporations simply don’t want us to tinker.

Your iPhone? You void the warranty the second you crack it open instead of bringing it to the Genius Bar. A John Deere tractor you want to repair with your grandson? You can’t — John Deere requires that customers bring it into the shop on grounds of copyright law. Your dishwasher? Chances are it’s made by one of 86 percent of appliance companies that do not provide service manuals to customers as they do not recommend self-service (which is code for forcing you to work with one of their partnered technicians they get a kickback from).

Increasingly, the pastime of fathers and sons working on car repairs together is becoming untenable, with automakers withholding diagnostic information in a way that precludes car owners from repairing or tinkering with their own cars and forces them to bring the vehicles into the dealer for even the quickest of fixes.

To make matters worse, more and more personal anecdotes and reports confirm that manufacturers of our fridges, phones, and cars just “don’t make ‘em like they used to.” So the problem compounds due to the need to replace or fix our products far more frequently than in the past. They even have a term for it: “planned obsolescence.”

If you think it is asinine that we are barred from fixing our personal property or from bringing items we own into a third-party repair shop of our choosing, then welcome to the Right to Repair movement! Simply, the Right to Repair ensures that manufacturers provide owners and independent repair businesses with fair access to service information and affordable replacement parts. Based on the current corporate regime, legislation is required in Texas to afford Texans the right to repair their own stuff as they see fit.

Recently, I sat down with the chairman of the Texas Innovation and Technology Caucus, Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, and when I asked him about some of the major tech legislation they’re looking at in our home state next session, he led with Right to Repair. In his own words, “Sometimes you have to pass a law to give people certain rights … that you would think would come by default … something like the Right to Repair. Should you be able to take your phone and do anything you want with it? Of course you should.”

At the heart of the Right to Repair movement is human agency — the agency to use your property as you see fit; the agency for small businesses and repair shops to compete with huge incumbents by providing better, cheaper services; and the agency for the next innovators of the world to tinker, free of constraints, as they develop the skills needed to realize the vision for that next great product.

It’s almost unthinkable that we would let corporations tell us how and when we can use our property. And it is certainly un-American to capitulate to forces that seek to rob us of our dignity.

It’s high time Texas and other freedom-loving states passed robust Right to Repair laws to take back our agency and dignity.

David Dunmoyer is campaign director for Better Tech for Tomorrow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He develops conservative technology policy solutions for the Texas Legislature and previously worked for the Republican leadership in D.C.