Stewart Brand

Yeah, and I think lots of things might as well be short-lived.

And this is the whole idea of kind of disposable containers versus something that you're going to keep going.

The cover of the book honors the idea of kintsugi, the Japanese art of basically repairing broken things.

pottery with a kind of a gold glue, and so it not only fixes it, but it makes it more beautiful, and you honor the mistake that broke it, and you honor the repair, and then you brag about it.

So kintsugi is...

is a way of kind of just honoring the fact that things do break.

But nobody actually wants things to break.

And so what is being done with scientific and engineering progress is make things that are lower and lower maintenance.

One of the things you lose in the course of that is people being

skills and maintenance.

We saw this when personal computers first came along and I happened to be in the thick of that, it turned out, in the Bay Area and the user groups

For a good while, we're carefully attended by the manufacturers because the users were, one, showing the problems, and two, showing the workarounds.

And then the manufacturers needed to know about that.

And then they could try to do a workaround way back to the manufacturing level so that particular kind of problem would not keep occurring.

With software, this is much harder to do because software keeps moving, whereas hardware stays the way it is.

And that just is part of the history of these things.

I'm going to be going into the right to repair issues shortly because people like John Deere, who used to be famous for making it easy for their customers to repair their tractors, lately have made it very, very difficult and expensive and problematic for the customers to fix their high-tech tractors.

Right.

And so, you know, Senator Elizabeth Warren is all over this, and the guys at iFixit, Kyle Weins, and others in the public world are...

are basically, it's a form of insistence on the owner of repair rights to, if I own it, if you sell it to me and I own it now, I've gotta be able to fix it or I don't really own it.