Paper short abstract:

Consumer electronics are designed to be irreparable and ephemeral, even as they become increasingly ubiquitous. Repair practices constitute resistance to their prescribed horizons and the dictate of use, loss, disposal and replacement inherent in their logic and design.

Paper long abstract:

Small consumer electronics are increasing ubiquitous in human lives. Manufactured to be consumed, disposed of and replaced, these devices have prescribed material and temporal horizons, often designed as impermeable, near-irreparable and to become defunct after a certain amount of time. Their latent potentialities are thus sealed off, rendered inaccessible by design, by technical as well as legal means - they are meant to be closed, ephemeral, to eventually stop working, to become (e-)waste, part of a technofossil record, a persistent chemical heritage, or drawn into circular economy schemes as recyclable, re-commodifiable material. Practices of repair constitute resistance to their prescribed horizons, their impermeability and the foreclosure of their latent potentials. Repairers work against technical and legal specifications to release devices' residual potentials and make their value available once again - not to the corporations that market them, but to their users and to other economies, a subversion of surplus value. Repair is also resistance to the way that these objects and their logic entail loss; the loss of a kind of material relationship, however mundane, that is nonetheless somehow constitutive, and of which one is robbed when objects become or are made into rubbish. Repair practitioners act within vastly diverse contexts, horizons of possibility, economic and political realities, yet nevertheless share very specific, technical struggles against insidious hardware and software tactics that aim to curtail objects' lifespans.