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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork with open-hardware supporters, this paper shows how they exchange repair skills to counter corporate tech’s material constraints and advance an alternative model of innovation beyond profit-driven logics.

Paper long abstract

In a world where technological futures are promised through ever more sealed, opaque devices, repair has become both an everyday struggle and a political horizon. This paper examines a transnational community of open hardware supporters who respond to the black-boxing of digital technologies and planned obsolescence by re-centering care, maintenance, and tinkering as ordinary technological practice. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with small-scale hardware producers, makers, engineers, and users in Turkey and the United States, I trace how these actors challenge material constraints of corporate tech by sharing designs, exchanging repair skills, and building commons-based markets oriented toward accessibility rather than profit.

I argue that open hardware supporters advance a past-oriented understanding of technological innovation that challenges corporate tech’s profit-driven model, which equates innovation with the successful commercialization of world-first inventions. Open hardware supporters draw on the past by referencing the repairable devices and radio amateurs of the 1950s and 1960s as formative examples. With open hardware practices they want to revive similar skills for today’s digital devices. This paper approaches the lost ability to repair technological devices as the enclosure of a once-existing technological commons, driven by the rise of profit-driven tech giants. By shifting attention from open source software to open hardware in commons-based markets, it focuses on the materiality of digital devices, which is harder for corporations to co-opt than software. Hence, the notion of novelty emerging in open hardware commons holds greater potential for egalitarian innovation that challenge profit-driven innovation.