Driving

We share much in common! I’ve never driven a car either, though I did buy and use a bicycle in the early 90s. In my student days in London (82-84) I had a bicycle. At one point, both the brakes had snapped, and I was too lazy to take it for repair and so I was going about my routine, including on important roads, using my shoes for brakes!

Here’s some thoughts triggered by your post.

Tinkering

Yes, things that involved all the brilliant tinkering etc have changed, and so that whole mode of activity has passed. But at the same time other things have come up, including those in the young gen’s use, which also involve deep immersion, discovery, learning, experience, skill, knowledge. E.g. One’s own PC. Or music related gadgetry. How many heavy PC users of Outlook know where their email files reside within Windows? Those who “know” are less likely to be paralysed by PC difficulties, or lose valuable information, than people who simply use a PC (or drive a car).

Our bodies

Like those who learn about their own bodies and rely fundamentally on observing and listening to the body, self-healing, naturopathy – are likely to be in better health than others. But this is growing rapidly – even as the hi-tech healthcare sector and pharmaceuticals also grow. I wanted to use the metaphor of “like brushing one’s teeth” to refer to the deep instilling of certain practices and habits in childhood. But the fact is that on account of abominable oral hygiene, large numbers of people suffer from dental problems.

Mechanical

“Mechanical”, tactile things and aspects have come to be replaced. Perhaps the mechanical faculty will go to the domain of art, and we will have “artists” making ingenious mechanical devices and machines, and maintain and repair them… Or go to the “games” or “hobby” domain. Like we had the old fabulous Mechano sets. I did manage to build one of the highest level models when I was 9, a crane, with my somewhat rusty high-level set (received from my father who had this when he was a boy; the whole thing had been transferred to a small suitcase). Now we could have intricate metal machining, shaping, turning sets. Or carpentry (another sector where the gifted carpenter has been replaced).

Calcutta had a huge, elaborate, highly-skilled industrial ancillaries sector, meeting the needs of the large medium and large engineering industry. The whole industrial economy of West Bengal has shrunk and languished over the last 4 decades. Consequently today one finds the skills base for vital ancillary operations is just not there. A lathe machine operator – would rather drive an auto-rickshaw, he would earn more.

Monopoly

My younger son Rishiraj (aka Chotu, 11) wanted me to play Monopoly (or Business, as I think its Indian equivalent is called) with me a couple of months back. To humour him I did sit with him. I used to be addicted to the old (English) Monopoly, with all those places in London. The image of that board, the place names, their colours, their relative rental / value are all engraved in my mind. When I arrived in London, I also had those place names in my head as I became familiar with the city. I used to play with the servant boy in our house, and become greatly agitated and feel murderous when I was losing.

My father – probably to ease his boredom – had shown me a shortcut or quick way in Monopoly. You shuffled all the place cards and dealt these out among the players. So every one began with an initial endowment of real estate. Instead of building it up dice-roll by dice-roll, transaction by transaction.

But playing with my son – the whole operation of distributing the currency notes, in various denominations, making physical payments, getting change etc etc was so irksome and boring! So I took out a note book and made entries for the transactions instead.

Times have changed! And different people live in different times. On account of age, and also exposure. So when I read about swipe cards in Monopoly on your blog – I was glad to know that, that made sense.

But as a boy, I actually enjoyed the physical, tactile, visible, literal activity of handling the “money”, receiving it gleefully, winning or losing was also about the visible, physical aspect of having and your opponents not having the money.

Immersion

The question here is also that of deep (awed) immersion and continuous learning.

The new gen – is the channel flicking generation. There is a satiation, and an attention span deficit. And one will learn and understand and innovate only after deep immersion. That quality, that effort, expressed in whichever sphere, is what needs to be instilled.

Conscious choice is also exercised here. Like one can choose to be gravitas, as opposed to levity, because the occasion requires that. Or one can choose to be austere, simple living high thinking, though one can afford much more.

Large numbers of children labouring through the weighty Harry Potter volumes – is a good sign. Though a friend of mine did tell me that this was also faddism and media hype, that many of the HP books bought may not actually have been read!

Education

Schooling and education must instill zestful deep immersion. The whole school and university education system – with the information and internet revolution, one can see much of what happens now is entirely redundant. They have to be reconceptualised altogether. And “teaching” – will be the most demanding, the most difficult, the most creative vocation. But we are not going to see the results of this for a long time, sheer inertia of what happens will make it lurch on. Meanwhile little bubbles of alternatives will keep happening. And yes, eventually the mainstream will become marginal.

Motor garage

Coming back to the car mechanic case – several years ago, when I was working in Jerusalem, I accompanied my friend Lou to a car garage to get his tyre puncture fixed. I was immediately struck by the mechanisation in everything that was done manually in India, with simple tools, including by child-workers. So a whole new set of tools also existed – such as electric screwdrivers and spanners, tools to remove the tyre from the hub etc. Cars too had changed, so the task for the worker was also much simpler, and routine. The whole operation of maintenance and repair had become more efficient, and the whole enterprise – I assume – has grown and become more profitable. And that garage was run by an old lady – she could have been my grandmother! – the widow of the owner. She sat in a cabin, with a PC in front of her.

But it will still be a long time before we see the spread and penetration of that in India. It is there, in the depots of Mercedez-Benz etc. When this happens in India, the employment of workers, and especially child-workers, will shrink. But the larger operation could in fact grow, and total employment, enterprise, revenue and profit could all grow. Currently the whole business is subsidised by child labour, low wages, ability to pollute, artificially low space rental costs (which in turn distorts urban management). A small garage in a residential neighbourhood could e.g. become a deposit-collection centre for tyre-fixing. And each such unit is linked to a large mechanical repair centre, which could be off-city, and which could have quite a no. of workers because of the scale of operation. For a large city like Calcutta, there could be a good no. of such large repair centres, each in turn with its network of local outlets. As with couriers (already in existence now). With growing use of cars, a neighbourhood could perhaps also support more than one local outlet. Competition will bring in greater benefits to customers. The activity of carrying tyres to the main centre will also generate employment. Over time, the main centres will develop sub-centres, for particular operations. The sector would also benefit greatly through use of computers, and related software. So the full operation, all the new linkages and activities – will eventually be superior and more wholesome in every way to the old order.

A visionary, committed person, empowered within the system, could actually build and bring about the whole thing, draw a new landscape of car-tyre repair over the current scribble and scrawl of that activity on the existing landscape. All the people currently in that sector, including the child-workers and their parents, could find a place in the new, with better terms. A lot of new skills have to be imparted, ranging from computer application to entrepreneurship. The places in the city polluted by proliferating garages – could be redeveloped into salubrious places.

Likewise with another sector that you can see in the streets of Calcutta – scrap metal dealers, and car scrap. You sell your dead car to the scrap dealer, and he dismembers it completely, keeps all salvageable parts and components, and then breaks and cuts the metal frame. All such outlets can move off-city, and inside the city one could have merely small booths with a computer. And the property could be redeveloped.

Capital has to be driven by a wholesome, inclusive, aesthetic, intelligent, system vision, rather than simply by quick and maximal profit; and private profit and public / system benefit have to be synchronised. That doesn’t happen on its own.

We’re moving from a labour-intensive mode to a capital-intensive mode, but with the existence of masses of labour, and huge unemployment. Thinking holistically and in system terms can make for a solution for all, rather than a solution that benfits some and leaves others in the bog!

But yes, something precious would also have been lost, the skill of the motor mechanic. That precious thing can move out of that sector / domain, but needn’t be lost to humanity. Some people can work to create a place for that, in art, or games / hobbies.

Some will be lost forever. Like building construction masons’ skills. The specialised artisanal skill of the mason – bricklaying, plastering, mosaic work etc etc – does not exist any more, skill has altogether gone from construction work, replaced by new products and machines and techniques. Hence old buildings in Calcutta are aesthetically superior to new machine-aided constructions, and the emerging landscape is dreary.

Titration

A final thought. You talked about mechanical skills. Physics. There’s also chemistry. Perhaps the only thing I carry from all the “science” I studied in school – is the chemistry practicals in the laboratory, playing with chemicals and fluids and heat, and in particular “titration”. The higher secondary chemistry practicals had that. One liquid is added in minute drops into another, with no outward effect, until out of the blue, one drop leads to a transformation of colur of the host liquid. Until that last drop gave the final nudge, surely something was cooking in the womb of the matter!)

Titration is a powerful metaphor in terms of which life and the world can be thought about, especially towards transformation.

Thanks for your ear, eyeball! chutki

Now I’m not sure. Modularise and hide away and say Do Not Open. Fine. But only if it works six nines. And even then only if the safety issues are meaningful.

Our suppliers don’t fix stuff for us cost-effectively anyway. In fact the usual response is Throw It Away And Buy a New One.

Even if what we get is a consumer experimentation space at the edge of the sealed unit that’s better than now.

Rule 3 is a back-door attempt to price the ecosystem impact of obsolescence and tag it on to the price of the replacement. If we did that then we would extend replacement cycles more easily.

And anyway all I really wanted was to have all three “Rules” treated as analogous, to show how Generation M experiments with their stuff and how bad IPR and bad DRM comes in their way.

Aren’t these the reasons they don’t let us get under the hood?

1) Things are too complicated for us to fix (forgive the generalisation across both people and products)
2) We expect our suppliers to be able to fix stuff for us and they can’t do that cost effectively if we have meddled

And on rule 3

Isn’t this a market forces and regulation issue? If you believe in capitalism then you have to trust it to allocate resources properly. It is then up to governments to regulate externalities, for example with a tax on disposing of PCs. There might also be value in regulating manufacturing to improve fixability, but you can’t expect firms to do this on their own. Their shareholders would be up in arms.

I’m with you 100% on rule 2 though….

As soon as I have accepted a comment from someone, filter 2 disappears. That’s the best I’ve been able to come up with so far.

Andrew, I’ve wanted to meet Prof Zittrain for some time now, and I guess it will happen one day. ….

My take is there are two separate economic effects driving this state of affairs.

1) It is cheaper to do massive system integration and mass production. No-one even thinks of building a CPU from discrete components any more (I can remember one electronics magazine running a construction project building a desk calculator out of discrete 7400-series logic gates, just about the time one-chip calculators were coming on the market). Generally a benevolent effect on society.

2) There’s a nice revenue stream to be made from servicing equipment, with revenue proportional to parts cost. Or even more if you can persuade the customer they need a total replacement. Perhaps life-cycle economics and charging for disposal might help counter this trend. But I’m not optimistic.

Have you seen the Groklaw debate over GPL v3? http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060727140038810 – especially see the comments. Linus Torvalds has issues with the proposed additions on DRM, but there’s plenty of polarised opinions there, debating round the point “should DRM-locked-down hardware such as Tivo be allowed to use GPLv3 software? Or does blocking its use also block beneficial uses too?” (with examples from certified medical equipment and privacy/security).

It makes sense what you say and more importantly the way you say it, but pause for thought…. it is our generation that got under the hood and it is the same generation that has decided to seal the hood. Our children are now growing up in an age where there is no repair, simply replace. Rules 1-2 and 3 will not sell in the 21st century and as you point out it will affect parts of the world that used to depend on hand-me-downs and reconditioning eventually.