“We don’t do repairs”

Trying to fix what is broken

A few weeks back, I was lying in bed and sensed the dryer running. That in and of itself isn’t unusual as the appliance sits in some proximity to our bedroom. If a few doors are left open I can hear the faint lull of the spinning drum. (It’s of course far more discordant when one of my daughters forgets to take coins or a key out of a pocket.)

But this was odd because I had heard the chimes of the finished cycle a while back. I reluctantly got up and saw to my dismay that the dryer was off but it was spinning. Ugh. Luckily it stopped when I opened the door. When I closed the door it went back to tumbling. 

I researched the symptoms online and found that it was likely a faulty electronic control board. I read suggestions that unplugging and plugging it back in could be a successful reset strategy. Isn’t that always the option of last resort for recalcitrant electronics? It didn’t work. And neither the user manual nor the company help line (“try unplugging it”) seemed to offer any hope. 

I flipped the circuit breaker off just in case. And then after a day flipped it back on. 

That worked!!! For about a week. 

I brought out the drying rack and called numerous repairmen only to be told they would need to come out for a paid inspection. One friendly guy I called diagnosed it over the phone. “I’ve seen a lot of these.” 

He ordered the part and when he arrived he was quietly deliberate yet cheerful, with an easygoing manner. He had “Alex” neatly sewn into his work shirt. I thanked Alex for repairing the unit and then he said something that struck me deeply: “We don’t do repairs anymore, really. We just replace.”

Alex told me that his father and uncle had started the business doing television repairs. Back then, he said wistfully, you could actually go in and fix things. Now, he said, all the electronics are glued together. He mostly switches out parts. He pointed to my replacement hardware as a case in point.

The offending piece of dryer hardware

Alex left me with his card, the manufacturer’s warranty, and my own sense of wistfulness. 

I grew up in the midst of a relentless global transition from a mechanical and early electronic age to one dominated by increasingly complex computing. I loved trains as a child and ate up stories from my grandparents about what it was like to ride behind those mighty massive marvels of mechanics, the old steam locomotives I saw at the museum. I remember my dad telling me stories of how he took apart radios and other old household goods as a child to see how they worked. I remember trying myself to fix the mechanism that opened the cassette holder on my broken Sony Walkman only to be left with a bunch of tiny screws and I couldn’t remember where they went. 

My next-door neighbor is very handy, building his own deck, raising bees, and rebuilding cars. He has impressively restored an old Porsche (not a fancy model, he has said many times). The car was from the 1970s. He said that is about the upper limits that home tinkerers can fix from bumper to bumper. After that cars became “rolling computers.” 

For most of human history, mechanics humans had invented — wheels, pulleys, etc. — were ingenious but pretty basic to understand. The Industrial Revolution ushered in a world of precision instruments and wondrous complexities. These machines were distinct. Beautiful. And if you were really clever, you could still open them up and follow their logic. 

No longer.

When a reckless driver tore off the side mirror of our parked car a few years back, the cost and complexity of replacement was much higher than I expected. We were told that was because of all the sensors encased in modern mirrors. 

Computers are everywhere and the trend is only accelerating. Our phones, those impenetrable monoliths that are engineered to be virtually impossible to open or understand, control aspects of our days that used to be handled with tangible objects. Maps. Alarm clocks. Rotary phones. The industries that made and fixed these things have largely disappeared. 

Today, our lives are governed by opaque algorithms. And the revolution of artificial intelligence, already underway, seems even more untethered from human agency. 

We hear cautionary tales about computers out-thinking us and posing a malevolent threat to humanity — a dystopian vision of a world where humans will no longer have the power to repair what we’ve made. Even if we pull the plug. 

The more I thought about all this, the more I wondered if our fraught political environment reflects a world where we expect to replace what grows old and broken rather than go in and try to repair what needs fixing.

Have we become too comfortable swapping out the old for the new? What does that do to our senses of self and community? How do we challenge our own thinking when we hand over our personal ecosystems to the algorithms powering the social media inputs on our phones and laptops? Have we surrendered to forces we don’t feel we have the capacity to understand? Even if computers haven’t taken over running the world, have the effects of our digital deluge taken over our individual identities? 

The 18th-century theologian and philosopher William Paley famously argued that just as the complex mechanisms of a watch implied the existence of a watchmaker, the intricacies of nature necessitated a divine creator. What would he make of Instagram? 

Modern science has shown us that nature works in ways Paley could have never imagined. In fact, new technologies like the gene editing tool, CRISPR, have given humans the capability to alter life in ways that were once the sole domain of science fiction. We are going in and literally editing single letters of our DNA. We are engineering cells to fight diseases. 

And this is what ultimately gives me hope. I think humans will always have a desire to tinker, build, and repair. The complexities of modern life mean that trying to fix what is broken will look different than poring over the interlocking gears inside a beautiful old watch. But we also have new tools. We can use alternative energy like massive windmills and efficient solar panels to try to fix our climate. We can use AI to diagnose diseases. We can use computer probes to study the depths of the ocean and the far reaches of space. 

And at the same time, we can find ways to keep ourselves in touch with the tangible. One of my oldest friends has taken up making marvelous creations of wood using only hand tools. He shares pictures of impressive joints (the tongue and groove variety, not the rolled paper kind). I marvel at their ancient simplicity. The geometric perfection. The beauty of the planning and execution. 

As we face a world that can sometimes seem beset by uncontrollable chaos, where systems and institutions we have relied on are deeply damaged, we need to find new ways to repair and build resilience. We will never be able to fix what is broken if we see everything as replaceable.