Main Character of the Week is a weekly column that tells you the most prominent “main character” online (good or bad). It runs on Fridays in the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter. If you want to get this column a day before we publish it, subscribe to web_crawlr, where you’ll get the daily scoop of internet culture delivered straight to your inbox.
The internet is a stage, and someone unwillingly stumbles onto it weekly. This makes them the “main character” online. Sometimes their story is heartwarming, like the catastrophic injury lawyer who posts about household products you should banish; usually it’s a gaffe. In any case, that main character energy flows through the news cycle and turbo-charges debate for several business days.
Here’s the Trending team’s main character of the week.
It’s the climate! And the stuff in our homes that was once connected to the internet but now lives in a bedside drawer.
Our sister publication one5c hosted a series of panels Tuesday at Climate Week NYC. The themes touched on the human cost of our online lives.
As the event description noted: “Most of us probably don’t think about the stuff we already own—the appliances in our homes, the phones in our pockets—as opportunities to fight the climate emergency. It is.”
Think about your phone. And the giant holes created in the earth daily to manufacture them across Chinese mines. Think about how you are conditioned to perpetually upgrade to the latest iPhone. Think about the amount of waste you could conserve by holding onto it for seven years. And what if you made it a point to fix stuff to extend the shelf lives of products like headphones that often just need a new battery to keep going?
It’s something iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens thinks about a lot.
“The system was rigged,” he told me Thursday on the phone.
“I was trying to fix my laptop and I was searching online for the repair manual and I couldn’t find it,” he said about the genesis of iFixit. “I learned later that Apple had sent legal DMCA takedown requests to anyone who had posted the service manual online.”
Onstage, Wiens talked about visiting impoverished parts of Africa where teens are burning plastic wires, breathing in the fumes, so that they can extract the copper and sell it for $5. He thinks about supply chains a lot. Domestically, he thinks about how this constant device churn has rotted out Main Street.
“We’ve all been watching the dwindling of repair shops from our community… that actually is an engineered decision,” he said. So he got to work making service manuals available online.
“We did that systematically for every Apple product,” he said. “We’re the largest repair resource on the internet.” For not just phones but everything from refrigerators to skateboards, he said.
Now Wiens wants us breaking the “mental block” that comes with fixing our own stuff.
“All our things are held together with screws and fasteners,” he said. “But the fastener of the digital age is solder… Yet we are totally disconnected. Almost nobody knows how to solder… If we can make soldering so simple and safe that anyone can do it… it would connect us better with our things.”
iFixit is shipping its new portable soldering station next month. At Climate Week NYC, I learned to solder an LED flashlight by “baby welding” the circuit board. It’s like using a hot glue gun, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration when Wiens says the world would be a better place if everyone learned how to solder.
(Full disclosure: Wiens insisted I take one of these portable solderers home, which in my opinion, is ethically suspect because the Daily Dot is not in the gadget reviews business. It isn’t being given a vacation and car to then write about the products you were provided along the way, but it’s in the same neighborhood given that this bad boy retails for $250. I gifted it to the hotel front desk as a thank-you for letting me check out late in order to write this column.)
But I do believe in his big-picture philosophy and agree when Wiens says the digital age has turned us into just “users and consumers.”
“If you can’t open it and fix it, you can’t really own it,” he added.
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