The Restart Project Podcast

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Restart Podcast Ep. 27: How to Restart the World with Lewis Dartnell Nov 29, 2017

Show notes

Lewis Dartnell, fellow of astrobiology at the University of Leicester, asked himself a difficult question. If tomorrow we woke up and all the technologies we had come to depend on had ceased to exist, what knowledge would we need to re-build them from scratch? The book that came out of his research, called 'The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch', explores the history and inner workings of many of the facets of our modern society. Using the idea of a 'technological apocalypse' as a thought experiment, it forces us to consider our dependence on the systems and technologies that we take for granted every day. When we invited Lewis to come and talk at the first Fixfest at LSE in October this year, he raised the important point that knowledge has become highly specialised. Given the number of people that are involved in the various stages of production of any single item, from the design, to the mining of the raw minerals used, to the assembly, a repairer seeking to understand that item must be multi-skilled, curious, and eager to learn. In this interview, Lewis talks to us about how people might be inspired to become more curious in the world around them. We also put Lewis' thought experiment to members of our community at a recent Restart Party in Tower Hamlets. While some seemed to be thrilled at the idea of a world without computers, for others, the prospect was panic-inducing. Imagining the unimaginable raises important questions about the real problems facing our word today. Would we want to recreate the world exactly as it is? What would we change, and how would we change it?

Restart Radio: Breaking the world record for community repair Nov 22, 2017

Show notes

How many gadgets do you need to fix to break a world record? The repair café held in Cambridge earlier this month has set the new magic number: 232. Today, Ugo and Jon talk to Nicole Barton from Cambridge Carbon Footprint, who helped to organise the 'World's Biggest Repair Café' on Saturday the 11th of November. The event was held with the intention of surpassing the 150 repairs that took place in Vauréal, France - previously the largest community repair event to date. Out of the 375 items brought in, the 232 items repaired in Cambridge - which included gadgets, clothing, bicycles and furniture - shows a success rate that adheres more or less to what Nicole estimates is the average success rate for community repair events in Cambridge: around 65%. Nicole helped put together the Cambridgeshire Repair Café network, which is a collaboration between various organizations including Cambridge Carbon Footprint and Circular Cambridge. She sees repair as playing an important role in tackling climate change. But there are other important benefits, too. She talks to us about what she calls the 'kindness' element: the warmth that emerges in a room where people volunteer their time to help others to learn new skills. In Cambridge, where the 'Town vs. Gown' divide can sometimes be keenly felt, this serves as a way to unite the community. This is equally the case in London, where small communities within the metropolis are incredibly important. Our own community lead, Jon Stricklin-Coutinho, talks about his experience working with our community of volunteers both in London and beyond. He talks through some of the ways that its possible to get involved, either by attending a Restart Party in your local area (whether that means volunteering, learning to repair, or just having a look around) or by starting up one yourself. The key to successful community repair is forging connections. People are often more than willing to help, and often all it takes is a bit of asking around in order to find a usable space and some willing co-hosts and volunteers. Organising a repair event does take some amount of admin work, like anything else. But issues with safety and liability are easily navigable, and should not put people off. The joy that comes out of a successful repair event makes it more than worth it, even if no records are broken.

Restart Radio: Glitch art by refurbisher RDKL Inc Nov 15, 2017

Show notes

Today, Lauren and Ugo talk to John Bumstead - an artist and laptop refurbisher whose company 'RKDL Inc' (pronounced "Roadkill") gives a new life to old Apple Macbooks. Most Macbooks end up recycled - shredded for raw materials. According to John, many discarded Macbooks are only halfway through their lifetime at 5-7 years, and good for another half a decade or more, after a few tweaks. John trawls the internet for wholesale Macbooks. He buys them, refurbishes them, and sells them on at an affordable price. His process sheds light on the somewhat hidden circular world of the online secondhand laptop trade. But John isn't just a refurbisher: he's a living example of ways in which repair can be a highly imaginative act. After seeing dozens and dozens of Apple laptops come in to his workshop with strange and wonderful visuals, John started to photograph the faults and upload them online. When he saw they were gathering interest, he began to experiment further, overlaying them with photographs with tree branches, which he loads onto machines with graphics defects in order to purposely distort the image. "I never would have imagined starting my business that I would be a visual artist", says John. "I had no idea. And so many amazing things have come out of it." John's work is an example of glitch art - a fascinating movement that sees error and failure as a source of beauty: or in John's words, as an "electronic ballet". Communities of glitch artists and repairers might share many of the same aims and philosophies: what better way to highlight planned obsolescence than to draw attention to the aesthetics of error that so many of us are familiar with? Drawing our attention to the fallibility of technology, glitch art gives us a fascinating glimpse into the world behind the polished exterior, the world that repairers have to immerse themselves in each time they diagnose and attempt to fix an item. We also share some of our own stories about screen faults, including a spectacular DIY fix at a Restart Party that involved a series of clothes pegs positioned carefully to keep a screen working. Screens are by far the most fragile component of the objects we use everyday - our smartphones and laptops - and this fragility is a huge source of frustration. Pushing for more easily replaceable screens is not just a matter of convenience, it is a matter of principle: we do not really own an object until we can understand how to fix it ourselves.

Restart Radio: Robot pets Nov 09, 2017

Show notes

Japan has long been at the forefront of the design and manufacture of robot pets: from the Tamagotchi to the Sony Aibo. But how would these gadget-critters be received in the West, where we are less inclined to see the boundaries between animate and inanimate worlds as blurred?

Lauren Collee is joined by Restart trustee Carolina Vallejo, who spends a couple of months in Japan each year as co-director of the Koshirakura Landscape Workshop – teaching designing and making for greater social sustainability.

Japan was one of the first countries to acknowledge the growing problem of e-waste, and has high electronic recycling targets. Yet we have questions about the success of the Japanese system. Even with recycling and care for resources playing a large part in social attitudes, the current rates of recycling cannot keep up with the increasing demands of a global consumerist culture.

We discuss how elements of Shinto philosophy, according to which objects have souls, have contributed to a society that is less hostile to the idea of an inanimate world that communicates with its users than it is here in the UK.

A poignant illustration of this is the mass funerals held for the Sony Aibo – multiple generations of robot dog that were discontinued, before a new model was released earlier this year in Japan. Many earlier generation Sony Aibo owners had developed strong emotional attachments to their robotic pets, and were left without ongoing support for its maintenance when the model was discontinued.

.@Sony brings back Aibo with some… notable updates https://t.co/cCajlQ96kH pic.twitter.com/zuMCjxoq9B

— CNET (@CNET) 1 November 2017

Robot pets have all kinds of potential: from use in nursing homes as therapeutic tools, as a way to encourage people to invest more care and time in the objects they own. But in light of the current model of ownership – where gadgets are dependent on software and services that remains under copyright – we must expect that there will be significant barriers to repairing and adapting them. And while the use of AI might enable these gadgets to develop increasingly distinct ‘personalities’, how could these services be manipulated and/or hacked?

Links:

BBC: Japan may use e-waste for 2020 medals
New York Times (Video): The Family Dog
The new Aibo
PARO the therapeutic robot
The Guardian: How Paro the robot seal is being used to help UK dementia patients
Sherry Turkle (MIT): Robotic pets may be bad medicine for melancholy
Boing boing: Sony’s new robot dog doubles down on DRM

[Feature Image “img_0169” by Flickr user Steve Rainwater is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0]

The post Restart Radio: Robot pets appeared first on The Restart Project.

Restart Radio: Open-sourcing the Internet of Things Nov 01, 2017

Show notes

The rapidly-growing Internet of Things (IoT) takes multiple forms: some more useful than others. Broadly defined, the Internet of Things refers to anything that is traditionally 'dumb', but is manufactured to communicate - with other devices, or with the internet. A smart kettle, a smart toaster, or a smart central heating system all fall into this category. A world where gadgets can talk to each other brings a whole host of opportunities - but it also throws up unprecedented challenges. Today, Ugo and Jon are joined by Davide Gomba, an Italian maker and member of Restarters Turin who is working on an open-source connected home called 'Casa Jasmina'. Built to merge traditional Italian skills in interior design with emergent skills in open-source electronics, Casa Jasmina is an ongoing project that provides a test-bed for experiments in IoT. Casa Jasmina demonstrates the potential of smart homes that are tailored to the specific needs of its inhabitants, and how it can facilitate more sustainable practices in the home, for example by reducing energy consumption. Davide talks about the emerging challenge of controlling IoT via voice. With many voice-controlled assistants working through proprietary platforms, such as that used by Amazon for Alexa, there is a need for an open-source database of voice that can be used by independent makers. We talk about the security risks posed by these new products and services, especially in relation to medical IoT devices such as the artificial pancreas developed for Type 1 diabetics. In terms of e-waste, IoT devices also run the risk of increasing the problem of software obsolescence. If gadgets are developed faster than the resulting software issues that crop up can be addressed, we fall into a pattern by which the life expectancy of our things is drastically decreased. Ugo recently spoke at MozFest about the discontinuation of support for owners of the Pebble Watch after it was bought by Fitbit. The smarter our devices become, the more reliant we become on the assistance of the manufacturers in maintaining them.

Restart Podcast Ep. 26: Fixers united at the first Fixfest Oct 24, 2017

Show notes

On the weekend of 6-8 of October, we hosted the first International Fixfest in London. It was an incredible chance for repairers, makers, activists, tinkerers and academics from all over the world to meet each other, share tips and stories, and come up with joint strategies for repairing into the future. Video recordings of many of the talks and unconference sessions from Fixfest are available on Youtube, and if you want just the audio, you can listen and download from our Soundcloud page. You can also read summaries on the Fixfest site. This episode features Dave Pickering, our podcast producer, in conversation with repair group organisers from Holland, Italy, Tunisia, Argentina and more. They discuss whether Fixfest can signal a new era of global collaboration for community repair. This podcast episode is a portrait of an emerging repair movement. And it would not be complete without stories about some of our participants' favourite community repairs. From an old guitar that means a lot to two particular parents, to a cleverly modified paper shredder, it is clear that repair is about much more than just a successful fix. And even if the benefit to individual and community well-being is much harder to quantify than kilos of waste saved from landfill, these event organisers are hugely motivated by the social aspects of repairing together. Over the coming months, we'll be featuring more material from Fixfest on our podcast, including an interview with Lewis Dartnell - author or 'The Knowledge' - in which we imagine that we have to rebuild all the technologies we've come to depend upon from scratch. In another episode, we talk to designer Leyla Acaroglu about her positive vision for systems change, and how we might go about achieving it. Stay tuned!

Restart Radio: Tech repair myths Oct 18, 2017

Show notes

The greatest myth surrounding electronic repair - one that desperately needs busting - is that we can't repair at all. Most items when they break are repairable. But there are several persistent myths about DIY quick fixes that can harm rather than help an ailing electronic item. To kick off today's episode, we briefly discuss two pieces of tech news that caught our attention this week. In the wake of the big release of the new iPhone release, there is speculation that the iPhone 7 may still be selling better than the newer model. And the recent resignation of Samsung CEO Oh-Hyun Kwon gets us thinking about why the story hasn't been as 'big' in western news as we might expect. The first tech repair myth to come under the magnifying glass is one that many people still recall in times of urgency, when a phone is dropped in a river, a loo, a bath, a bowl of soup... Put it in rice. Lauren's recent incident involving a Welsh river indicated that the newer Apple iPhones are surprisingly (and secretly) quite waterproof - at the price of being incredibly difficult to repair when they do break. The old 'rice trick' seems to be largely useless. The best thing to do is to take a phone apart and let its insides dry out completely - which is increasingly difficult to do. Most importantly, turn your phone off, and let it dry. Give it a full three days to recover. Inconvenient, maybe, but effective. We also cover some more obscure home fixes - using ovens to reball circuit boards, or freezers to restart dead hard drives. A recurring pattern is that the technology changes, but myths persist: there was once a pretty solid logic behind the 'Fonzarelli Fix', or 'percussive maintenance' - the act of giving a gadget a good whack to get it going again. We've even found some audio from the Apollo 12 mission in which an Astronaut resolves his dilemma with a well-placed bang of his hammer. The trick, of course, is knowing where to hit.

Restart Radio: Community repair, neurodiversity and mental health Oct 11, 2017

Show notes

This week, Restart Radio coincided with World Mental Health Day. We talk about how repair can contribute to greater social cohesion and individual well-being. Community repair events can be a great way of involving people who might otherwise feel isolated, but this takes some thought on the part of the organisers. Restarters Panda Méry and Dave Lukes share their thoughts with us about how spaces and events can be organised to cater to neurodivergent people and those suffering mental health problems. Aside from facilitating relationships between people, we talk about ways teaching and doing repair can also be an activity with therapeutic qualities. We talk about what it means to 'get in the zone' or get in a 'flow state' in repair, which Dave likens to the experience of meditation. Rather than seeing the broken device as simply a dead piece of metal, it becomes an entity that the repairer can converse with. According to Robert Pirsig, author of the 1974 classic 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance', this constitutes a kind of friendship. But like any friendship - it can be challenging. Drawing on ideas from Fixfest, we discuss ways in which these challenges are not the same for all people - and how we need to be sensitive to these differences. Repair is not purely a manual activity, nor purely an intellectual activity - it is both, and also something that has a significant emotional component. What does this emotional engagement mean for how we relate to either success or failure at the end of a repair? An inspiring story from our most recent Restart Party seems to suggest that the act of repairing turns out to be more significant than the outcome.

Restart Podcast Ep. 25: Goodbye iSlave (Pt.2) Oct 03, 2017

Show notes

This week's episode picks up where we left off last week, with part 2 of our podcast special with 'activist academic' Jack Qiu. In his new book 'Goodbye iSlave: a Manifesto for Digital Abolition', Jack argues that while slavery has certainly mutated from the horrific forms that it took in the 17th century, the systems of production and worker exploitation underpinning electronics manufacturing must be considered as forms of modern-day slavery. In Part 1, he tells the story of the coercion of student workers in China, and explains how our addiction to online content - the new 'sugar' - fuels this exploitation. You can catch up here if you missed it last week. In this week's episode, we hear about some of the political and legal circumstances that make it easy for Foxconn factories to go unchallenged on mainland China - leaving workers powerless, and tech giants untouchable. Jack aims to bridge what he sees as the large information gap that exists for most consumers of 'AppConn' products. We spoke to people who have recently attended our Restart Parties in London to see if the exploitation of workers in China is something people think about when they buy electronic products. But even people who are aware of the issues surrounding the production of their phones, laptops and tablets felt somewhat powerless to stop it. Who is ultimately responsible for the inequality stemming from supply chains? It is impossible to point the finger at every owner of an apple product. As one of our interviewees put it, that would be "like blaming smokers for being smokers". At Restart, we like to say that the most ethical phone is the one you already have: The longer you hold on to your iPhone, the more ethical it becomes. And rather than thinking about our relationship with electronics in terms of individual consumers, we need to think about ways in which our collective needs bring us together as a community. Looking back through history, Jack Qiu draws attention to the fact that wherever we find slavery, we also find anti-slavery. He believes that there are lessons to be learned, and hope to be gained, from examining the work done by abolition movements in the 17th century, both in London and elsewhere. He also talks about some of the contemporary ways that the dominant models of exploitative production are being challenged, such as Fairphone's effort to demonstrate that it is possible to make an ethical smartphone. We've still got a long way to go - but as we begin to think and work more cohesively, 'Digital Abolition' looks less and less like a Utopian ideal, and more like a potential reality.

Restart Podcast Ep. 24: Goodbye iSlave (Pt 1) Sep 27, 2017

Show notes

What do you know about the circumstances surrounding the production of your smartphone? For the majority of us, the answer is sadly 'not much' or 'I'd rather not know'. In this special 2-part episode, Jack Qiu - author of the book 'Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition' - talks us through a story that has been largely neglected by the technology media. Many people think of slavery as history. But for Jack Qiu, the present-day treatment of some workers in smartphone, tablet and laptop factories in China needs to be conceived of as slavery. While he says slavery has "mutated" since its most horrific historical forms, he suggests that coercion of student workers approximates modern-day definitions of slavery. He goes further, drawing parallels between the western addiction to sugar that fuelled the slave trade of the 17th century, and the addiction to online content that fuels the endless production of gadgets today, he highlights ways in which exploitative systems of production continue in ever-changing ways. In Part 1, Qiu talks about the use of student "interns" by electronic manufacturers as a source of involuntary labour, as many vocational students have their degrees held at ransom until they complete work at Apple contractors. He outlines his view of the role of academics in fighting for social justice, and explains his personal reasons for going after tech giant Apple before other equally as exploitative companies. Featuring the contribution of Restart Party guests around London, this episode begins to follow the patterns of oppression and exploitation that are etched into the phones we carry around in our pockets. Be sure to tune in next week for Part 2 of the 'Goodbye iSlave' podcast. We'll continue our conversation with Jack Qiu, and start thinking about ways we can move towards a less exploitative and happier model for electronics manufacturing.

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