There is always a lot of talk in the media about waste and trying to be ecologically friendly when it comes to the reusing of, say, coffee cups, but how much designed obsolescence stops us using things for longer?
I, relatively recently, came into contact with the Restart Project (https://therestartproject.org/) which is designed to help people use, re-use or continue to use electronics products that we have that have fallen into disuse. The project is an interesting one that taps into the feeling of waste that many of us feel when electronic items stop working quite as well as we would like – often still working but not performing quite as well as we want. These devices become "obsolete" but the nature of that obsolescence is not always benign with a huge amount of wasted energy needed to make new devices to enable us to do the same things that we could before.
I am inclined to agree with the paper (here) that there are three major types of obsolescence:
1. obsolescence of function, whereby a product is superseded by a better functioning model
2. obsolescence of quality, where a product is engineered to break after a short period of time
3. obsolescence of desirability, whereby a product continues to work perfectly well but in our minds it has become worn because of external factors such as fashion
The first is necessary for progress, but the other two are manipulative and dishonest.
On that basis, I thought of all the computers that many of us have at home and we could be using instead of buying new computers that don't allow us to do anything different, they just feel newer (until they stop being new) and how to rescue them. Computers are vastly overpowered for most people – and even "complex" software like Excel used to work on computers 10 years ago – so they would work on old computers now. Home computers are now largely used as windows into the Internet and most people would be very well served by a decent browser and not much more (as evidenced by the use of "Chromebooks") – in many ways they are quite close to the "dumb terminals" of the past.
If that is the situation that you find yourself in, you can, for free, look into installing a variant of
- ChromeOS (for a simple, secure and automatically updating browser-based OS using Chrome and Chrome apps – recreating the Chromebook experience). For personal use, you can download from https://www.neverware.com/freedownload a version of ChromeOS.
- Linux (for a fully featured computer with access to lots of software but more maintenance than ChromeOS). I would recommend https://www.linuxmint.com/ for this.
In order to do this, all you usually need is a USB drive (4GB for Linux, 8GB for Chrome) and the ability to download the operating system file. You can usually have the operating system in addition to the one already on there (usually Windows) to have what is called a "dual boot system".
These kinds of systems are absolutely ideal for so many people and re-use is a great way to give access to the digitally disenfranchised at low, or even zero, cost. That's a digital revolution.
