Peter Mui has organized almost 1,300 “fixit clinics” around the nation, opening up spaces for community members to gather around their broken devices and build relationships through the repair process.
Mui brought the fixit clinic to Belmont’s Beech Street Center on Nov. 16 with the hope the event will lead to ongoing repair programs at the town’s new library.
“It’s really about neighbors helping neighbors,” said Mui. “At an ideal fixit clinic, the role of fixit coach and participant blurs, and everyone’s just helping everyone.”
“We’re activating libraries for this brief period of time,” he added. “For these three hours, we’re holding this as a kind of a sacred space, where the best of who we are as a community and as neighbors comes together to help each other out.”
According to Mui, the fixit clinic is an experiment in social re-engineering, exploring the question: “Can we move the needle [on] people’s relationship to consumption?”
He said as long as people perceive new items to be better than older items, they don’t recognize the true costs behind production.
“Everything from the mining of the precious metals to the embodied energy that was taken to bring it together … and then on the downstream side, we think it’s free to throw it away,” he said.
“We have to keep everything in its highest utility possible for as long as possible at this point, because we’re using up the resources of the planet faster than we can replenish them.”
Right to Repair
Mui started the fixit clinic program after noticing many ordinary items have specialty fasteners or are otherwise difficult to open.
“The first fixit clinic was an attempt to make those tools available, to see if we could open stuff up and look at what was inside … and then, lo and behold, once we were inside, we found out it wasn’t often that hard to fix it.”
He added, “All you really have to do is give people permission [that] it’s okay to open up their broken thing. It’s already broken. What do they have to lose, right? I mean, if the next step is the landfill, let’s open it up and learn as much as we possibly can about it before we throw it away.”
Beyond the physical challenge of opening up devices, there is also the barrier of legislation, said Mui.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1988, which initially created protections for online service providers against copyright infringement, was amended to include permitting companies to put intellectual property copyrights on software that runs on various household devices.
“So, just being able to fix it mechanically or electronically now involves having software you can’t get access to, that the manufacturer keeps to themself as intellectual property, and it’s become a big deal,” Mui said.
He pointed to the example of John Deere, a tractor company that had software that was not accessible to the public due to an intellectual property copyright.
“You can’t repair or maintain the vehicle in any way without access to that … it becomes a food security issue,” he said.
However, laws that protect the “right to repair” have been passed in California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, and New York.
“With the population density of the United States, that means almost 22% of the US population is covered under some sort of right-to-repair law at this point,” Mui said.
Creating a Circular Economy
He also foresees that technological advancements in manufacturing could create opportunities for local repair economies to flourish.
For example, Mui said instead of repair being done by overseas manufacturers, it could be done by small, regional factories; if right to repair legislation passes, one could imagine a digital file being distributed to these factories, giving them the information they need to produce specialized parts of an item.
“We could essentially have these things that are living forever,” said Mui. “You could have an immortal toaster, right?”
He said this model could strengthen communities, since it would allow wealth to circulate within local economies.
“It could be so much better for the planet, and better for us in our relationships with each other,” he said.