10 ms·

Gambiarra: repair culture (2015)

123 points by mat_jack1 9y ago

mat_jack1 9y ago
Felipe Fonseca's critical thoughts about the last 10-15 years of the "makers" movement. Very insightful reading how the general culture of the movement has changed from a repair-reuse-recycle to a prototype-industrial-capitalistic mentality.
- brudgers 9y ago
  Looks like it is from 2015 since it mentions the Obama administration in the current tense.
  - goshx 9y ago
    Yes, the date is there: 08/03/2015 (that's March 8th)
digi_owl 9y ago
VC discovered the "makers" hype, and things turned "weird"...
- ivanbakel 9y ago
  Because anything against capitalist thought gets mulched up, repackaged, and spat out. If you can commodify being a maker, you take away from the people who are actually subverting basic consumer thinking. I think we're seeing the same problem in the modern form of the "gig economy" versus what people initially idealised for a freer, less contractual workforce.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths
    - hkon 9y ago
      That was a good read on a saturday.
rl12345 9y ago
Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author. The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  On the other side of Atlantic also means a cable for light extension. :)
  - rl12345 9y ago
    Probably the origin of the expression :)
- zorked 9y ago
  Accurately translated in English as "hack".
  - leobueno 9y ago
    The more appropriate translation would be "kludge".
  - throwanem 9y ago
    I'd tend to agree, sort of sidewise, with the article author that "hack", like "make" in the "maker culture" sense, is freighted with all kinds of connotations that I think somewhat blur its applicability here. Where and when I grew up, the term was "jury rigging", which I think much more narrowly captures the same meaning as "gambiarra", and likewise escapes the commercial colonization of "hack" and "make". Jury rigs by their very nature are one-offs - necessarily individuated applications of ingenuity, with whatever resources happen to be available, to solve problems often unique to the contexts in which they arise. You can't reasonably call such a thing a "prototype"; it's not an exploration, but rather a (semi-)permanent solution, and should it need to be replaced later on, likely it will be another jury-rig, itself unique although perhaps similar to the first, that does so. Such efforts are the very antithesis of off-the-shelf solutions. To that point, I think the article author is both right and wrong to decry commercialization, and the commodification of industrial manufacturing techniques, as antithetical to pure ingenuity. I'd agree that when one can 3D print, laser cut, and CNC mill custom parts to a fare-thee-well, the jury-rigging or gambiarra style of ingenuity tends to fade into disuse, because why bother jigsawing together expedients when you can just design the exact thing you need and then manufacture it at a lot size of one? If it doesn't work as expected, throw it out and make another. If it does, the nature of the process lends itself well to the idea of productization (ugh, what a word), because the result is already necessarily designed for manufacture at industrial scale, with only some optimization required. And the large-scale commercialization of "maker culture" in general, with publicity and marketing firms opportunistically adopting the term in a transparent bid for the same sort of exploiting-the-naïve business as those "We Can Get You Published!" ads in the back pages of an old Writer's Market, certainly merits being looked upon with distrust and distaste. On the other hand, human ingenuity isn't a limited resource requiring conservation; be it ever so disdained, it will nevertheless rise anew in each generation, in each person, faced with a challenge for which no easy off-the-shelf solution or CADed, CNCed custom manufacture is available. We live at a moment of historical coincidence where such solutions are far more easily available than at any time in the past - but that may not always be so, and either way, "the future is unevenly distributed". In those places where it's thin on the ground, people still jury-rig and gambiarra their way past problems, just as we have always done - it's just that we don't hear about it much, because it's not terribly fashionable, and in any case people who do it can't be relied upon to noise it all over Facebook. And should we find ourselves exiting the current historical coincidence into a world where "the future" is less available to everyone, we'll see human ingenuity rise to meet the problems that new world poses, just as we always have.
personlurking 9y ago
Never thought I'd see the word Gambiarra at the top of HN. By the way, Portugal has a word with a bit of a similar meaning (https://i.imgur.com/7YHjJHs.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7YHjJHs.jpg) For anyone interested in how Cubans do it, I recommend this 8 min video from Motherboard (it has subtitles): > In 1991, Cuba's economy began to implode. "The Special Period in the Time of Peace" was the government's euphemism for what was a culmination of 30 years worth of isolation. It began in the 60s, with engineers leaving Cuba for America. Ernesto Oroza, a designer and artist, studied the innovations created during this period. He found that the general population had created homespun, Frankenstein-like machines for their survival, made from everyday objects. Oroza began to collect these machines, and would later contextualize it as "art" in a movement he dubbed "Technological Disobedience." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-XS4aueDUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-XS4aueDUg
- rasz 9y ago
  Mighty Car Mods did 'THE CARS OF CUBA' Special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJPqe1baowA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJPqe1baowA they got paid to do fast and furious promotion, but instead concentrated on Cuban ingenuity when it comes to fixing cars without replacement parts. What you see in the episode (30-50 year old cars held together with ducttape) is not that far off from what was the norm in Eastern bloc under Russian occupation.
alex_duf 9y ago
Probably a good thread to mention the fairphone http://fairphone.com/ http://fairphone.com/ Not the prettiest phone but it does what it says on the box/ it's easy to fix it yourself
- Numberwang 9y ago
  My friend has one of these. Sadly it has really bad build quality and he has been on call to their support over and over.
sly010 9y ago
This resonates with me a lot. My father is an old school car mechanic in eastern europe who (at least while i was young) hoarded all kinds of things and reused/repurposed them. I inherited his mentality. At some point he partnered up with a guy and they started their own business. His partner is more of a capitalist. He would run the computer diagnostics on the car, replace whatever the computer says is broken without much root cause analysis, then the old parts are thrown out. This gets repeated until the car runs. They make money on each part. The insurance company pays and everyone is happy. My dad's quality of life is better. He has a weekend house now. He sometimes complains how in the old days one would really fix things instead of replacing them, but he is getting older and not in a position change how the world works. My own story is playing out a very similar way and I am constantly struggling to decide what is the right thing to do and what kind of person I want to be. Most people of my age (especially in the US) don't even think about these things though. Edit: formatting.
- rublev 9y ago
  You got an email?
- brightball 9y ago
  That kids movie Robots is basically about this exact issue.
- ineedasername 9y ago
  It's not always easy to find the right balance. I've worked in the same place for obout 15 years. Earlier on, encountering limits of old legacy systems, I frequently spent lots of time finding creative work arounds in coding and automating. But over the years these have become less tenable, since I'm only one person, and home grown solutions without dedicated resources are a bigger risk to operations than purchasing a mediocre off the shelf product.
jackfoxy 9y ago
From the title I was hoping to read more about a repair culture such as Bunny Huang discusses when he talks about the possibility of legacy electronics in his latest book The Hardware Hacker. Of course I have had computers repaired from time to time, and even put life back into an old stereo receiver and analog television, but generally in the developed world the economics of buy new vs repair keep repair culture on the fringe, not just with electronics.
solidsnack9000 9y ago
When the maker culture becomes eminently entrepreneurial, we should wonder what mechanisms are set into motion. It may as well be the old capitalist drive to turn the critique to itself into the gears of its own reinvention gaining ground. Could we ever escape that path? Lately when I read things like this I wonder, how are the people in the movement -- whatever movement -- supposed to make a living without being entrepreneurial?
- cfelix 9y ago
  It's not about being able to make a living, it's about how much do we really need to make a living.
  - solidsnack9000 9y ago
    Things seem kind of bimodal there, though. If you're part of a new technology or movement, generally there aren't any stable jobs with retirement plans. So someone has to get entrepreneurial...and then they are CEO.
leovonl 9y ago
Having grown up in Brazil, where computers and parts are expensive - and in a time where the country was recovering from a galloping inflation and a failed attempt from the government to cut it back by freezing everyone's saving accounts - I can very strongly relate to this. In fact, I think most brazilians of my generation which share same taste for building things are used to prototyping things with "a lot of duct tape" and reusing parts by disassembling unused/old toys, small machines/appliances, etc, and reusing what they can to make something new. About the "gambiarra" term, it has a lot of connotations associated (some bad), but it also carries an idea of "subverting the original intent of the designer" or "subverting the intended usage of the parts/pieces". Which is why it fits perfectly in the idea of "hacking" for repurposing and recycling.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  The term "gambiarra" should always come with its related "bambo", which means floppy, or not solid enough.
- chicob 9y ago
  Portuguese guy here. The 'desenrascanço' culture in Portugal has two sides to it, because on one hand people do appreciate the art of finding quick hacks on the fly ('desenrasques'), but on the other it just overlooks thorough planning and design.
Animats 9y ago
PC recycling and repair is alive and well in the US. The SF Bay Area has the Computer Repair Center.[1] In Shenzhen, as was discussed on here, there's an active phone recycling culture, with people doing chip-level replacement on iPhones. PC recycling was easier in the desktop era, where you could take a pile of discarded PCs and swap around boards, hard drives, cases, and power supplies until you had something that worked. All you really needed was a screwdriver. Laptops are tougher, but still repairable without too many special tools and training. Mobile phone repair takes special skills, training, equpment, and parts, all of which are available.[2] Third-party iPhone parts are available. I'm amazed that people are doing SMD board rework in small repair shops, but they are. [1] http://www.crc.org/ http://www.crc.org/ [2] https://stsparts.us/ https://stsparts.us/
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
efeefe 9y ago
Hey all, thanks for the attention and comments. A slightly updated version of this text was published in Tvergastein (walled garden version here - https://www.academia.edu/20808625/Gambiarra_Repair_Culture https://www.academia.edu/20808625/Gambiarra_Repair_Culture , anyone interested in the PDF please let me know). And indeed, I have not explored that the "repair" side of it that much. More recently, I've been trying to think of "transformation of matter" to frame a wider field that would encompass digital making, arts & crafts, repair, maintenance, customization and others. I wrote another two texts last year while researching that perspective: Transformed Worlds (https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/transformed-worlds-9a6bd7c44e8e https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/transformed-worlds-9a6bd7c... ) and Knowledge, Skill and Labor (https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/knowledge-skill-and-labor-1c8f5d89a1b4 https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/knowledge-skill-and-labor-... ). I'd love to read everyone's thoughts on those as well. (Felipe Fonseca / http://efeefe.me http://efeefe.me )
hardbaloney 9y ago
This speaks to a disparity between the first and second (and third) worlds (and yes, I know that these are outdated terms); in the US writ large, we take it technology for granted, and have been marketed to thusly; as such, our products are disposable, obsolescence is as much about culture as it is about cycles of technology, and we are marketed to as such. Go further afield, and tech cultures spring up around technology we'd otherwise take for granted in the Anglosphere. Sure, there's some cultural cachet around old 'things,' but to my cynical mind, it's cachet for the sake of cachet. The label of useless is applied to last generation's gear, and it's thrown out, recycled, or stuck in a drawer. If only we had a more open and less, shall we say capitalist/IP-based view of our technology, we could create an ecosystem where 2012's iPhone, with ample computing power for many tasks, could become a valuable part of said ecosystem instead of being a relic. Similarly, instead of trashing broken things, we could repair them; there exist almost a stigma surrounding a broken phone screen. Why repair when you're due for an upgrade in a few months? Don't be so base as to actually fix your shit, that's not what you're being sold; upgrade, advance, incrementalize.

123 points by mat_jack1 9y ago

Felipe Fonseca's critical thoughts about the last 10-15 years of the "makers" movement. Very insightful reading how the general culture of the movement has changed from a repair-reuse-recycle to a prototype-industrial-capitalistic mentality.

brudgers 9y ago
Looks like it is from 2015 since it mentions the Obama administration in the current tense.
- goshx 9y ago
  Yes, the date is there: 08/03/2015 (that's March 8th)

digi_owl 9y ago

VC discovered the "makers" hype, and things turned "weird"...

ivanbakel 9y ago
Because anything against capitalist thought gets mulched up, repackaged, and spat out. If you can commodify being a maker, you take away from the people who are actually subverting basic consumer thinking. I think we're seeing the same problem in the modern form of the "gig economy" versus what people initially idealised for a freer, less contractual workforce.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths https://meaningness.com/metablog/geeks-mops-sociopaths
  - hkon 9y ago
    That was a good read on a saturday.

rl12345 9y ago

Ha, when I read the post title I knew it would come from a (Brazilian) Portuguese author. The way I would explain "Gambiarra": it's a quick fix that relies heavily on an ad hoc solution instead of following the generally accepted principles for solving a problem.

pjmlp 9y ago
On the other side of Atlantic also means a cable for light extension. :)
- rl12345 9y ago
  Probably the origin of the expression :)
zorked 9y ago
Accurately translated in English as "hack".
- leobueno 9y ago
  The more appropriate translation would be "kludge".
- throwanem 9y ago
  I'd tend to agree, sort of sidewise, with the article author that "hack", like "make" in the "maker culture" sense, is freighted with all kinds of connotations that I think somewhat blur its applicability here. Where and when I grew up, the term was "jury rigging", which I think much more narrowly captures the same meaning as "gambiarra", and likewise escapes the commercial colonization of "hack" and "make". Jury rigs by their very nature are one-offs - necessarily individuated applications of ingenuity, with whatever resources happen to be available, to solve problems often unique to the contexts in which they arise. You can't reasonably call such a thing a "prototype"; it's not an exploration, but rather a (semi-)permanent solution, and should it need to be replaced later on, likely it will be another jury-rig, itself unique although perhaps similar to the first, that does so. Such efforts are the very antithesis of off-the-shelf solutions. To that point, I think the article author is both right and wrong to decry commercialization, and the commodification of industrial manufacturing techniques, as antithetical to pure ingenuity. I'd agree that when one can 3D print, laser cut, and CNC mill custom parts to a fare-thee-well, the jury-rigging or gambiarra style of ingenuity tends to fade into disuse, because why bother jigsawing together expedients when you can just design the exact thing you need and then manufacture it at a lot size of one? If it doesn't work as expected, throw it out and make another. If it does, the nature of the process lends itself well to the idea of productization (ugh, what a word), because the result is already necessarily designed for manufacture at industrial scale, with only some optimization required. And the large-scale commercialization of "maker culture" in general, with publicity and marketing firms opportunistically adopting the term in a transparent bid for the same sort of exploiting-the-naïve business as those "We Can Get You Published!" ads in the back pages of an old Writer's Market, certainly merits being looked upon with distrust and distaste. On the other hand, human ingenuity isn't a limited resource requiring conservation; be it ever so disdained, it will nevertheless rise anew in each generation, in each person, faced with a challenge for which no easy off-the-shelf solution or CADed, CNCed custom manufacture is available. We live at a moment of historical coincidence where such solutions are far more easily available than at any time in the past - but that may not always be so, and either way, "the future is unevenly distributed". In those places where it's thin on the ground, people still jury-rig and gambiarra their way past problems, just as we have always done - it's just that we don't hear about it much, because it's not terribly fashionable, and in any case people who do it can't be relied upon to noise it all over Facebook. And should we find ourselves exiting the current historical coincidence into a world where "the future" is less available to everyone, we'll see human ingenuity rise to meet the problems that new world poses, just as we always have.

personlurking 9y ago

Never thought I'd see the word Gambiarra at the top of HN. By the way, Portugal has a word with a bit of a similar meaning (https://i.imgur.com/7YHjJHs.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7YHjJHs.jpg) For anyone interested in how Cubans do it, I recommend this 8 min video from Motherboard (it has subtitles): > In 1991, Cuba's economy began to implode. "The Special Period in the Time of Peace" was the government's euphemism for what was a culmination of 30 years worth of isolation. It began in the 60s, with engineers leaving Cuba for America. Ernesto Oroza, a designer and artist, studied the innovations created during this period. He found that the general population had created homespun, Frankenstein-like machines for their survival, made from everyday objects. Oroza began to collect these machines, and would later contextualize it as "art" in a movement he dubbed "Technological Disobedience." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-XS4aueDUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-XS4aueDUg

rasz 9y ago
Mighty Car Mods did 'THE CARS OF CUBA' Special https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJPqe1baowA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJPqe1baowA they got paid to do fast and furious promotion, but instead concentrated on Cuban ingenuity when it comes to fixing cars without replacement parts. What you see in the episode (30-50 year old cars held together with ducttape) is not that far off from what was the norm in Eastern bloc under Russian occupation.

alex_duf 9y ago

Probably a good thread to mention the fairphone http://fairphone.com/ http://fairphone.com/ Not the prettiest phone but it does what it says on the box/ it's easy to fix it yourself

Numberwang 9y ago
My friend has one of these. Sadly it has really bad build quality and he has been on call to their support over and over.

sly010 9y ago

This resonates with me a lot. My father is an old school car mechanic in eastern europe who (at least while i was young) hoarded all kinds of things and reused/repurposed them. I inherited his mentality. At some point he partnered up with a guy and they started their own business. His partner is more of a capitalist. He would run the computer diagnostics on the car, replace whatever the computer says is broken without much root cause analysis, then the old parts are thrown out. This gets repeated until the car runs. They make money on each part. The insurance company pays and everyone is happy. My dad's quality of life is better. He has a weekend house now. He sometimes complains how in the old days one would really fix things instead of replacing them, but he is getting older and not in a position change how the world works. My own story is playing out a very similar way and I am constantly struggling to decide what is the right thing to do and what kind of person I want to be. Most people of my age (especially in the US) don't even think about these things though. Edit: formatting.

rublev 9y ago
You got an email?
brightball 9y ago
That kids movie Robots is basically about this exact issue.
ineedasername 9y ago
It's not always easy to find the right balance. I've worked in the same place for obout 15 years. Earlier on, encountering limits of old legacy systems, I frequently spent lots of time finding creative work arounds in coding and automating. But over the years these have become less tenable, since I'm only one person, and home grown solutions without dedicated resources are a bigger risk to operations than purchasing a mediocre off the shelf product.

jackfoxy 9y ago

From the title I was hoping to read more about a repair culture such as Bunny Huang discusses when he talks about the possibility of legacy electronics in his latest book The Hardware Hacker. Of course I have had computers repaired from time to time, and even put life back into an old stereo receiver and analog television, but generally in the developed world the economics of buy new vs repair keep repair culture on the fringe, not just with electronics.

solidsnack9000 9y ago

When the maker culture becomes eminently entrepreneurial, we should wonder what mechanisms are set into motion. It may as well be the old capitalist drive to turn the critique to itself into the gears of its own reinvention gaining ground. Could we ever escape that path? Lately when I read things like this I wonder, how are the people in the movement -- whatever movement -- supposed to make a living without being entrepreneurial?

cfelix 9y ago
It's not about being able to make a living, it's about how much do we really need to make a living.
- solidsnack9000 9y ago
  Things seem kind of bimodal there, though. If you're part of a new technology or movement, generally there aren't any stable jobs with retirement plans. So someone has to get entrepreneurial...and then they are CEO.

leovonl 9y ago

Having grown up in Brazil, where computers and parts are expensive - and in a time where the country was recovering from a galloping inflation and a failed attempt from the government to cut it back by freezing everyone's saving accounts - I can very strongly relate to this. In fact, I think most brazilians of my generation which share same taste for building things are used to prototyping things with "a lot of duct tape" and reusing parts by disassembling unused/old toys, small machines/appliances, etc, and reusing what they can to make something new. About the "gambiarra" term, it has a lot of connotations associated (some bad), but it also carries an idea of "subverting the original intent of the designer" or "subverting the intended usage of the parts/pieces". Which is why it fits perfectly in the idea of "hacking" for repurposing and recycling.

fiatjaf 9y ago
The term "gambiarra" should always come with its related "bambo", which means floppy, or not solid enough.
chicob 9y ago
Portuguese guy here. The 'desenrascanço' culture in Portugal has two sides to it, because on one hand people do appreciate the art of finding quick hacks on the fly ('desenrasques'), but on the other it just overlooks thorough planning and design.

Animats 9y ago

PC recycling and repair is alive and well in the US. The SF Bay Area has the Computer Repair Center.[1] In Shenzhen, as was discussed on here, there's an active phone recycling culture, with people doing chip-level replacement on iPhones. PC recycling was easier in the desktop era, where you could take a pile of discarded PCs and swap around boards, hard drives, cases, and power supplies until you had something that worked. All you really needed was a screwdriver. Laptops are tougher, but still repairable without too many special tools and training. Mobile phone repair takes special skills, training, equpment, and parts, all of which are available.[2] Third-party iPhone parts are available. I'm amazed that people are doing SMD board rework in small repair shops, but they are. [1] http://www.crc.org/ http://www.crc.org/ [2] https://stsparts.us/ https://stsparts.us/

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

efeefe 9y ago

Hey all, thanks for the attention and comments. A slightly updated version of this text was published in Tvergastein (walled garden version here - https://www.academia.edu/20808625/Gambiarra_Repair_Culture https://www.academia.edu/20808625/Gambiarra_Repair_Culture , anyone interested in the PDF please let me know). And indeed, I have not explored that the "repair" side of it that much. More recently, I've been trying to think of "transformation of matter" to frame a wider field that would encompass digital making, arts & crafts, repair, maintenance, customization and others. I wrote another two texts last year while researching that perspective: Transformed Worlds (https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/transformed-worlds-9a6bd7c44e8e https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/transformed-worlds-9a6bd7c... ) and Knowledge, Skill and Labor (https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/knowledge-skill-and-labor-1c8f5d89a1b4 https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/knowledge-skill-and-labor-... ). I'd love to read everyone's thoughts on those as well. (Felipe Fonseca / http://efeefe.me http://efeefe.me )

hardbaloney 9y ago

This speaks to a disparity between the first and second (and third) worlds (and yes, I know that these are outdated terms); in the US writ large, we take it technology for granted, and have been marketed to thusly; as such, our products are disposable, obsolescence is as much about culture as it is about cycles of technology, and we are marketed to as such. Go further afield, and tech cultures spring up around technology we'd otherwise take for granted in the Anglosphere. Sure, there's some cultural cachet around old 'things,' but to my cynical mind, it's cachet for the sake of cachet. The label of useless is applied to last generation's gear, and it's thrown out, recycled, or stuck in a drawer. If only we had a more open and less, shall we say capitalist/IP-based view of our technology, we could create an ecosystem where 2012's iPhone, with ample computing power for many tasks, could become a valuable part of said ecosystem instead of being a relic. Similarly, instead of trashing broken things, we could repair them; there exist almost a stigma surrounding a broken phone screen. Why repair when you're due for an upgrade in a few months? Don't be so base as to actually fix your shit, that's not what you're being sold; upgrade, advance, incrementalize.