A Requiem for Disassembly

A lot of hay has been made about the relentless push towards closed architectures in contemporary technology, and rightly so. Back then, technology was friendly to people who wanted to take it apart, either to hack it or to do repairs. Everything was put together with a Philips or a flathead screwdriver that your father had lying around in some toolbox under the kitchen sink, and parts like memory, batteries, and even screens could be removed and replaced with ease.

As a teenager growing up, our desktop computer (then powered by the latest and greatest Windows 95) had a side panel that easily slid off, no screws required, allowing my father to teach me where each component was and how it worked with the rest of the system. It fascinated me, knowing the difference between Random Access Memory and Persistent Storage, where the CPU was seated and how it differed from the graphics and sound cards. Then, when my father wasn’t looking, I would take his toolbox and I’d pry everything out of the casing, challenging myself to put everything back together without breaking the damn thing.

It was the closest thing to magic. All these circuit boards appeared to me as little more than pieces of metal and plastic, but somehow, when put together, they could play the bootleg copy of Batman Begins that my father bought from some shady salesman by the train station entrance, connect to the internet and be in communication with millions of other assemblages of metal and plastic like it humming dryly in households all over the globe. Right around I was about to start high school, my father brought home a floppy disk installation set for Borland Turbo C++, and showed me how I could make those metal and plastic do other things, things I told it to do.

When people talk about closed technology, the focus tends to be more about the right to repair, and the increasing disposability of our gadgets. It used to be that you bought a phone, then when the battery turned to a potato you just bought a new one at Micro Center and swapped that in. Now when your iPhone hardly makes it through half an hour unplugged, what do you do? Or if you needed more than the 128 Gb memory it came with out of the box to accommodate new travel photos, or the next iOS upgrade?

Right to repair is certainly up there in terms of our pressing concerns. But another thing that occurred to me this morning is that having so few gadgets and appliances friendly to disassemblers means losing out on that childhood wonder of discovering technology. I know I’m not alone, that many others in my generation got into technology, into computer science, into coding, by first opening the underside of an old laptop. Silicon valley’s closed philosophy has filtered into more than just computers, including toys and home appliances. Everything is either soldered on, or held together by proprietary screws.

There is something else here, something much deeper that has to do with our evolving relationship with consumer electronics. I saw a post the other day on Threads about how our generation seems to be sandwiched in between the older generation that doesn’t understand computers, and the younger one that understands it even less. I think it’s an exaggeration, but I have come across not a few undergraduates who could only scratch their heads when, during a tutorial of how to use the R programming language, I instructed them to first locate their working directory.

“Where did you save your data files?”

“Right here <points to folder>.”

“Okay, copy the address and paste it into the R script.”

“Address?”

Silicon valley – really spearheaded by Apple – is slowly teaching us to think of tech as something that just exists, like a light bulb or a chair, rather than something to be learned. The wonders of very clean and streamlined design is that they make even something as complex as installing a new program seem like common sense (“just copy and paste to your Applications folder!”), but the downside is we don’t get the intuition for criticizing or questioning common sense. What is a program, and how is it “installed” into the system? If you didn’t need that program anymore, where would you locate it and how would you delete it?

When you purchase a new book for your Kindle, or a new game into your Steam library, you get so pleased by how painless it is that every book can be accessed on the phone app or the official gadget, how every game just saves your progress so you can play up to a certain level on your laptop while on the go, then just continue along when you come home to your beefier gaming computer. And isn’t it nice that you don’t have to buy a new hard drive to accommodate all these games you’re accumulating, since you can just delete the ones you don’t play right now and download them again later on demand? It hardly occurs to you to wonder, what if Steam gets bankrupted, or taken down by hackers, or just decides to fuck off and shut its servers down – where do you get all your games that you paid hundreds of dollars for?

It’s a philosophy that we’ll need to think about even more deeply in the advent of AI and the increasing commodification of the cloud. We get so caught up in the convenience, in the user-friendliness of the things that we forget to question the nitty-gritty, the bare metal and plastic that keeps it running. How is an AI trained? What data are they using to train this AI, and how did they get their hands on it? All our private photos and files we’re uploading to its memory – where is it being stored, who has access to it, and what can they do with it?