At some point during the late 20th century technology moved to a point where manufacture consists essentially of assembly of ‘black boxes’ the function of which is known; but not how that function is achieved. Today only a small minority of highly skilled experts are able to understand the component parts of our technology.
When I was a boy my mother, who had been a wireless operator in WW2, could open the radio or TV and persuade the valves to function again so it would work. I had a Philips Electrical Engineer set for Christmas and played around a bit with it. I later built a fuzz box for my guitar by buying a book with projects in and then buying the component parts. It worked!! I could look at the innards of my mid sixties Vox AC30 guitar amp and see the components and I knew that if I bothered to do the work I could have a reasonable understanding of what was going on. I was never stimulated by electronics so never took if further. But in the seventies even the electronics where accessible to the skilled amateur.
Those days are long gone. Repair of electronic equipment now is very specialist. Gone are the days of being able to clearly see the individual components on a circuit board. Open up an iPhone – if you can even manage that – and the chances of understanding anything you see inside is close to zero.
My 2009 Moto Guzzi 750 has, in my opinion, atrocious fuel consumption and performance. However to tweak this to give the required improvements requires remapping the ECU – not about rejetting the carbs or adjusting the timing by moving the back plate carrying the points. The latter was well within the capability of the competent home mechanic: the former requires specialist knowledge and I have so far been unable to track down someone to do it for me.
We are now in a position where we own and use equipment which we have no real chance of understanding. We live in a world of ‘black boxes’ which we hope will keep working as our lives increasingly depend on them. When they do cease to function there is usually little realistic option but buy a replacement.
This generates huge amounts of waste which is very difficult to reuse in any way; and huge amounts of alienation in the population who are controlled by technology they have no way of understanding.
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