This refers to the practice of disabling third-party hardware components through code-based encryption software and firmware. An example can be found here →.
See Dai Jinhua and Jingyuan Zhang. “Invisible Writing: The Politics of Chinese Mass Culture in the 1990s,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 11, no. 1 (1999); Nathan Sperber, “Party and State in China,” New Left Review, no. 142 (July 2023); and Zhiming Long, et al., “On the Nature of the Chinese Economic System,” Monthly Review, October 1, 2018 →.
Mary Ann O’Donnell, “What Kind of Public Space Is the City of Shenzhen?” The Emerging Public Realm of the Greater Bay Area, ed. Miodrag Mitrašinović and Timothy Jachna (Routledge, 2021), 90.
For an examination of Jodi's game modification works, see →. For reporting on shanzhai handphones, see David Barboza, “In China, Knockoff Cellphones Are a Hit,” New York Times, April 27, 2009 →. On Deng Xiaoping–style grassroots entrepreneurship, see Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell et al. (University of Chicago Press, 2017).
For theorizations on “people’s war,” see Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat and the Road to Equality (Verso Books, 2016), 110–15. For more on digital rights management, see Sascha D. Meinrath et al., “Digital Feudalism: Enclosures and Erasures from Digital Rights Management to the Digital Divide,” Advances in Computers, vol. 81, ed. Marvin V. Zelkowitz (Elsevier, 2011), 237–40.
China-based repairers don’t typically face the same difficulties since most of their tools and parts are locally made, often in factories miles from Huaqiangbei.
Early precedents of the ecosystem enclosure strategy can be found in the US auto industry, which helped drive America’s rise as a global power in the twentieth-century just as the consumer electronics industry underpins China’s growth in this century. Ford was among the first to standardize repair services, while General Motors pioneered early experiments on mixing planned obsolescence with brand image advertising, hinting at the emergence of vectoral power in its nascent form. They understood that sales depended on an ecosystem of after-sales. These new business practices emerged around the early 1900s, a time of an intensifying crisis for Adam Smith–style capitalism. That crisis gave rise to various repair attempts, including Keynesian economics, the Walter Lippmann Colloquium, a Cold War, and eventually vectoralism. See Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective (Harvard University Press, 2015).
For discussions on Biden and the Green New Deal (GND), see Daniel Goulden, “We Need a Real Green Jobs Program to Fight Climate Change,” Jacobin, October 4, 2023; and Alyssa Battistoni and Geoff Mann, “Climate Bidenomics,” New Left Review, no. 143 (2023). For an activist GND vision, see →.
Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet (University of California Press, 2017). See also Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso Books, 2011).
Rob Aitken, “Depletion Work: Climate Change and the Mediation of Stranded Assets,” Socio-Economic Review 21, no. 1 (2023): 267–70.
Benjamin H. Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty (MIT Press, 2016).
Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso Books, 2019), 48.
See for example Donald MacKenzie, “Making Things the Same: Gases, Emission Rights and the Politics of Carbon Markets,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 34, no. 3–4 (2009); Gavin Bridge et al., “Pluralizing and Problematizing Carbon Finance,” Progress in Human Geography 44, no. 4 (2020); Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa. Assetization: Turning Things into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism (MIT Press, 2020). See also →.
See →.
Wark, Capital Is Dead, 123.
Agustín Fuentes, “Naturalcultural Encounters in Bali: Monkeys, Temples, Tourists, and Ethnoprimatology,” Cultural Anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 600–1; Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), 1–10.
McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (Verso Books, 2016), 10–20. See also →.
Eyal Weizman and Fazal Sheikh, The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert (Steidl, 2015), 12.
Melissa Checker, “Wiped Out by the ‘Greenwave’: Environmental Gentrification and the Paradoxical Politics of Urban Sustainability,” City & Society 23, no. 2 (2011): 210–13.
Robert Poirier and David Ostergren, “Evicting People from Nature: Indigenous Land Rights and National Parks in Australia, Russia, and the United States,” Natural Resources Journal 42, no. 2 (2002): 331–38.
Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 180–81.
Lily Zhao, “Workers Die in Extreme Heat During China’s Summer,” World Socialist Website, October 17, 2022 →.
Robert Wade and Geraint Ellis, “Reclaiming the Windy Commons: Land Ownership, Wind Rights, and the Assetization of Renewable Resources,” Energies 15, no. 10 (2022).
Blaine Friedlander, “Climate Change Has Cost 7 Years of Ag Productivity Growth,” Cornell Chronicle, April 1, 2021 →.
See →.
Fariha Roisin, Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind (Harper Wave, 2022).
McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard University Press, 2004), thesis 153.
Reece Walters and Maria Angeles Fuentes Loureiro, “Waste Crime and the Global Transference of Hazardous Substances: A Southern Green Perspective,” Critical Criminology 28, no. 3 (2020); Emily Brownell, “Negotiating the New Economic Order of Waste,” Environmental History 16, no. 2 (2011): 262–64.
Marx, Capital, vol. I (Penguin UK, 2004), 711.
Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism: How Our System Is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet—and What We Can Do About It (Verso Books, 2023), 9.
See →.
Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Verso, 2014).
Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya and Liselotte Vogel (Pluto Press, 2017).
Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (Sage Publications, 2000).
Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (Monthly Review Press, 1966); Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-critique. Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital (Monthly Review Press, 1972).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Belknap Press, 2011), 275.
The most iconic of such narratives is probably Marx’s take on how “the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself” by the proletarians. Then there’s also Adam Smith’s epic story of the four stages of human history, or futurist Alvin Toffler’s account of the three waves. See Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848) →; Smith, The Wealth of Nations (Penguin, 1999); and Toffler, The Third Wave (Bantam Books, 1980).
Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2014).
Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behaviour (Harvard University Press, 1999).
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
Wark, Molecular Red, 1–6.
Jason Koebler, “Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware,” Motherboard, March 21, 2017 →.
Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Partner Abuse in Activist Communities, ed. Ching-In Chen et al. (AK Press, 2016).
See for example Suzanne Morrissey and Olivia Hagmann, “Social Justice, Trauma-Informed Care, and ‘Liberation Acupuncture’: Exploring the Activism of the Peoples Organization of Community Acupuncture,” Anthropology and Activism, ed. Anna J Willow and Kelly A. Yotebieng (Routledge, 2020).
J. S. Tan and Moira Weigel, “Organizing in (and Against) a New Cold War: The Case of 996.ICU,” in Digital Work in the Planetary Market, ed. Mark Graham and Fabian Ferrari (MIT Press, 2022), 209.
For Wark’s discussions on expressive politics and escape, see Hacker Manifesto, thesis 251, 252, 256, 257, and 273.
Most internet services in China require phone numbers for registration, and many people want more than one SIM card in their phone so they can switch between different digital accounts registered to different phone numbers.
Wark, Hacker Manifesto, thesis 74, 14, and 78.
Wark, Hacker Manifesto, thesis 160.
See →.
Walker, The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart (Ballantine Books, 2001), 200.
Byung-Chul Han, Shanzhai: Deconstruction in Chinese (MIT Press, 2017).
Silvia M. Lindtner, Prototype Nation: China and the Contested Promise of Innovation (Princeton University Press, 2020), 74–79.
Jyh-An Lee, “Shifting IP Battlegrounds in the US-China Trade War,” Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts 43, no. 2 (2020): 147.
For media-studies discussions on software and hardware, see Friedrich Kittler, “There is no Software,” Stanford Literature Review 9, no 1 (1992); Alexander Galloway, “Language Wants to Be Overlooked: On Software and Ideology,” Journal of Visual Culture 5, no. 3 (2006); and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge,” Grey Room, no. 18 (2005). For the digitization of mechanical devices, see for example M. C. Forelle, “The Material Consequences of ‘Chipification’: The Case of Software-Embedded Cars,” Big Data & Society 9, no. 1 (2022): 1–5. See also Cory Doctorow, “Apple Fucked Us on Right to Repair (Again),” Medium, September 23, 2023 →.
Serres, The Parasite (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 166.
Wark, Hacker Manifesto, thesis 87.
Walter Benjamin. “On the Concept of History” (1940), trans. Dennis Redmond , marxists.org →. One has to wonder if Benjamin’s Angel of History, with his face turned towards the single catastrophe of the past and his hope for a pause to piece together what has been smashed, must be a repairer.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 271–80. We are now accompanied by so many more figures than Marx’s Mr. Moneybags and the labor-power possessor. The hidden spheres in need of scrutiny also stare at us with a far more intricate governmentality of inclusion and exclusion: not just “no admittance except on business,” but also “warranty void if seal is removed.”
See for example April Carter, Direct Action and Democracy Today (Polity, 2005); Uri Gordon, “Anarchism Reloaded,” Journal of Political Ideologies 12, no. 1 (2007): 29–30.
Lara Houston and Steven J. Jackson, “Caring for the ‘Next Billion’ Mobile Handsets: Proprietary Closures and the Work of Repair,” Information Technologies and International Development (special section), no. 13 (2017): 200.
See →.
See →.
Mia Mingus, “Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet,” Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective, June 2016 →.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, “A Not-So-Brief Personal History of the Healing Justice Movement, 2010–2016,” Mice Magazine, no. 2 (Fall 2016) →.
Cassie Thornton, The Hologram: Feminist, Peer-to-Peer Health for a Post-Pandemic Future (Pluto Press, 2020).
See →.
“No Climate Justice without Debt Justice,” open letter →.
Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri, Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).
brown, “Additional Recommendations for Us Right Now From a Future,” Center for Humans and Nature, October 23, 2020 →.
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (National Geographic Books, 2019); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Assembly (Oxford University Press, 2017), 139–43; Hakim Bey, T.A.Z: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism (Autonomedia, 2003).
Such irregularity and uncontrollability of repair spaces in the early 1900s proved to be a major point of friction and a limit to the Fordist model of value extraction. See Stephen L. McIntyre, “The Failure of Fordism: Reform of the Automobile Repair Industry, 1913–1940.” Technology and Culture 41, no. 2 (2000): 269–75.
Steven Jackson, “Rethinking Repair,” in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, ed Tarleton Gillespie et al. (MIT Press, 2014), 228.
Andreas Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire (Verso Books, 2021).
See →.
Gumbs, “Freedom Seeds: Growing Abolition in Durham, North Carolina,” in Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle Against the Prison Industrial Complex, ed. CR10 Publications Collective (AK Press, 2008), 145.