Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech’s Repair Monopoly
It’s not a long video, just shy of 12 minutes.
Watch it. There’s a lot packed in there, but I’m only going to touch on a few aspects.
This the worst of our tech-powered world.
The expectation to change things you own, to fix, to modify, to upgrade, to do whatever the hell you want to it, is so deeply ingrained in the human psyche and soul it should be a war crime to prevent that expression.
This is common ground for every American, right or left.
If any thing separates humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom is our drive to build. We build families, homes, villages, cities, tools, ourselves. We are a building species, that drive is stamped into our physical and spiritual DNA. Screwing around with that, stunting expression of that drive, is playing with forces not understood and will not simply bend in any direction so dictated by lawyers on behest of their masters.
A small part of me sorta gets it. I mean, companies have dumped millions into R&D and want to keep their cash cows, I mean, consumers consuming in order to recoup their investment. I’m sure they have charts full of projections and targets and data points to hit in order to keep their business running along, people paid, bonuses and pay raises coming.
But if you intentionally pervert and prevent people from working with their hands to solve a problem themselves, your business should die.
DMCA is evil and needs to be destroyed and becoming a hiss and byword.
Now, I’m a fan of Apple. Have been for years. I know the complaints and concerns, but I like their products. But if they don’t get their act together and soon to allow people to hack on the hardware they bought, Apple deserves to die.
If John Deere cannot turn around their corporate culture and support their clients, they deserve to die.
Software is eating the world. Technology driven by software is everything in everything.
If we can’t wrest our future away from tightly controlled monopolies preventing us from modifying things we own, we deserve to die.
I see this everyday. We have an independent mechanic that we use. He is less expensive and we know who is showing up. The big companies are trying to put the independent mechanics out of business and more financial burden on the farmers.
It’s eating the seed corn.
5