BUYING "BIG TECH"

I had one of my old philosophical rants planed, something about 
denial of one's own humanity, but I've been trying to fix one of 
the broken blower motors in the A/C system of my Jag and it's left 
me way beyond the ability to talk that sort of nonsense. Actually I 
only put three hours into it, and only managed to get the thing 
out, ready to start actually figuring out what the problem is. The 
trouble is that it's burried at the back of the dash behind the 
glovebox and more wires, relays, and control modules than you can 
possibly comprehend being useful in a car. My Haynes manual has 
absolutely nothing to say about removing any of this, so it was the 
old chain of removing part B so I can see Part A, but part C needs 
to be removed to get to part B, and to get to the screws holding 
that in I need to remove part D. As it turned out many of the 
things I thought I'd removed needlessly trying to dig back to the 
blower motor's mounting bolts needed to come out anyway in order to 
get the thing out. I really don't know how mechanics do this stuff 
every day, in this case it wasn't very physical work, but the 
amount of thought that you have to put in to figuring out how to 
remove something that at first looks (from what little you can see 
of it) completely inaccessible is enough to tire you out on its own.

But while wrestling screwdrivers through the angry mass of wiring, 
frustrated as I was by how poorly access to the passenger-side 
blower motor was allowed for, I couldn't help but be in awe of how 
all these different systems and modules had been designed to fit 
together at all. The little hand-written dates and codes on some of 
the tags also emphasise that it was a luxury car being made in 
comparatively small volumes to others, yet needing all of this 
design work to stay ahead of what anyone could get in a regular car 
from the late 1980s. This was also during Jaguar's last period of 
independent ownership, now they're owned by some big Indian car 
firm. Indeed much of the stuff I've been pulling out has names from 
a whole range of British firms who I highly suspect are now mostly 
out of business. It's not really surprising that Jaguar couldn't 
keep going on their own, with all of this complexity to perfect 
every few years. It's the same as many other technologies where the 
market leaders evolve their product to a level of enormous 
complexity and integration. Smaller niche players can't really 
compete without massive sales volumes to justify their design 
costs. Their markets might instead be served by sub-divisions of 
bigger mass-market companies, with the names of their independent 
forbearers sticky-taped on top, so that existing designs and parts 
from bigger-selling products can simply be copied over. But the 
customer no longer has the choice of buying from a more innovative 
independent brand that might suit their own niche better. Instead 
they're just shuffled into a particular box defined within some 
huge car firm's overall product range.

This seems to be increasingly the case with IoT tech and smart 
phones, where the big companies making the tech make sure that in 
looking for a new TV you'll have to buy a "smart" model that will 
feed data back to them and possibly custom advertisments to you. 
Though I'm not looking for a smart phone of any sort, many people 
with phlogs seem to regularly chase designs based around 
privacy-respecting open-source software, only to be frustrated by 
their failings or lack of long-term support. I think it's a symptom 
mainly of what people are asking from these products in the first 
place. They embrace the latest cutting-edge technology without 
considering how it might be buildable only within the elite circle 
of the richest companies in the market. By insisting on these new 
features, they unwittingly also insist on conformity to the 
company's will, complaining all the time that they have no other 
option.

Indeed soon enough they really don't have any other option, because 
nobody buys from a company still selling an "old" model, and those 
companies either disappear or, more usually, are absorbed by their 
big mass-market competitors as Jaguar was. It's a hopeless case, 
and probably wouldn't be nearly so bad if every owner of such tech 
had to dig through that complexity themselves like I'm doing with
my old Jag.

 - The Free Thinker