COMP 2300 Winter 26 / Charlie Shields
In my drawer sits a 30 year old Game Boy that still boots up and works perfectly. Right next to it is a smart home hub I bought to control some LED lightbulbs. It is barely three years old but now has as much functionality as a bag of bricks.
One runs Tetris without complaint; the other cannot even blink its lights. The Game Boy was not built with superior technology, it just is not on a leash. Our technology is not breaking, it is being broken on purpose.
Unbeknownst to many, we have entered a strange era where buying a product no longer means you own it. As a recent example, Spotify “remotely detonated” the Car Thing, a portable device people paid $90 for. Spotify told them to just dispose of it, as if it was no longer their problem. $90 down the drain because Spotify did not want to pay to keep the servers up.
One runs Tetris without complaint; the other cannot even blink its lights.
The Illusion of Ownership
We are letting corporations use terms of service to override our actual property rights. As author Cory Doctorow famously puts it: “if buying is not owning, then piracy is not stealing.” Beyond the breach of consumer rights, we are witnessing a massive, manufactured waste of perfectly functional technology.
When a company bricks a device, they are not just deleting code. They are sabotaging our ability to reclaim incredibly valuable materials. This makes it nearly impossible to wipe data for reuse or safely disassemble parts for recycling.
The Hidden Goldmine in Our Trash
From a global perspective, this is a massive waste of perfectly functional computers. While a study from the Yale Center for Industrial Ecology shows that total e-waste mass is declining, the complexity of what we are throwing away is becoming a bigger problem. We are discarding rare materials like cobalt and indium. These are resources that are becoming increasingly concentrated in our waste stream as we move toward mobile devices.
The irony is that we actually have the resources to be sustainable, it is just all sitting in our landfills. Visual 3 in the Yale study compares the raw materials needed for new electronics against the amount sitting in our discarded e-waste. By 2018, for materials like gold and indium, the amount we were throwing away actually surpassed what we needed to build new devices.
We have reached a point where we could theoretically stop mining the earth and just reuse what we already have.
But this renewable potential is not possible if we continue the wasteful cycle that hardware locks create. When a company bricks a device, they are sabotaging our ability to reclaim those incredibly valuable materials. Locked software makes it harder to wipe data for reuse or disassemble parts for recycling.
The Corporate Defense
Critics and tech manufacturers argue that maintaining software for “legacy” devices is a security risk and a financial burden. They claim that bricking a device like the Car Thing is a necessary step to protect user data and prevent the unused hardware from becoming a gateway for hackers.
However, we believe that if a company can no longer afford to support a device, they should not be allowed to kill it. They should be required to open it.
The Legal Solution
We need a legal “Sunset Clause” to solve this problem legally. If a company stops supporting a product, they should be required to release the final firmware and unlock the bootloader.
Essentially, if they stop supporting it, they must immediately hand over the keys so we can run the hardware ourselves instead of watching it become e-waste. It is time for laws that protect the consumer, the planet, and the very idea of ownership.
Sources
- Welch, Chris. “Spotify is going to break every Car Thing gadget it ever sold.” The Verge, May 23, 2024. This is the primary reporting on the event. It confirms that users were told to “dispose” of the device with no option for a refund or open-source software.
- Doctorow, Cory. “If buying is not owning, piracy is not stealing.” Pluralistic, December 8, 2023. From Doctorow’s daily blog, this is the most direct source for the “End of Ownership” argument. It explains how “terms of service” are used to override property rights.
- Yale Article: “Electronic waste on the decline, new study finds.” This study provides statistics on how electronic lifespans are changing and impacting the waste stream.
- Journal of Industrial Ecology metadata: “The evolution of consumer electronic waste in the United States.”
