On mylar balloons and forgotten futures

Some thoughts about mylar balloons, what they represent in the paranormal, and what else they might mean in terms of our world and our future.

I’ve been sick this week, so wasn’t able to record the podcast episode I was going to drop today. Instead, here’s an essay version of an episode of Buried Secrets Podcast that I published in October 2022, which you can listen to wherever you get podcasts. It’s my favorite episode that I’ve done so far.

Mylar balloons are a popular piece of imagery in the paranormal today. This nearly ubiquitous type of trash has been imbued with synchronistic meaning because of its role in the popular webseries Hellier. But I’m interested in what else it might be able to represent, and the ways in which this dangerous type of trash can prompt us to imagine better futures.

Mylar balloons as paranormal synchronicity

In Hellier, mylar balloons appear during particularly significant moments, which has led many people interested in the paranormal to think more critically about their own encounters with mylar balloons, past or present. Independently of Hellier, I’ve heard about strange mylar balloon synchronicities elsewhere, such as on the podcast Strange Familiars^[1] and in articles about bigfoot sightings.

I suppose it’s also worth mentioning that when I searched “mylar balloon paranormal” there were some results that mentioned that some people mistake mylar balloons for ghosts, UFOs, or other paranormal phenomena, since they’re shiny objects that float around in the air. So there’s also a possible trickster element to mylar balloons.

I’ve had my own personally significant mylar balloon synchronicities while randonauting and hiking, so I think there’s something in the paranormal community’s fascination with them. But that’s not the only thing going on with mylar balloons.

Mylar balloons as trash

Last year, I read tons of books about reuse, repair, garbage, and the environment. Multiple books mentioned mylar balloons as a common sight when it comes to waste, which stood out to me, since I already have mylar balloons on the brain from a paranormal perspective.

In the book The Buy Nothing, Get Everything Plan: Discover the Joy of Spending Less, Sharing More, and Living Generously by Liesl Clark and Rebecca Rockefeller (the folks who started the Buy Nothing movement), there’s a story about going to the beach and finding it covered in trash:

When we looked more closely at the sand beneath our feet. . . . We found larger bits of plastic debris that were even more disturbing: syringes, a green army man that Finn was happy to add to his collection, coffee stirrers, PVC pipe, pens just like Cleo’s from home, light switch covers, a Mylar helium birthday balloon like the one that Ava lost at a friend’s party when it slipped free from her fingers the week before, cigarette lighters, a bright yellow baby toy just like one Mira remembered having, car bumpers, and tampon applicators—objects of our everyday lives, all made of plastic, all washed up on our shoreline.

Mylar balloons are mentioned only briefly, but as I researched further, I discovered that they’re an extremely common sight in places where people go to “be in nature,” like forests and beaches.

I did a bit more digging to see who else was talking about finding mylar balloons out and about in nature, and I came across a thread on arizonahuntingforums.com from March 2022.

I found the thread fascinating because it was hunters talking–not a group stereotypically known for being environmentally conscious. Multiple hunters talked about the need for legislation to ban mylar balloons, saying things like “I find them in the most remote locations and they never seem to die. They need to be outlawed as an environmental hazard.” and “Brothers, you are all singing the right song- these damned balloon[s]- and plastic Wal Mart bags- ought to be banned and taken off the open market.”

The hunters also talked about how mylar balloons are particularly pernicious, because unlike Walmart bags, they can float around and get into the most remote areas: “I tend to hike fairly deep into the woods and will always find [mylar balloons]. I have yet to go on a hike, scout, hunt and not come across one, often 2-3!”

While reading Garbology by Edward Humes, a book about the study of garbage, I was struck by how we are haunted by our own trash. The book describes dumps where our trash is warehoused and tells stories of garbage that should have decomposed, but which was essentially mummified instead. (I believe that was because there wasn’t enough oxygen for things to break down as expected.) To me, while mylar balloons are a potent symbol of the paranormal phenomena that can haunt us, I think that they’re also a symbol of the trash that haunts us.

Mylar balloons are such a widespread issue and are found out an about in nature so often that there are a lot of websites dedicated to spreading the word about how environmentally damaging they are. There’s even one called mylarmistake.com.

The ubiquity of mylar balloons is also important context to have for paranormal mylar balloon encounters. I’m not trying to debunk paranormal experiences that anyone has had with mylar balloons, but it’s good to know that they’re common. It’s helpful context to have while weighing the likelihood of a possibly synchronistic occurrence.

Dangers of mylar balloons

In addition to mylar balloons being litter and eyesores, they are also potentially dangerous. One CBS news report talked about how mylar balloons are dangerous to our infrastructure:

Mylar balloons have also proved to be a constant menace to utilities and fire departments. Their silvery coating serves as a conductor for electricity, which means they can short transformers and melt wires just by coming near a high-voltage line. . . .

[A] California utility recorded 80 outages in February involving balloons and 217 in June. Last year, it tallied more than 1,000 outages related to mylar balloons, including dozens of incidents involving downed power lines.

Imagination and the paranormal

So why am I writing about mylar balloons and trash? Well, it’s partially because I’ve been reading and thinking a lot about the power of imagination. It turns out that imagination is important when it comes to trying to make the world a better place.

If you’re reading this, you probably have a lot of imagination. That’s because being interested in the paranormal requires imagination. I’m not saying that the paranormal is made up or imaginary.

But the paranormal and the occult are all about the things that are at work in this world that we can’t see. They’re about an alternate way of experiencing reality.

The whole world tells us that the only things that are real are what we can see and measure. But the paranormal is all about things that are harder to measure scientifically, more difficult to explain, or just out of sight and accessed through unusual means.

So you have to have a lot of imagination and vision to be able to consider that there’s something else out there.

I would also argue that if you’re interested in history, you have to have a lot of imagination as well. Because to study history and to learn about history, you have to be able to imagine things being different from how they are now.

The importance of imagination

There’s a great book called From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by Rob Hopkins, which talks about how people’s imaginations are constrained. People are taught not to be imaginative. (For example, here in the United States, curriculums are built around standardized testing, which doesn’t exactly encourage people to think creatively.)

On top of that, stress damages the part of your brain that allows you to imagine things.

So in a world where we need creative solutions for difficult problems more than we ever have before, we end up with a population of people who find it more and more difficult to use their imagination.

I don’t know about you, when I think about times my life when I’ve been extremely stressed out, those memories are very . . . blank. Dull. They’re times when I didn’t have the mental space to imagine anything. I couldn’t really picture anything getting better in my own life, much less the world.

Most people are like that, because that’s literally how our brains work.

If you have no imagination, then you end up rooted in the here and the now, in the measurable. You are confined by the restraints created by the consensus of what reality is, and what is possible.

To be interested in history or the paranormal, you must be able to imagine a world that’s different from the one we’re in right now. That sort of imagination is exactly what I want to talk about here.

There’s a lot of unpleasant, stressful, and bad stuff going on in the world right now. The consensus tends to be that things are going to keep getting worse and worse.

But what if it were possible for things to get better? Can you even imagine a world where things could get better?

I think that a lot of people who imagine a better world are just imagining a past world. They’re imagining maybe the ’90s or the ’60s or some other time when they imagine that things were better than they are now.

But, to quote my Cajun grandparents, “there’s no such thing as the good old days.” They should know, because they grew up in Louisiana without air conditioning or indoor plumbing.

We don’t need to regress to a previous time when maybe some small number people might have had things better than they do now, but most people still were struggling (and had it worse).

Instead, we can imagine a better future. And that’s what I want talk about here.

Let’s loop back to the mylar balloon.

The mylar balloon is meaningful in the paranormal, but in a more realistic sense, mylar balloons are just a thing that you encounter a lot out and about in “nature.” And that’s because people release them without thinking about what kind of damage they’re doing.

So I could just say that when you see a mylar balloon out in the woods, you shouldn’t think of synchronicity, you should think about litter and the environment.

But that’s not what I’m saying here.

I think that it is important to think about the environment. But it’s just as important to think about how things could be improved as it is to think about how things are bad and getting worse.

Forgotten futures and solarpunk dreams

Like I said, things can feel pretty bleak. We’re up against a lot, and it’s worth pausing and trying to find a way to feel more hopeful about things. Because otherwise you just end up miserable, crushed, and unable to even imagine a less miserable fate.

Let’s get back to the book From What Is to What If. In it, Hopkins describes a concept called “shit life syndrome” (SLS):

In August 2018, the journalist Will Hutton reported on a new colloquialism being used by doctors in the United States and United Kingdom to describe ‘a tangled mix of economic, social and emotional problems’, which ‘consists of low mood caused by adverse life circumstances’. ‘Shit life syndrome’ (SLS), as the doctors call it, is when ‘finding meaning in life is close to impossible; the struggle to survive commands all intellectual and emotional resources … It is not just poverty, but growing relative poverty in an era of rising inequality, with all its psychological side-effects, that is the killer.’ Although Hutton was primarily describing SLS as an argument against austerity and growing inequality, it seems to describe how an awful lot of people, rich or poor, are feeling these days.

SLS is probably familiar to anyone reading this. Even if not every day is characterized by this hopelessness, it’s hard not to feel it sometimes.

That makes me think of a quote I stumbled upon in the book Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion by Tansy E. Hoskins: “I agree with the activist economist Michael Albert who wrote: ‘Our negative or critical messages don’t generate anger and action but only pile up more evidence that the enemy is beyond reach.’”

The introduction to From What Is to What If is called “What if things turned out okay?” In it, he imagines a nice future, and walks the reader through a day in a better future than the one we usually picture (sorry to include such a long excerpt, but I just love to detailed picture this paints):

I wake, well rested, in the straw-bale-walled apartment my family and I call home. Built fifteen years ago as part of a sustainable-construction initiative throughout our city, the three-storey-high apartment complex costs virtually nothing to heat, its basement hosts composting units for all the building’s toilets, and the solar panels on the roof generate all our electricity needs. I wake my kids, get them dressed and fed and accompany them to school – a walk that takes us through shared gardens with a diversity of food crops, including young ruby chard whose deep red leaves radiate like stained glass caught in the brilliant sun of this late spring morning. The streets are quiet, due to sparse motorised traffic, and they are lined with fruit and nut trees in early blossom. The air smells of spring. Each bus stop we pass is surrounded by a garden on three sides, part of the Edible Bus Stop network that now includes most bus stops across the United Kingdom. Anyone can graze while they wait for the bus. In our community, the kids seem to have radically different feelings about school than they did ten years ago. The education department’s decision to eliminate testing, to give ample space for unstructured play and to provide students with opportunities within the community to acquire meaningful skills that enable them to live happy and healthy lives by their own definition means that most kids here now love going to school. My son, for example, recently upped his cooking skills by spending a week at a local restaurant. My kids and I approach the school through intensive food gardens, planted and managed by the students, and walk into a building where we are greeted by the smell of baking bread and the sound of happy chatter. After we say our goodbyes, I pick up a public bicycle and head into the city on one of our cycle networks. With more bicycles and fewer cars on the road, air quality has improved, and public health along with it. I call into my favourite bakery to buy bread. Launched fifteen years ago on the premise that ‘baking is the new Prozac’, the bakery’s mission is to provide meaningful work opportunities for people who lack housing and job security, and who struggle with mental health. The bakery prioritises local produce, grows a thriving rooftop garden and uses bicycle-powered delivery around town. With the bakery’s support, many of its employees have launched other successful businesses across the city.

The future that he describes sounds lovely; everyone probably has their own version of this that they could dream up. What would a day in your future life look like if things turned out okay?

Particularly if you’re someone who’s prone to feeling hopeless from time to time (who isn’t these days?), it’s worth really thinking about and trying to imagine.

I really enjoy the solarpunk genre of sci-fi, which is about imagining sustainable futures in which today’s destructive systems have been dismantled, people live in a society that prioritizes community, and the climate crisis has been mitigated.

I’m completely exhausted by dystopias. We’re so often focused on apocalyptic events and fear of the future we could be barreling toward that we forget to focus on the future we might want to live in. And I like that solarpunk stories aren’t utopias. There’s a sense of realism, an idea that not everything is perfect and some past mistakes are hard to recover from. But if society were structured differently and we lived differently, our lives and the world would be better.

Imagination and the paranormal

So, if you’re someone who’s into the paranormal, I hope that the next time that you see a mylar balloon, you don’t just think about synchronicity and imagine what the balloon could mean from a paranormal standpoint. I also hope that you can also use mylar balloon sightings as a trigger to remind yourself to think about how things could be better in the future.^[2]

The more we suppress our imagination–the more we tell ourselves that things can’t improve–the more screwed over we are. And if we humans want to have any chance of improving the state of things, we have to have the courage and imagination to envision a world where things are better. And that means being able to see beyond the bleak future that the governments, the corporations, and the hegemonic structures of our world tell us is the only option.

I reject the idea that the only one possible future is an apocalyptic and miserable one.

So when it comes to mylar balloons, I’d like to challenge you to use it as a prompt to pause and think about what sort of forgotten future you’d like to reclaim, what sorts of what ifs you’d like to dream into being.

Things to read, watch, or listen to

Here are just a few places to learn more about imagined better futures and solarpunk ideas.

Andrewism on YouTube
Becky Chambers’ books, especially the Monk and Robot series (starting with A Psalm for the Wild-Built) and Record of a Spaceborn Few
Terra Nil, a game where you restore barren landscapes and rewild a screwed up planet
Anarcho Solarpunk on Substack
Low Tech Magazine (this is the solar-powered version of the website)
Cory Doctorow’s podcast (not always positive, but his work often looks at issues head-on and offers possible solutions)
The Clothes Horse Podcast, a podcast about fashion, capitalism, and the environment
From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by Rob Hopkins
the podcast Srsly Wrong (here’s a good episode about degrowth)

^[1] I can’t for the life of me remember which episode(s).

^[2] Also, if it’s safe to do so, it’s worth collecting the mylar balloon and disposing of it elsewhere.

Cyberpunk, cautionary tales, and imagination

The world we live in can be . . . bleak.

I’ve written and podcasted before about how folks who are interested in the paranormal are uniquely positioned to imagine better futures. After all, if you’re willing to believe that there’s something beyond the widely accepted reality, then you have an ability to believe in and imagine things that you’ve been told not to.

I’ve also talked about the excellent book From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want by Rob Hopkins, which makes the argument that creative solutions and positive thinking are critical to our ability to change the world.

If the only future you can imagine is a bleak one, how are you supposed to make moves toward a better one? You just end up with billionaires trying to turn reality into Snow Crash.

Anyway, this week, I’ll be writing about science fiction, solarpunk, and imagining better futures.

Science fiction is cool

One of my favorite memes is this 2021 tweet by @AlexBlechman:

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

I’m someone who grew up on a mix of classic mid-to-late 20th century sci-fi (like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Ben Bova, Orson Scott Card, and Michael Crichton) and 19th to early 20th century sci-fi (like Jules Verne and H.G. Welles).

(Listen, the local library had a terrible selection, so I was mostly limited to the books on my dad’s shelf.)

A lot of those books showed positive futures, but plenty of them—as well as many other sci-fi classics—showed disaster.

Cyberpunk and cautionary tales

Science fiction has long been a genre concerned with social commentary and cautionary tales. And just like a fairy tale where a unruly child is eaten by a witch, sci-fi novels often show scenarios that point out the evils of mankind and how it could all end terribly.

But there’s a problem with that. Sci-fi is cool. Even a book that ends in disaster can capture someone’s imagination with its cool tech (like interstellar travel, or example) and aesthetics.

For example, I missed a lot of the cyberpunk classics, but I’ve been an earnest, unironic fan of the Matrix movies (and the Wachowski sisters in general) since I saw The Matrix at the age of ten.

I remember loving other 90s cyberpunk, like Tad Williams’ Otherland series as well as other, more obscure books like Wyrm by Mark Fabi (I tried reading Cryptonomicon a few years after it came out, when I was twelve or so, but I wasn’t really into it, and it’s a long book).

In middle school, I breathlessly watched Blade Runner and anime that dealt with disappearing into digital worlds, like Serial Experiments Lain and .hack//Sign. Later, as an adult, that I read some Philip K. Dick and less-appreciated-but-still-great cyberpunk classics like Trouble and Her Friends by Melissa Scott. (Still haven’t finished anything by William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, though I’ve started reading a few of ’em.)

Aesthetic poisoning

Cyberpunk stories depict a depressing, miserable world of tech, isolation, and general misery. Not the sort of reality you’d want to live in, all things considered.

But many of these worlds are aesthetically beautiful. I dunno about you, but there’s just something about a dark city street lit by neon lights. Even in real life, there’s nothing I love more than walking around a dark, bustling metropolis. And cyberpunk media really takes that to another level.

Like it or not, so much of today’s world feels like it’s been specifically crafted by people who were charmed by the aesthetics and technology of cyberpunk but absorbed none of the lessons. They took the stories at face value and dove headfirst into replicating the aesthetics—and the underlying evils that came along with it.

Cyberpunk stories often depict alienation, economic precarity, widespread (isolating) tech use, artificial intelligence, and government and corporate corruption. Sound familiar?

I’m not immune

There was a period in early 2021 when, depressed by the state of the world and still feeling extremely isolated because of COVID, I just had to tell myself, Imagine you’re living in a cyberpunk movie. Just tell yourself that. This is like that fiction you like. And . . . it helped, a little.

I’m not saying that habitually distancing yourself from reality is a good thing, especially in the long term, but it was decent enough coping mechanism for the short term.

That being said, I also coupled that . . . let’s call it a visualization . . . with doing a bit of volunteer work around the neighborhood. I’m not saying this to claim I’m a good person or anything—I do far less than I should—but I recognized that I was freaking out because I was feeling alone and helpless, and getting out and talking to people in real life did help me cope.

But in my darker moments, alone and feeling desolate, I wrapped myself up in an aesthetic blanket and told myself I was a character in a cyberpunk book. It gave me a different lens to see things through, a narrative distance that I think I needed. I don’t think it did any harm.

That being said, it’s one thing for me, a private citizen without capital or power, to retreat into fiction to shelter myself for a few months.

But it’s quite another for the powers that be—billionaires, tech CEOs—to actively try to recreate a cyberpunk world. And more and more, that seems to be what’s happening.

Take the metaverse, for example. I’m not going to get deep into it, but it takes its name from Snow Crash. Facebook rebranded as Meta and spent billions of dollars trying to create a virtual reality world inspired by and named after a concept in a 1990s cyberpunk novel. (At the time, articles talked about how “eerie” it was that Facebook’s plans were so similar to the book. Yes. A very eerie “coincidence.”)

It’s also not lost to me that on the Oculus VR headset (now called the Meta headset, I guess), you can choose a “cyber city” home screen environment that’s literally an apartment in a cyberpunk city. And many of the games (Beat Saber, Synth Riders, and plenty of others) have a cyberpunk aesthetic.

Look, there’s a possibility that I know all of this because the home screen environment on my VR headset is the cyberpunk city one. There’s also a possibility that I really enjoy Beat Saber and appreciate the aesthetic.

My purpose here isn’t to say that it’s wrong to like the cyberpunk aesthetic. But aesthetics can also be a trap. Fiction can be a trap.

Ordinary people can easily be pulled in by fiction and have our imagination of possible futures circumscribed by dystopia.

People with power can decide to recreate their favorite science fiction dystopias and make the rest of us live in them.

The power of solarpunk

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of solarpunk, an science fiction genre that’s all about imagining better futures. There’s an emphasis on renewable energy sources, sustainable technologies and ways of life, DIY, post-capitalism, nature, and optimism—a belief that there’s a better way to live than the way we’re living now. An easy entry point into the genre is Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series. I also find the Terra Nil video gamevery soothing.

Solarpunk offers a counterpoint to cyberpunk: we can still have a future with cool tech, but without the misery, inequality, waste, and environmental destruction that we have today and that most science fiction depicts. There can be a better way forward.

It’s telling (and unsurprising) that when I was struggling so much in 2021, withdrawing and feeling like I was stuck in a dystopia, what got me out of it was helping my neighborhood in tiny ways, doing yard work in the community garden and helping out with local political campaigns for candidates and policies that helped ordinary people. (Which, again, I did—and do—far, far less than I should.)

The antidote to loneliness isn’t more isolation, and the antidote to despair isn’t giving up. But it’s so hard to see that, and to act on that, when so much of our narratives (books, movies, news media, social media) focus almost exclusively on the negative.

Even when dystopias are wrapped in exciting plotlines and aesthetic beauty, they’re still dystopias, offering cautionary tales rather than solutions.

And, as Rob Hopkins points out in his book From What Is to What If: Unleashing the Power of Imagination to Create the Future We Want, we need imagination and creative thinking to get us out of this mess. The more stressed, depressed, and hopeless we are, the less we’re able to do that—and the more trapped we are in the reality that we’re told is the only possible one.

As a paranormal researcher, I reject the idea that the mundane physical reality is the only one. So it’s not a leap at all to also reject the narrative that we’re doomed and that dystopia is our destiny.

For more on this subject, check out the episode of Buried Secrets Podcast called “On Mylar Balloons and Forgotten Futures” or read the essay-formatted version.

Device overload and solarpunk imagination

Yesterday and in the past, I’ve talked about why I think that the solarpunk science fiction genre—and the practice of imagining better futures in general—is vital to actually creating a better future. And I think that people who’re interested in the paranormal are already exercising imaginal muscles that make it easier for us to imagine new, better things.

As I’ve talked about plenty on the blog, I’ve been writing a solarpunk novel, that’s got me thinking about the unsustainable ways we use tech today, what some solutions might be to that, and what the world would look like if those solutions were put into play.

That’s given me a lot to think about, but for the past week or two, I’ve been obsessing over this question: why the heck do we each have to have multiple computers?

What I say computer, I don’t just mean a desktop PC or laptop. Smartphones and tablets are computers, too. (Among plenty of other tech.)

I’m generalizing (and speaking from a particular sort of North American perspective), but nowadays, it seems like most people have at least two of the following: a smartphone, a laptop computer, a tablet, a desktop PC, some sort of TV-controlling box thing[^1], or a video game console. If you’re me, you might have . . . all but one of the above. (And I’m not even touching on the piles of old laptops and phones many of us probably have lying around.)

But, like: why?

Okay, there are plenty of reasons why. These devices do different things, they have different form factors, they have different specs, some things work on one but not the other, you have to keep buying new devices because they become outdated as software becomes more and more bloated, we stream increasingly higher-res video and do things that take more processing power in general, etc.

But again: why?

I never quite thought of it this way before. I never really asked this question until I was fleshing out the world of the novel I’m writing, thinking about our relationship to technology and what a more sustainable one might look like.

Why I have too many devices

Today, in the real world, the non-fictional one we live in, I know my personal reasons for having multiple devices. And as far as I can tell, they’re “good” reasons, if you define good as “doing the best you can because things are set up so you have to do things in an inefficient, expensive, wasteful, and roundabout way.”

If you want the full rundown of my own justifications for the devices that I use regularly: I (basically) have to own and use a smartphone to move through the world. I’m self-employed, so I must have a working computer. I bought my desktop PC because my laptop was toast and it was cheaper to get a PC with the specs I needed (and I liked that it was more repairable/upgradable than most laptops). I bought my laptop about a year later because I’d discovered that I needed to be able to work a little bit while on vacation (see: self-employed), and I found a used (repairable/modular) Framework laptop for a good price. I bought my iPad because I do art, and my old touchscreen laptop was on the fritz (also, the software I wanted to use was only available for iOS). And I own an Oculus because I like Beat Saber and the other VR options were too expensive.

But the thing is, all of those reasons are kinda BS. I’m not saying that I’m full of shit, but the tech industry is. Why did I have to buy all of those devices? Why couldn’t I have one repairable, upgradable device that everything works on, that had I/O so it could be docked to displayed on a monitor or TV, connected to a keyboard, etc.? Why do some programs work on certain operating systems and not others?

Manufactured reasons

I know the reason for that: there are a bunch of competing companies with business reasons for preventing things from being interoperable and repairable. They want to make more money, force us to buy their products early and often, etc.

There are also technical reasons why having one device that works with everything and does everything isn’t possible in today’s tech ecosystem. But the technical reasons aren’t because of laws of science—they’re because of how things are set up now. They’re because of the way that humans decided to do things to maximize consumption and profit. They’re because of the specific way that humans decided to write code and engineer hardware, not an unstoppable force like gravity.

I understand that it’d be an unbelievable amount of work to recreate everything so it all worked together, nevermind how you’d convince corporations (and a whole industry) to go along with that. (Related: the XKCD comic about standards.) So, humor me: I’m really talking in science-fiction, thought-experiment-type terms right now.

But you know what’s not science fiction, and wouldn’t even be a pain to make standard? Something that the EU has even started making baby steps toward? Modular, repairable devices.

Modular devices, BS excuses, and simple solarpunk solutions

We need repairable devices.

This week, I’ve been fixated on imagining better futures, something that I believe that people who’re into the paranormal are uniquely primed to do. Check out Tuesday’s essay on cyberpunk vs. solarpunk and yesterday’s essay about the manufactured justifications for why we need so many damn devices.

I wrote about how many of these restrictions are arbitrary and human-made, and I gestured toward how it’s bullshit that so many tech companies argue that we can’t have modular, repairable, upgradable devices. Today, I’ll dive into that even more.

Apple—and other manufacturers—have claimed that they can’t make their devices modular and repairable. It’d make them too heavy, too thick. And that’s not what the consumer wants.

The fact is . . . that’s just not true. On any level.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the two options were:

to have a better, more repairable, upgradable, longer-lasting device that’s a few millimeters thicker or
to have a worse product with soldered-and-glued-down components, a device that’s e-waste within a couple years of its purchase and forces you to spend more money to replace it

If that were the case, I don’t think anyone could argue (in good faith) that the average consumer would take the wasteful, inferior second option. But I don’t believe that tradeoff is real. It’s a straw man to begin with.

Some companies have already proven that it’s possible to create repairable, upgradable devices that don’t have a huge tradeoff. I have a Framework laptop that’s light, thin, and user repairable. I’ve also had laptops made in the 2000s-2010s (Apple and Lenovo) that were thin for their time and allowed me to at least upgrade the RAM and replace the battery.

But that isn’t even the only counterpoint.

The Samsung Galaxy S5

In 2014, I bought the best device I’ve ever owned: the Samsung Galaxy S5. It had a removable back cover, expandable storage, and a removable battery. And, yes, it was a thin, nearly-top-of-the-line flagship phone.

That removable battery was a godsend; it saved me so many times. I often found myself out late after a long day of work, realizing—at the start of an hour-plus-long subway ride home—that I was about to run out of battery. But that was fine; I kept the spare battery in my bag (it fit neatly inside the charger so you could carry them both with you). It was so easy to swap in a fresh battery that I could do it while standing on a crowded moving train and be going again in less than a minute. No tools required—the back cover just pulled off and snapped back on. And there were no compromises; the device was waterproof, even. (Which I proved plenty of times by using it in the shower and dropping it in the sink.)

In 2016, I had to say goodbye to that beautiful phone. Not because there was anything wrong with it. But the device was locked to the AT&T network. When my contract was up, I switched to a cheaper, no-contract carrier because AT&T was too expensive and their service didn’t work in crowded spaces in NYC. (I lost reception at every large concert or gathering, which was incredibly stressful when meeting up with people.)

And because the Galaxy S5 was restricted to the AT&T network, I had to buy a brand-new, worse phone.[^1]

So, if Samsung could make a flagship phone with those features in 2014, why can’t they do the same in 2023?

Well, they can, obviously. They just don’t.

I’ll continue this series next week.

[^1] Though I will say that my next device, a Nexus 6P, wasn’t a terrible phone. At least it still had expandable memory and a headphone jack, which is more than I can say for my current device, the overpriced, headphone-jack-less Samsung Galaxy S22+, which is my most-regretted tech purchase to date.

Device overload and solarpunk imagination

That’s given me a lot to think about, but for the past week or two, I’ve been obsessing over this question: why the heck do we each have to have multiple computers?

What I say computer, I don’t just mean a desktop PC or laptop. Smartphones and tablets are computers, too. (Among plenty of other tech.)

But, like: why?

But again: why?

Why I have too many devices

Manufactured reasons

But you know what’s not science fiction, and wouldn’t even be a pain to make standard? Something that the EU has even started making baby steps toward? Modular, repairable devices.

Modular devices, BS excuses, and simple solarpunk solutions

We need repairable devices.

Apple—and other manufacturers—have claimed that they can’t make their devices modular and repairable. It’d make them too heavy, too thick. And that’s not what the consumer wants.

The fact is . . . that’s just not true. On any level.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the two options were:

to have a better, more repairable, upgradable, longer-lasting device that’s a few millimeters thicker or
to have a worse product with soldered-and-glued-down components, a device that’s e-waste within a couple years of its purchase and forces you to spend more money to replace it

But that isn’t even the only counterpoint.

The Samsung Galaxy S5

And because the Galaxy S5 was restricted to the AT&T network, I had to buy a brand-new, worse phone.[^1]

So, if Samsung could make a flagship phone with those features in 2014, why can’t they do the same in 2023?

Well, they can, obviously. They just don’t.

I’ll continue this series next week.

We deserve modular devices

Last week, I wrote about how so many wasteful, expensive, and inconvenient aspects of our tech are completely avoidable, and about how we can and should imagine better futures. We shouldn’t have to be victims of planned obsolescence and incompatibility. But it’s profitable for companies to make shitty devices that break easily and do less than they should be able to, so that’s what happens.

But the tide seems to be turning there. It used to be normal for devices to be user-upgradeable and repairable. The practice of unnecessarily soldering or gluing components together to make it harder to fix things is relatively new.

Right to repair advocates have been working hard to press for legislation to protect users, and some manufacturers have begun to take notice. So let’s talk about that.

Framework laptops

The excuse that so many manufacturers make for why they glue and solder components down rather than making their devices modular is that they have to because it allows them to make the thinnest possible devices. That was Apple’s “reasoning” for a long time, though in recent years, consumer pressure (and probably the fear of right to repair legislation) has made Apple change course slightly, making some of their products slightly thinner and more repairable. (Though you could argue that their “repairability” leaves quite a lot to be desired, and they aren’t upgradeable.)

Contrast that with a company like Framework, which makes explicitly user repairable and upgradeable laptops. (Framework laptops literally ship with a screwdriver so users can easily open them up anytime.)

During my weekly Learning Things updates, I’ve talked a bit about some of the technical issues I’ve had with my 1st gen Framework laptop. I bought it secondhand earlier this year, and because it’s a used laptop from one of the early batches from a brand-new startup’s very first product, it has some issues that I’m still trying to work out.

But you know what? Because it’s a modular laptop created by a company that’s focused on making user repairable and upgradable products, that’s not really a big deal. I’ve been able to fiddle around with things to fix some of the issues, they have guides on different troubleshooting steps and repairs that might fix the issue, and I’m in touch with their (very responsive) customer service team.

It’s a modular laptop that’s made for repairs. It’s been built to last and for me to upgrade. It’s a great device, performance-wise (far superior to my old, unrepairable Surface Pro laptop), and Framework’s mission is awesome.

If the RTC battery problem that I’m having persists and I get sick of the troubleshooting steps I have to do whenever it crops up, I can just buy a new motherboard (they’re coming out with a new batch that fixes the issue) and put that in. (They even have guides for how to repurpose old motherboards to reduce e-waste.) So what would be a potentially fatal issue on a non-modular laptop is just an inconvenience. And that’s huge. I’m looking forward to a day when most, if not all, laptops, are built with similar levels of repairability and upgradability.

Repairable smartphones

When it comes to smartphones, the manufacturer Fairphone is known for their user-repairable phones. Sadly, they’re currently unavailable in North America. That being said, I believe that they’ve removed the 3.5mm headphone jack from their latest model, which means I wouldn’t buy it anyway–I’m never making that mistake again. (After my current phone dies, I’m done with flagship phones until they bring back the headphone jack.)

However, earlier this year, Nokia released the G22, a cheap, repairable phone that has a headphone jack and microSD card support for up to 2 TB. (I’m currently talking myself down from a desire to sell my loathed Galaxy S22+ and getting this instead—or even downgrading to my old Moto G Power. I just envy that sweet, sweet 3.5 mm headphone jack and expandable memory. But I know that it’s better, environmentally and financially, to keep using the phone I have for as long as humanly possible.)

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that users don’t want devices that are as thin as modern science can make them. We want repairable, good quality, long-lasting, and affordable devices. They’re better for our wallets, our convenience, and the environment. And some manufacturers are beginning to realize that, at least.

There are alternatives

I’ve been talking a lot about new devices. I believe that all new devices should be modular, user-repairable, and built to last, with support and security updates that last for a very, very long time. But new devices aren’t the only solution.

I mentioned that many old devices that were better and more repairable that modern ones. So why not just buy old ones?

I love this article in Low-Tech Magazine about ways to cheaply purchase and upgrade old laptops for use today, detailing the author’s strategy for doing so and workflow on old devices. (Hint: a lightweight Linux distro is key. The writer also has an ingenious backup workflow using SD cards.) It also talks about embodied energy—that is, the energy and materials that it takes to create a device—and why buying used tech saves not just money but resources.

As a sidenote, Low-Tech Magazine is an awesome website that you should check out. It’s solar powered, meaning that it’s hosted on a server powered by solar panels on someone’s balcony in Barcelona. It’s fascinating to read about what they’ve done to optimize that, such as dithering images to save bandwidth and energy use. But the site can have downtime in bad weather, and it has a battery indicator on every page indicating how much is left. (Check out this article about the sustainability of a solar-powered website and this article about the process of rebuilding the website.)

I also recommend the awesome solarpunk Substack Sunshine and Seedlings. It introduced me to the concept of permacomputing, which is about “maximizing of hardware lifespans, minimizing energy use and focussing on the use of already available computational resources.” It’s an awesome read if you’re interested in solarpunk ideas, DIY, and tech.

I really love the idea of permacomputing, and the only reason why I went with a used Framework laptop over a used older laptop with Linux installed is because some of the software I use for work is resource-intensive (so not ideal for older hardware) and not available for Linux.

But it’s a cheap and affordable solution that’ll work for many users, and I’m glad there are resources online that encourage people to think creatively, especially in the face of an industry and society that tries to convince us that everything is disposable.