AI can’t repair my sewing machine and do you think it reflects the decline of Western Civilisation?

I live in Warsaw Poland and on a main road nearby is an old sewing machine repair shop with dirty windows and a faded sign on its door and I have never seen anyone in there having their sewing machine repaired. It’s like a relic of a lost era a facade on Main Street at Disneyland but it makes me want to buy a sewing machine and break it just so I can take it to the shop and watch someone fix it with their hands and bring something broken back to life like a retail Lazarus.

Last weekend my laptop revolted against my writing and crashed so I took it to the Mac service store and learned you don’t repair old laptops any more you just replace the whole thing in fact the repair gentleman said anything over seven years old is considered obsolete which i thought was inappropriate with my seven-year-old son standing next to me.

I’ve no idea what to tell my nine-year-old.

There’s a rarely-reported* legend about how when Rome was burning Nero broke a string on his fiddle and when he asked a manservant for a replacement he was told you don’t replace strings anymore you just replace the whole violin.

And that’s when Nero knew they were doomed.

I paid £1500 British pounds in 2014 for that laptop which adjusted for inflation is 14 billion dollars in today’s money. 1.4 billion dollars a year feels like a suboptimal return on investment for something now considered obsolete.

Some say that 10 years is a good innings for a technical device but it’s not because the Lincoln Calibration Sphere 1 (LCS-1) satellite is also a technical device and has been in orbit since 1965.

That is a good innings.

Many hanker for a return to the ways of times past the days when people tilled the fields and worked with their hands and wore aprons and rugged dungarees. This is very understandable when there’s much chaos around as there’s a sense of the idyllic about days gone by but I do struggle with romanticising this time because life was tough then and folks died young. Without teeth.

I await the TikToks of people throwing their sewage into the streets as a sign of living authentically but I’m not confident it will be popular with the neighbours.

Of the three horsemen of the Shopcopalyse we are familiar with Increasing Consumption and Rising Prices but accompanying these two is the third and lesser-known rider named A Decline in the Quality and Shelf-Life of Things. I hypothesise his lesser fame is due to the unwieldy name.

He is however impressively effective as we’ve become strangely okay with paying money for things that don’t last or cannot be repaired or are poorly designed so long as they’re cheap. Except for fast food which is an odd exception but anytime someone gets a bad burger at McDonalds it’s straight back to the counter for a full refund.

Perhaps bad McDonalds is one disappointment too many for people to bear.

The quality of handyman tools is also declining but at least now when someone says a poor workman blames his tools the poor workman has a legitimate excuse.

I would like to be optimistic but the approaching onslaught of AI-generated everything means we must prepare in the short term for things to get worse not better. Everything will have AI baked into it including baking equipment.

This will trigger a familiar pattern whereby everyone becomes so annoyed with the uselessness of things that after a while there will be a reaction and a happy medium will be found.

Unfortunately like grief we have to go through the intermediate stages and I wish there was a way to jump right ahead to the part where everyone realises what’s best for us just like grieving people want to jump right to acceptance.

There are things we can do to reverse the trend such as purchasing directly from local craftspeople or investing infrequently in higher-quality longer-lasting goods or lobbying for Right to Repair legislation or just not buying gaudy trinkets.

And that is all I have to say about that.

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*Rarely-reported in the sense that this article is the only time it is has ever been reported.