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.
