I love my old iPhone 14. That might sound like a strange thing to admit, because we’re taught to think of phones as disposable, as objects we should upgrade every couple of years without a second thought. But I do love it. It’s been with me through late nights, long trips, and countless half-baked ideas that I’ve typed into its notes app. Lately, though, I’ve been starting to face some hard truths. The battery doesn’t hold a charge the way it used to. Apps that once opened instantly now sit on a loading screen for a beat too long. It’s not broken, exactly, but it’s aging, and no amount of screen time or good intentions will stop that process. Some of it I can fix. I could take it to the Genius Bar and have them swap out the battery. I could even try to do it myself, if I’m feeling brave, and that would buy me some more time. But eventually, Apple is going to stop supporting this wonderfully expensive device altogether. There will come a day when a new update doesn’t include it, when a new feature passes it by, when a repair part just isn’t available anymore. And there won’t be much I can do about it. That’s a strange thing to accept about something I own. I paid for it. I’ve taken care of it. And yet the people who made it get to decide when it becomes obsolete.
Apple did start offering self-repair services a few years ago, which sounds great on paper. But the reality is less romantic. It involves renting nearly eighty pounds of equipment, which you have to haul around and set up, and it requires you to use official parts. When you add it all up, it doesn’t save you that much money compared to just going to the Apple Store and letting a professional handle it. And if you try to go a different route, if you buy a screen or a camera component from a third party, there’s a real chance your iPhone will lock you out of certain features because it doesn’t recognize the part. It doesn’t matter if the part works perfectly well. It doesn’t matter if you installed it carefully. The software sees something unfamiliar and decides that you, the owner, can’t be trusted. That’s not just inconvenient. It’s a fundamental statement about who really controls the devices we carry with us every day. And the thing is, this problem goes far beyond iPhones. Manufacturers have put similar locks on all kinds of gadgets, from video game consoles to cars to smart home devices. They make products hard to modify, hard to repair, and even harder to restore after some firmware update renders a certain feature unusable. If you’ve ever had a device stop working because of an update you didn’t ask for, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Not surprisingly, a lot of people think this isn’t fair. They think there should be a better way, and at this point it’s safe to say that sentiment has grown into a full-blown movement. It’s called the right to repair, and it’s built around a radical idea: when you buy something, you should actually own it. Not just the physical shell of it, but everything inside, including the software that makes it run. Right-to-repair advocates believe that consumers have the right to maintain, fix, or modify any piece of hardware they’ve purchased. If your phone’s screen cracks, you should be able to replace it without being punished. If your tractor breaks down, you should be able to fix it without calling the dealer. If your pacemaker runs out of battery, well, that’s a bigger conversation, but the principle still applies. This movement has been around for years, but it’s gained even more traction recently because artificial intelligence has made it easier than ever to hack the software that powers consumer devices. The same tools that companies use to lock things down can now be used by ordinary people to unlock them. That’s exciting for the right-to-repair crowd and terrifying for manufacturers who built their business models on keeping control in their own hands.
To find out what’s next for the movement, I went straight to one of its most recognizable figures: Louis Rossmann. You might know him as a YouTuber, a guy with a thick New York accent and a storefront full of broken MacBooks, but he’s more than that. He’s a consumer rights advocate, a kind of folk hero for the repair community, and someone who has spent years fighting against the idea that companies should be able to decide what you can do with your own property. Earlier this year, Rossmann organized the Own Your Shit tour, which went around the United States with a very specific goal: to call for the death of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That’s a long, dry legal name for something with huge consequences. Section 1201 is the part of copyright law that prohibits users from bypassing digital restrictions placed on devices by manufacturers. In plain English, it’s the rule that makes it illegal to break a digital lock, even if you’re not stealing anything, even if you’re just trying to fix something you already own. Rossmann has been fighting this law for years, and the tour was a way to bring that fight to people who might never have heard of it. He wants to make the issue personal, because that’s what it really is. It’s about your phone, your car, your home, your life.
When Rossmann and I talked, we covered a lot more than just the DMCA. We talked about the US midterm elections and what they might mean for the right-to-repair movement, because at the end of the day, this is also a political issue. It’s about whether lawmakers are willing to stand up to corporate lobbying or whether they’ll continue to let manufacturers write the rules. We talked about the idea of putting out bounties to find product fixes, which is exactly as cool as it sounds. Instead of waiting for a company to release an official repair, you offer a reward to anyone who can crack the problem, and suddenly thousands of independent tinkerers are working on your behalf. It turns repair from a corporate service into a community project. We also talked about what happens when the right-to-repair movement collides with the rise of AI. That’s a collision that’s already happening. AI can analyze software, spot vulnerabilities, and generate patches in ways that used to take human experts weeks or months. It can democratize repair, but it can also give manufacturers even more sophisticated tools to lock things down. The same technology that empowers consumers can empower corporations, and the outcome isn’t guaranteed. Rossmann is aware of that, but he doesn’t seem defeated. If anything, he seems energized by the possibilities.
In the end, the right to repair isn’t just about saving an old phone or fixing a broken laptop. It’s about power. It’s about who gets to decide what happens to the things we own, and whether ownership means anything at all in the digital age. When you buy a device, you’re not just buying plastic and silicon. You’re buying into a relationship with a manufacturer, and right now that relationship is wildly unbalanced. They can change the rules with an update. They can make features stop working. They can refuse to sell you parts or force you to use their repair services at their prices. The right-to-repair movement is trying to rebalance that relationship, to remind companies that they work for us, not the other way around. It’s a long fight, and there will be setbacks, but there’s also momentum. More people are asking questions. More states are considering repair-friendly legislation. And more people like Rossmann are out there, building a movement one video, one repair, and one conversation at a time. So when I sat down with him, I wanted to know how he does it. Not just how he evangelizes for the cause, but how he introduces it to people who have never thought about it before. How do you take a legal issue as dry as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and make someone care? How do you convince a stranger that the phone in their pocket is a symbol of something bigger? My first question to Louis Rossmann was simple: “You’re someone who spends a lot of time not just evangelizing over ‘right to repair,’ but I would imagine introducing it to people who don’t know what it is. How do you do that?”
