Value and Values
I’ve been a Framework enjoyer for a couple of years now. Indeed, I’m writing this on my Framework 13. I didn’t buy it because it occupied the best position in the performance/portability/price matrix of the options available to me. I bought it because it offered decent performance and portability while potentially being significantly more repairable and upgradeable than its competitors, and because they put some effort into ensuring Linux is well supported. In other words, it embodied my values in ways that other laptops did not, and I thought that was worth paying a premium for. The value proposition is in the values of the company. I’m careful to point this out when recommending it to people because I don’t want them to think they are buying a “MacBook but repairable”.
Of course I was aware that there were “risks” involved. The main one that came to mind was that they might go out of business at some point and that would likely be the end of any significant repairability advantage, as despite the clever design, it is not commodity hardware as you would find in a desktop PC. Or of course, they might just abandon the model I have eventually, or abandon their current focus altogether. Any of these could happen if their business model and the niche they occupy turns out to not be sustainable, or profitable, or they fail to grow that niche market. In such an event, it would be the same as if I had bought any other laptop. They joke all the time about doing an IPO, something which might significantly effect their ability to stick to their principles, and it comes across very “ha ha, only serious”.
One risk that hadn’t really occurred to me was that they would associate their brand with fascism in a ridiculous PR own-goal.
But, why wouldn’t I have expected something like that? If I could anticipate that they might abandon their stated values for predictable business reasons, why would I not expect that they might betray a set of values that were left unstated, ones that I merely assumed they held as a baseline of decency? Despite presenting themselves as a hacker-friendly, values-forward company doing things in new and different ways in order to tackle an intractable problem, at the end of the day they are still a VC funded Silicon Valley startup. It is a joke at this point how many such entities have abandoned their stated principles or otherwise betrayed their customers and the public in the pursuit of growth, or for political expedience, and many more whose principles were always obvious lies, or based on disingenuous right-wing distortions of values like “free speech”.
What Are Corporate Values Even?
While there are sometimes better or worse choices amongst products and services, from an ethical perspective, it is not in the nature of the companies that produce them under the capitalist system to put principles or values above the accumulation of capital.
One obvious problem with such organisations is of course that they are profit-seeking, and subject to the whims of the market. If a strategy isn’t working (i.e. is not resulting in growth), a company that doesn’t adapt will stagnate or wither away to nothing as their competitors crowd them out of the market. If a principle is an obstacle to that adaptation, then it is likely to be discarded, because holding to it would be an existential threat. This is the main source of the risks I identified above. If they manage to survive and grow to the point where they are dominating or even monopolising their industry, it is likely that any putative values will have long been abandoned. And if they are bought out by a larger company, there is no reason to expect that their values will survive the transition.
Another problem is that they are hierarchical; private tyrranies in fact. The feelings, opinions, obsessions and values of their owners, CEO and other officers, carry much more weight than anybody working within them, and certainly more than their customers. Sometimes this can work contrary to a company’s need for growth. A principled owner/CEO could potentially stick with lower-growth strategies as long as there is nobody in a position to fire them - though I wouldn’t expect such a situation to last indefinitely. An unhinged CEO on a bender could help elect a fascist who is hostile to his company’s interests, confident that his cult of personality will protect him from the consequences. Or in a somewhat less extreme scenario, the CEO might just want to help out some of his problematic fave open source developers, and not want to think about why that is a problem for some people, and there’s nothing that anybody can really do about it except make angry noises online and refuse to buy any more of the company’s products. We can’t fork a laptop manufacturer like we can an open source project, unfortunately (and forking a major open source project isn’t exactly trivial either).
These people exist in completely different milieu than the rest of us, responsible for millions or billions of ${currencyUnits} worth of undemocratically allocated capital. Our concerns about the swelling tide of racist and queerphobic rhetoric and attacks around the world are abstract to them, mere differences of opinion. They and their peers are concerned about real things, like access to cheap skilled labour, regulations that might reduce their power or increase their costs, and taxes that might shave a few million off their accumulated or potential billions. They’re more likely to see it as prudent to appease fascist movements than to oppose them, once they come to power. Violent street gangs, uniformed or otherwise, don’t really affect them. The policy whims of a mercurial leader might. And anyway, if they play their cards right they might get to be the Hugo Boss or IBM of the 21st century. Or get their own government department.
In the world of capitalist tech companies, stated principles and values are best understood as marketing: nice, cheap, non-binding promises that bring certain demographics to the trough, or make people feel good about their purchases, that they are making responsible choices or contributing to some improvement to the world. It certainly worked well enough on me, for Framework. They can hold to them, or pretend to, as long as they are useful, and abandon them when they become a burden. Their real values emerge from the inhuman machinery of the capitalist system, and the class interests of men twisted by privilege and power.
What is to be done?
The laptop market is the way it is because it is more profitable to manufacture disposable products and sell replacements for them in the future than it is to make repairable products that you may sell fewer of. Good intentions and green consumerism is unlikely to change that, as admirable as the attempt may seem.
Not to be all whatabouty, but certainly it is absurd to say that it is bad to buy a Framework, and good to buy a laptop from a company with a dismal track record on repairability, which is currently also sucking up to a fascist administration. All for-profit tech companies are somewhere on a spectrum from bad to worse, and there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
No doubt there are many regulations that could be put in place to increase repairability of all sorts of devices and reduce other sources of e-waste. Stuff along the lines of the EU’s regulations on phone repairability, and the common charger rules that came into force for most devices in December 2024, and will apply to laptops from April 2026. We should be dictating to the industry the standards of repairability and sustainability that they have to meet, not hoping for plucky American startups to innovate a new set of norms - and we should be ruthless in our demands.
In the meantime, and always, we should take the commitments of for-profit companies with a grain of salt, and not allow their products to define us. I maintain that the tech industry will not reflect our values until we own everything, from the chip fabs to the stars, and the profit motive is a thing of the past.
