Repair cafés are the real internet of things

By ten in the morning the church hall is loud with the whine of hand drills. A retired electrician is looking at a lamp as if it owed him money. Across the room a teenager is learning to resolder a headphone jack.

Repair cafés began in Amsterdam in 2009 and now number in the thousands. The idea is simple: bring a broken thing, sit with a volunteer, and fix it together. Roughly two thirds of items leave working.

The politics of a screw

Many failures are unnecessary. A proprietary screw head, a glued battery, a firmware lock. Volunteers keep a list of manufacturers who make repair hard, and an informal list of those who do not. It is better consumer advice than most review sites.

The cafés will not solve the e-waste problem on their own. But they leave a generation with a physical sense of how things work, and that may matter more than any single toaster.