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Broken By Design: How tech monopolies made our world dangerously brittle and how we take it back
Paperback
Business GeneralGeneral Computers
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: May 12 2026
Pages: 268
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.61 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
You know the feeling. You pull up to a fast-food drive-thru, craving a simple ice cream cone, only to be met with the familiar, infuriating refrain: The machine is down. Or perhaps you have experienced something with much higher stakes: sitting in a crowded airport terminal when a sudden, mysterious IT glitch grounds thousands of global flights, leaving you stranded for days. Maybe you have tried to replace the battery in your perfectly functional two-year-old smartphone, only to discover that doing so will permanently disable the device's core features.
What do all of these incredibly frustrating, seemingly disconnected events have in common? They are the visible stress fractures in a dangerously fragile technological foundation. They are the symptoms of a world where we have surrendered our autonomy to centralized, proprietary tech monopolies.
In Broken By Design, we peel back the polished aluminum casing of modern convenience to reveal a disturbing truth: you no longer own your things. Over the last two decades, multinational tech conglomerates have quietly rewritten the rules of consumerism, shifting us from a society of owners to a society of perpetual renters. Through restrictive End-User License Agreements, draconian Digital Rights Management software, and the aggressive centralization of data into the Cloud, corporations have stripped you of your right to repair, modify, or even truly understand the devices you rely on daily.
This existential consolidation leaves our society deeply vulnerable to catastrophic failure:
- Brittle Cloud Infrastructure: A single line of bad code, a localized server outage, or an API update can ripple outward, disabling hospital life-support systems, freezing banking networks, and bringing modern logistics to a grinding halt.
- Systemic Exploitation: Built on planned obsolescence, this framework funnels trillions of dollars from working people into the pockets of monopolists while generating devastating mountains of toxic electronic waste.
- The Proprietary Security Myth: Tech giants want you to believe that closed systems are safer, but the reality is that forced dependency is the ultimate security risk.
From farmers in the American Midwest hacking their own half-million-dollar tractors to independent fixers fighting tech giants in European courts, the Right to Repair movement is exposing the lie of proprietary safety. Engineered to challenge the status quo, this manifesto takes you behind the curtain of an invisible war, exploring the psychology of learned helplessness that keeps us compliant, the hidden economics of forced upgrades, and the human stories of everyday tinkerers fighting to reclaim our autonomy.
More than an exposé, Broken By Design is a survival guide for the digital age. Inside, you will learn how to:
- Break free from the exhaustion of constant subscription fees.
- Identify the grifters exploiting closed systems.
- Navigate the market of open-source, repairable tech.
If you have ever felt the sting of a forced update, the helpless rage of a bricked device, or the terrifying reality of a localized internet blackout, this toolkit will validate your frustration and help you fight back. You do not have to accept a brittle, rented reality. It is time to change your mindset, reclaim your agency, and demand the right to fix our broken world.
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