There are a lot of ways to tell this story about Apple allowing people to repair devices at a shop not owned and operated by Apple. It’s a wise move and here’s a personal anecdote why I would say so.

Nearly 25 years ago I worked as an authorized Apple repair engineer. I’d pore over videos sent to the independent repair shop I worked in. High-quality productions on CD from the manufacturer gave me x-ray vision, to see every step of decomposing and assembling Apple hardware.

In one hilarious day at work I was tossed a broken Apple product at noon by my manager and told to have it sorted out over lunch. Soon I had every screw and nut carefully removed down to the last one, parts laid out across the giant work space.

That means I did not just pull a part and replace using the “consumer-friendly” method of preset tabs and levers, common in today’s world. Instead I took apart, tested and rebuilt that device to be like new, given a carefully orchestrated training model from Apple themselves.

I said hilarious because when my manager returned from lunch he said “Damnit Davi, just pull a bad part and swap it. Do you have to understand everything? You could have joined us for lunch.”

Feed belly or mind? The choice for me was clear. He didn’t much care for the fact that I had just finished academic studies under Virgil’s Georgics (29 BCE) phrase “Rerum cognoscere causas” (verse 490 of Book 2 “to Know the Causes of Things”)

Sometimes I even put a personal touch on these repairs. One Apple laptop sent by the DoD was used in GPS development for strike fighters, so I made its icon for the system drive look like a tiny F-16 Falcon.

An appreciation for that extra effort meant a nice note from the US gov on formal stationary. Apple wanted computing to be “personal” and that is exactly what repair shops like ours were doing for customers.

Three years later I was managing a team of engineers who would desolder boards and update individual chips. As good and efficient as we were, however, everyone knew there was an impending slide into planned obsolescence economic models. Accountants might have asked us how many Zenith TV repair technicians exist, given Zenith itself disappeared. Remember these?

Profit models on the wall seemed to rotate towards shipping any malfunctioning products back to manufacturers, who would forward them to Chinese landfills for indefinite futures, instead of to engineers like me or my team who would gladly turn them around in a week.

Anyway it was 2010 when I owned an Apple iPhone. It died abruptly. Locked out of repairing it myself by the company policy, I took it to a desk in their billboard-like sensory-overload retail/fashion store.

An Apple employee looked at the phone and told me a secret sensor showed red, so no warranty would be honored. There had been no moisture I was aware of, yet Apple was telling me I couldn’t return my dead device because they believed that faulty device more than me?

Disgusted with this seemingly illegal approach to warranty issues, I quickly and easily disassembled that iPhone, replaced their faulty red sensor with a new one, and returned again. Apple confirmed (as a stupid formality) the new sensor wasn’t showing red, and gladly swapped the phone with a brand new one instead of repairing mine.

I wasn’t wrong, their inability to engineer honestly was…as they were forced to admit three years later:

…owners that were denied warranty repairs over internal moisture sensors that falsely registered water damage are a step closer to collecting their share…

Immediately after they swapped my defective phone I sold the new one and stopped using any Apple products, as I announced in my HOPE talk that year.

Good news, therefore, that today Apple finally has gone back to a mode of operating that honors the important consumer right-to-repair, as Vice reports:

After years of fighting independent repair, Apple is rolling out a program that will allow some independent companies to buy official parts, repair tools, and diagnostic services outside of the company’s limited “authorized” program. It’s a big win for the right to repair movement…

I’ve written about this on my blog for nearly 15 years already, so it’s encouraging to see progress even if it does come late.

RIP Senator Wellstone.

Recently I was fortunate to have a gate unlocked that led onto grounds of Magdalen College, Oxford, England for a stroll along the “Addison Walk” around a small island in the River Cherwell.

A paragraph in the 1820 topographical guide to Oxford gives some perspective on the walk’s namesake (page 85):

On the north side of the grounds is a long walk, still termed Addison’s walk, once the chosen retreat of that writer, when intent on solitary reflection. In its original state no spot could be better adapted to meditation, or more genial lo his temper.

No monuments to Addison were found along this walk, although apparently the Spanish oaks famously lining both sides were planted by Addison himself.

As I exited the secluded leafy path and crossed a bridge I couldn’t help but notice an engraved shield of C. S. Lewis placed upon on an old stone wall.

Lewis seemingly wrote this poem to contrast his faith in eternity with his disappointments in a series of ephemeral life events. Despite the age and environment of the poetry, I believe it provides excellent food for thought in our modern era of cloud computing.

I heard in Addison’s Walk a bird sing clear:
This year the summer will come true. This year. This year.

Winds will not strip the blossom from the apple trees
This year nor want of rain destroy the peas.

This year time’s nature will no more defeat you.
Nor all the promised moments in their passing cheat you.

This time they will not lead you round and back
To Autumn, one year older, by the well worn track.

This year, this year, as all these flowers foretell,
We shall escape the circle and undo the spell.

Often deceived, yet open once again your heart,
Quick, quick, quick, quick! – the gates are drawn apart.

It is said that in this poem Lewis was describing his feelings from taking walks along this same Oxford path I was on, where he engaged in deep philosophical/theological conversations with his “inklings” colleagues J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson.

While some try to limit the poem’s relevance to Lewis’ own religious struggles (raised a Christian, after the death of his mother and in his teens he left the faith disappointed and rebellious, then returned later to his roots) his words seem much more broadly insightful.

If nothing else, we can recognize Lewis experienced many trust failures as he grew up, which tested his faith. This poem emphasizes how repeated failures need not be seen as terminal when belief matures to account for greater good. He found permanence by believing operations run on something beyond each instance itself.

Perhaps I should re-frame his poem in terms of a certain “open-source container-orchestration system for automating deployment, scaling and management”…and then we’ll talk about what the container said early in the deployment.

On January 17, 1961 President Eisenhower gave a phenomenal speech about the future of technology, especially Internet authorization models. Consider his words in context of today’s social networks and data platform controls:

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect.

Video of the speech is available via C-SPAN

Many people reference this speech due to its stern warning against a congressional-military-industrial-complex diverting public funding to itself and away from education and healthcare.

People also tend to leave out the congressional role related to Eisenhower’s warning, probably because it was inferred and not explicit. Fortunately a professor of government explains how and why we still should include Congress in that speech:

When the president’s brother asked about the dropped reference to Congress, the president replied: “It was more than enough to take on the military and private industry. I couldn’t take on the Congress as well.”

Perhaps we can agree in hindsight that Eisenhower’s warnings were right. There is over-centralization in the American communications industry as well as a state of near-perpetual warfare. This means we should have also expected the “congressional-military-industrial-complex” to expand naturally into a “cyber” domain.

Of course, just like in 1961, we have more than one path forward. The tech industry should be moving itself away from power abuses and more towards something like Eisenhower’s prescient vision of globally decentralized “mutual trust” confederations.

Meanwhile, “For NATO, a serious cyberattack could trigger Article 5 of our founding treaty.”

It’s been interesting to read growing confirmations that Reagan was obviously a racist exaggerator and intentionally harmed Americans who did not have white skin.

One of the best explanations I’ve seen so far is how latent racism in Reagan’s campaigns elevated his popularity, while his opponents actually suffered when they tried to call it out without directly addressing Reagan as a racist.

Josh Levin writes about Carter being attacked for opposing racism, and also how Reagan escaped any condemnations at the same time.

Carter gave a Neshoba County Fair speech with some strong words about fighting hatred:

“You’ve seen in this campaign the stirrings of hate and the rebirth of code words like states’ rights in a speech in Mississippi,” Carter said, adding that “hatred has no place in this country.”

You would think this would have elevated Carter for being against racism in America. Instead apparently he had to go on the defensive of such a position, even denying calling the racist Reagan a racist.

Meanwhile Reagan just went right on campaigning with “stirrings of hate…code words”:

While Carter was chastened, Reagan did nothing to modify his behavior. Just before Election Day, the Republican candidate appeared at a rally with former Mississippi Gov. John Bell Williams, an avowed segregationist. South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, meanwhile, told a crowd of Reagan supporters, “We want that federal government to keep their filthy hands off the rights of the states.” Reagan would be rewarded for the company he kept. He’d beat Carter by 10 points, winning every Southern state except West Virginia and Georgia.

I believe this has been called something like the racists hate being called racist because they are racist. Carter should have just called Reagan racist and it’s a shame Carter lost trying to be diplomatic and fair (pun not intended) given how right he was.

It reminds me of the smooth language MLK used 9 October 1964 talking about Barry Goldwater’s run for President, which of course made MLK very unpopular at that time:

The principles of states’ rights advocated by Mr. Goldwater diminish us and would deny to Negro and white alike, many of the privileges and opportunities of living in American society.

MLK was absolutely right and Goldwater regularly engaged in racism using encoded signaling just like Reagan would do later, as reported even in Goldwater’s time:

…the Goldwater movement, whether or not it can command a majority, remains an enormous one in the South and appears to be a racist movement and almost nothing else. …Goldwater seemed fully aware of this and not visibly distressed by it. He did not, to be sure, make any direct racist appeals. He covered the South and never, in any public gathering, mentioned ‘race’ or ‘Negroes’ or ‘whites’ or ‘segregation’ or ‘civil rights.’ … He talked about those realities all the time, in an underground, or Aesopian, language—a kind of code that few in his audiences had any trouble deciphering. In the code, ‘bullies and marauders’ means ‘Negroes.’ ‘Criminal defendants” means negroes. States rights means ‘opposition to civil rights.’ ‘Women’ means ‘white women.’

MLK was assassinated in 1968. Goldwater continued being racist another three decades, expanding extremism and racism like his biggest fan Senator Thurmond, and died of natural causes in 1998:

…credited as a founder of the modern conservative movement and with contributing to Ronald Reagan’s [racist platform essential to his] rise to prominence and the presidency.

Goldwater’s failure, despite his “Aesopian” language, was taken by the GOP to be a result of his racism being too overt. This led to further encoding techniques by the time Reagan and Bush ran their campaigns.

Republican strategist Lee Atwater, who ensured George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential race’s success considerably by appealing to racism, explained that overtly appealing to racism backfired by the mid-1960s, “[s]o you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.”

Back to Levin’s points about Reagan (similar to the present occupant in the Whitehouse), he was exceptional in that his racism gave Nixon’s racism the appearance of being less extreme, which is no small feat.

I thought of the Neshoba County Fair and its aftermath this week when the Atlantic published a previously unknown snippet of a conversation between Reagan and President Richard Nixon. On the morning of Oct. 26, 1971, Reagan, who was then the governor of California, told Nixon that African nations were to blame for the United Nations’ vote to eject Taiwan and welcome in mainland China. “Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said in audio captured by Nixon’s White House taping system, “to see those, those monkeys from those African countries—damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon cackled in response. A few minutes later, the president called Secretary of State William Rogers to report, in the words of the Atlantic’s Timothy Naftali, “that Reagan spoke for racist Americans, and they needed to be listened to.”

On that tape, Reagan’s racism is direct and undeniable. Nixon, whose own racism is extraordinarily well-documented, immediately rejoices in it, laughing as Reagan talks about African “monkeys.” In his call with Rogers, by contrast, Nixon distances himself from the racist commentary, attributing it to someone more prejudiced than he is. (He also tells Rogers, erroneously, that Reagan had called the African leaders “cannibals.”) At the same time, Nixon categorizes Reagan’s views as a valuable political data point, a sentiment that needs to be understood and nurtured, not rejected.

Doug Rossinow, professor of history at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and author of “The Reagan Era: A History of the 1980s” puts it like this in his 2015 article called “…Face the Fact that Reagan Was Hostile to Civil Rights”:

Reagan rode the white backlash—along with other major issues, to be sure—farther than anyone else ever did in American history, before or since. It is long since time that historians of Reagan, Reaganism, and the 1980s overcame their reluctance to tell this basic part of that era’s history plainly.

And then a commenter on Rossinow’s article sums it all up for us:

…calling African Diplomats ‘monkeys’ is hella racist

In today’s terms, this analysis is not only historically interesting, it also impacts our debate about the safety of artificial intelligence. When machines use only straight reasoning, devoid of translation for Reagan’s true signaling and racism, they accelerate harms from encoded hate in the GOP.

I spoke about this briefly in my RSA Conference Presentation earlier this year

In other words, admitting Reagan was racist is good food for thought both in terms of political history as well as big tech.

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Update November 2020: New TV show and article released that explain “How Ronald Reagan’s Racism Helped Pave the Way for Donald Trump’s”

The “huge amount of dog-whistle racism that came from Reagan’s own lips,” [Matt Tyrnauer, director of Showtime’s The Reagans] says, “was under-reported in the time and has been virtually erased from the popular imagination.”

This deniability “becomes an essential part of dog whistling,” Berkeley Law professor and author Ian Haney López, who’s interviewed in The Reagans, tells Esquire. “It simultaneously involves appeals designed to trigger racist fears and also the denial that the person is doing any such thing.”

The list of Reagan’s under-recognized racism is a long one.

And yet somehow Americans “learned” sayings like “Shining City on a Hill” were meant to represent everyone despite all signs pointing to the kind of racism that would exclude non-white Americans from that city.