Equipment, know-how and rights
Kyle Wiens is the co-founder and CEO of iFixit: a wiki-based site and repair community that teaches people to fix almost anything. From its origins in a Cal Poly dorm room in 2003, iFixit has become an international movement.
Kyle and his team think that fixing should not just be possible, but also easy. This is the ethos underpinning iFixit.com: an enormous library of nearly 3000 free-to-download repair manuals, teardowns and troubleshooting documents.
Kyle has fought long and hard for the ‘right to repair’, a movement that has had a significant impact in the U.S., including success in legalizing mobile phone unlocking and tractor repair. He writes frequently for publications such as WIRED, the Atlantic and MIT Technology review on topics such as planned obsolescence, ownership and copyright.
For Kyle, repair isn’t just an individual passion or a clever way of defying the second law of thermodynamics. It’s a way for us to reclaim the things we own and re-define the ways we consume.