The Life of a Watch

Covered in sweat, mud, spit, and energy gel. Buttons tapped, smushed, and fumbled over.

Hi there, welcome back to Breakfast Club, a newsletter for thoughtful movers. My name is Sam Robinson, a former historian-turned-tech-worker who writes about life in motion and the ideas that shape our movement through the world.

I’ve got a couple new stories in the works. In the meantime, here’s a repost of a 2022 piece that newer subscribers haven’t seen. It’s lightly rewritten with an update at the bottom. Plus, new tweets of the week.

Midjourney generation.

My watch stopped the day after a rainstorm.

It was the sort of west-coast weather meteorologists now label with a fun name like “atmospheric river” or “tropical plume” when twenty years ago they would have just said, “heavy rain tomorrow, folks.” And of course my timing was bad and I got caught outside, running during peak precipitation. I was drenched. So was the watch. And when I awoke the next day, its digital screen was blank and lifeless, the clock interface empty.

A couple years ago, rushing to catch a train, my arm had whacked into a concrete traffic bollard. The impact cracked the glass face of the watch’, breaking the seal between it and the elements. The downpour must have soaked the exposed circuits and the battery failed. The watch was now dead.

We've been trained to be blasé about the end of our devices. Decades of marketing have taught us to embrace the contradiction that our current stuff is obsolete, that new stuff will make our lives better, even though that new stuff will eventually be tossed away when the next model drops.
 
But something about the death of this particular watch felt different. Now I'm not usually sentimental about my stuff. I’m not the sort of person who names their car or lines up to get the latest iPhone. For the most part, I see my devices as useful appliances

Yet I’d worn this watch, a Garmin GPS Forerunner, for over 3 years. It had rested, wrapped around my wrist, for over 10,000 miles of running, including several long races. It's been covered in sweat, mud, spit, energy gel, and blood. Buttons tapped, smushed, and fumbled over. Its interface flicked inwards innumerable times as I glanced at it during both work meetings and workouts. And now it sat blank, its steady metronome of 60 beats-per-minute gone.
 
It was, upon reflection, a real loss.

As devices increasingly penetrate our lives, they enmesh themselves further into our minds and bodies. This is largely the result of smartphones. According to writer Adam Greenfield, they’ve altered the texture of everyday life, from how we wake up, to how we work, to how we consume information. And as additional objects become networked within a wider internet of things—watches, wearable sensors, exercise equipment, voice assistants—we’ll further internalize these objects’ design, market goals, and advertising.
 
It’s not even clear if these are even “objects” in the traditional sense anymore. They no longer sit passive, awaiting manipulation or input. ”Move!” the Garmin will bark at you if you’ve been sitting for too long. At least the Oura ring is more polite in the notifications it pushes to your phone: ”Why not take a break and stretch your legs?” Our relationship with our devices is no longer one of mere ownership. They shape our behavior, our thoughts, and our actions.

Imagine you’re running a race. And when you cross a mile marker, a digital watch signals that you’re slow relative to your goal pace. To speed up, you dig further into your muscles cells’ mitochondria, which will effect your effort and pain level. This will affect how you feel later. It may change how much you eat that day and the quality of your sleep. In that sense, the watch is acting upon your body, influencing your behavior, and changing your decisions. 

Moreover, our devices connect entire hemispheres in chains of production. Sure, it’s just a watch. But consider its manufacture: an assemblage of petroleum-based plastic distilled from Middle Eastern petroleum wells, connected with lithium mined in Australia, rubber harvested in Indonesia, and assembled via factory labor in eastern Asia and neoliberal trade policies. All this manifests as the blinking, buzzing, beeping device on your wrist.

 The philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who lived in the Netherlands in the 17th century, would have been fascinated by our digital devices. He argued that all bodies, human or otherwise, had a vitality, that “each thing as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its own being." Bodies are social, constantly affecting and being influenced by other bodies. In Spinoza's view, there’s continuity between humans and other beings, including seemingly inanimate objects. We’re all part of a spectrum of material stuff that's constantly touching, bumping into, and interacting with one another. 
 
Jane Bennett, a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins, elaborates that all matter is vibrant with intrinsic force, influence, and vitality. This obligates us to reconsider our most basic relationships to the material world. Your watch isn’t dead stuff, a mishmash of resources bent to serve your will; it’s a lively assemblage that influences your life.

Moreover, your objects are never “thrown away”; they endure. As Spinoza noted, all this matter persists, influencing other bodies as plastics break down into oceans, as circuits oxidize into rust, as battery lithium leeches into groundwater.

Midjourney generation.

A few days after my watch conked out, I discovered it working again. Like a digital version of the New Testament, three days later the dead watch had risen.

The moisture must have evaporated out of the its inner workings. So, I’ve got my watch back . . . for now. But it is disposable by design. And that’s a shame, not only because our landfills are overflowing, but also because this object has joined me for adventure, mishaps, and small victories.

Mile after mile, steadily ticking, joining me wristside for all those hundreds of hours upon the trails and the roads and the sidewalks, past so much life and traffic and humanity. Sprinting to finish lines and to catch the Amtrak. Shuffling on sore legs to quiet an anxious mind. Climbing, always climbing. So much we ran through together. All of this relegated to a waste bin. Considered this way, tossing the watch aside is cosmically obscene.

So we should work to regain the value of repair, which we’ve mostly abandoned in an age of ceaseless consumption. Such alternatives already exist: there’s a thriving maker and repair community online. (For example, here’s a video for how to replace the battery of a Garmin Forerunner 235.) But the barrier of entry is too high if you need to scour Reddit to figure out how to hack your watch’s motherboard. Far better if we could push markets back toward productive systems that accommodated basic repairs.

And why not start with something as small as a watch?

Thanks for reading.

An update

Repairing my Garmin watch required purchasing several aftermarket parts and multiple attempts to use a blow dryer to melt off the glue adhesive that seals the watchface to its interior. These attempts failed. I’ll need a heat gun to try again. Two years on, I still have the watch, and fixing it remains on my to-do list.

I did have a positive repair experience recently. Working with a friend, we disassembled my family’s dryer, which had conked out due to the increased laundry of having a new child. We replaced the drive belt that rotates the drum of the machine. It wasn’t easy, but nor was it overwhelmingly difficult to replace the failed belt.

The biggest challenge was logistical: confirming that we had acquired the correct aftermarket parts. Getting the right parts requires cross-indexing the jumble of capitalized letters and numbers that make up a part number, comparing that between the listing at the vendor’s website with the specs of the appliance manufacture. It’s only possible with larger, more reputable manufacturers who provide part numbers. Having acquired and replaced the belt and connected pulley, the dryer is now working well.

Legislative efforts are making the repair of everyday objects easier. In October of last year, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed the Right to Repair Act, which requires manufactures to make available the tools, parts, and documentation to fix devices priced above $100. This followed an executive order from President Joe Biden in 2021, preventing manufacturers from imposing restrictions on DIY repairs and independent device shops. Apple has now made a self-service repair kit available for US customers. In a White House roundtable last autumn, the company announced it will honor the California right to repair law nationwide.

The essay above was inspired by Tamara Shopsin’s charming LaserWriter II, a novel about an independent Mac repair shop in 1990s New York City. It’s a fun read with a story weaving together the history of digital technology and the inner lives of our devices.

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Tweets of the week

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Parting thought

“Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being.”
— Baruch Spinoza