Resistance Through Inconvenience 😣

(Jon Tyson/Unsplash)

What happens when someone does something you don’t like but that negatively affects you, your organization, or something you care about?

Simple answer: You do everything you can to get in the way, to passively aggravate, to discourage a solution that you do not personally want to support.

There is a lot of that going around these days, and a few rounds of passive aggression arguably played a role in the big news of last night—the leak of a draft Supreme Court ruling that overturns Roe v. Wade.

(A few minutes before the news leaked, the Supreme Court quietly put up barricades. Point made.)

I don’t want to suggest that I’m the right person to have that discussion other than to note that it’s a sign of a broken political system that led to this result—I will instead forward you to some smart insights on the issue from people who are more versed in this topic than I.

Let me instead discuss this issue in a way that keeps me in my hard-earned lane. Because sometimes showing a somewhat innocuous example can highlight the same point while removing the cruft of emotion.

Recently, you might have heard that Apple—a company that has seemingly spent the last decade doing everything it can to limit repairability of the expensive devices it sells—launched a self-service program that, among other things, makes it possible to repair an iPhone yourself, in the comfort of your home.

Specific details of what that program looks like have been trickling out in bits and pieces, and last week, the program launched in earnest. One of the first people to try out the program, YouTuber Luke Miani (who I’ve interviewed in the past) got a hold of the recommended parts Apple offers to allow for this repair, and they’re … a lot.

Basically, Apple rents you extremely expensive equipment, a lot of it, at sizes so large that you basically need to have a large work area to even use any of it. On the one hand, Apple is clearly renting the equipment, which sells for hundreds of dollars on its own, at cost or less—as the price of the equipment would not even cover shipping. On the other hand, the equipment to repair a tiny phone comes in these boxes:

(Certainly screams “Apple” to me.)

Why do you need this equipment? Because Apple only writes the repair manuals for this specific equipment. Mind you, other companies offer other methods for doing this exact same thing, notably iFixit, without the need for this massive box.

Many people prefer to repair their devices because it saves money. Apple, by requiring the use of this overkill equipment, actually ends up charging a few bucks more than a Genius Bar repair when all is said and done. No reasonable person is going to want to do this—and Apple knows it. This program is designed to be unreasonable.

When someone wants to not do something but is required to, they will do everything they can to maneuver around it. And if they can’t avoid the inevitable, they will make it so inconvenient and frustrating that nobody will ever want to do it, damaging the cause through discouragement rather than denial.

Until the point where they find their opportunity actively push against the thing they don’t like.