The EU's new legislation mandating user-replaceable batteries is, on its surface, a consumer tech policy story. But read alongside Taiye Selasi's New Yorker conversation about surviving perfectionism, it becomes something more interesting: a week in which two very different conversations both landed on the idea that designed-in obsolescence is a form of control, and that the right to repair, whether device or self, is quietly radical.

Designed Obsolescence as Ideology

The Verge's Dominic Preston notes that user-replaceable batteries are "coming back in a big way," framing this as a return rather than an innovation. What was standard became premium became impossible, not because of engineering constraints but because sealed batteries meant shorter device lifespans and faster upgrade cycles. This is designed obsolescence as business model. Selasi's discussion of perfectionism maps onto the same structure. Perfectionism, as she describes it, is a system that makes the self unfixable: every flaw becomes proof of fundamental inadequacy rather than a component to be swapped out. The psychology of the upgrade culture and the psychology of perfectionism share the same architecture.

Repairability as Commons and the HOA Parallel

There's a third story here that completes the triangle. Fast Company's piece on the startup trying to fix HOAs describes another system designed to prevent individual repair: homeowners associations that accumulate governance power but resist accountability. The founder's observation that HOAs are "broken" in a systematic way mirrors both the battery situation (systems designed to need replacement, not repair) and the perfectionism problem (systems that pathologize the need for maintenance). The EU battery legislation, boring as it sounds, is a policy argument that devices, like people, should be designed to be maintained. The right to repair is not just a tech policy. It is a philosophical position about what systems are for.