The Thing That's Too Well Built

I’m ending my week in a grouchy mood. Right now, I am spending the first day of my three days off trying to battle what appear to be symptoms of bronchitis.  Before that, I have been storming around to eight different centres in town, and even more online, for the past four days searching for and trying to get a printer and/or computer parts, which even by the advice of so called ‘experts’ has been an enormous feat of trial and error. I finally have working results, but I shouldn’t have had this much difficulty. This is sort of the endgame to my ranting on Techno Scrap.

Weary of all these hassles just for simple tech repairs, and considering the rate of obsolescence and usage life of today’s typical consumer products, my mind began to drift around wondering what is out there on the opposite end of the spectrum. That is, I'm talking about a powerful piece of technology, of any product, that has been around during my lifetime, that has had a huge global impact, and was manufactured perfectly right off the mark with little or no revision, and has a proven to be high in the standards of durability, ease of maintenance, and ease of use by even the stupidest of people. I recalled some past articles I’ve read, and one glaring and disturbing example came to my mind of something that was made just too well.  That would be an AK47 assault rifle.

Thinking aside from its ability to crudely blast bodily organs out of people, it pretty much fits those criteria I just mentioned. It was made back in the good old days when Stalin was trying to make communism universal. So, competitions came about to satisfy the goal of developing a powerful, utilitarian, cheaply manufactured, and super-durable weapon that functions in all climates and which even the most dim-witted soldier could operate and maintain with minimal effort. A Russian gunsmith, Mikail Kalashnikov, won out by designing and developing the AK47. Amazingly, he has no patent on this thing; so its design has been copied into several derivatives without the red tape of patent infringement and licensing issues in the world of arms manufacturing. Of all assault rifles, this one survives the greatest of extremes of cold, heat, dryness, moisture, and exposure to environmental contaminants. It’s been field tested by being immersed in sand, dirty water, and even drove over by vehicles, and still has a high likelihood of being able to be fired after such abuse. It's a highly effective relic of low-tech, Soviet/Iron Curtain mass production; ironically, that’s its success of defying obsolescence, because of the common and standardized interchangeable machine parts made in a system didn't make huge leaps in progressive change, thus its specs haven’t changed much since it was first made in 1947. Someone could probably take one model of this gun made in Russia in 1947, another from China made in 1954, another from Romania made in 1968, and one made in North Korea in 1996; take them all apart, shake up all their components in a gunny sack, dump them all in a muddy ditch, and then recover all those pieces and re-assemble them into four different chimera rifles made from each others’ parts, and there would still very likely be four fully-operational AK47s. By comparison, on the stupid side of computer peripheral technology, I needed one stupid simple print head for my printer, which was one of several kinds made by the same manufacturer, but which seemed to be phased out of production, and wasn’t conveniently available, or feasible to acquire cost-wise if it was used. I was replacing the fan for my desktop tower, and I had to go through the trouble of finding three different models, each of them claiming to be allegedly “universal” before I got the right one that worked. That’s odd, because my old fan was removed with simply turning four screws; one of the new “universal” replacements I got (exchange number one)would have required me to completely disassemble my tower to extract my motherboard to change things to mount the damn thing properly to have contact with the CPU. That doesn’t sound universal to me. Another “universal” fan didn’t even fit into my tower casing at all, despite the insistence from one shaggy tech-head prick that it would. Between my old printer, my replacement fan, and the assault rifle competing for the category of having “universal” manufactured parts compliance, sadly the AK47 wins.

And cheap . . . Cripes! At first, I thought I was getting a reasonable deal (after a lot of time doing exchanges) spending $16.50 for a fan, and then a hell of a deal after finding a replacement printer for under $50.00 . . . that is until after I did a bit of fact finding on this subject and found out that the AK47 wins again. I discovered that in some Third World nations, an AK47 assault rifle can be purchased for as little as $6.00, or traded for a couple of chickens or a sack of grain. In the tech world, I can’t even buy a decent length of simple HDMI cable for six bucks, and I sure as hell can't get one for a bag of grain or poultry! How can a fully automatic weapon cost cheaper than a bag of groceries?* But seriously, it’s sickening to know that, either unwittingly or unscrupulously, poorly monitored or unsecured shipments of humanitarian supplies going to such places as Africa are occassionally intercepted and seized by warlords, who in turn barter or sell this stuff through the black market to acquire weapons; chiefly, the most favoured and coveted ones being sought are AK47s. In cases like this, especially in Africa, it’s a sound guess that the majority of these guns are then distributed and going into the hands of guerrilla fighters or soldiers who are very likely in some regions there to be under the age of fifteen.

That’s the other issue. As far as assault rifles go, an AK47's design has been made so practical and simple that an illiterate child can take it apart, re-assemble it, and operate it. And that’s when you know that there is such a thing as too much bloody simplicity: when the most powerful and devastating kinds of weapons start becoming too readily capable of being handled and made accessible to people who are either too young, or ignorant/stupid to know how to read. Sure, it is disturbing to watch some periodic news story about the Taliban, or some other radical terrorist group members running around with cheap, yet powerful weapons like Kalashnikov rifles, but what is a hundred times more disturbing to me is knowing that there are entire generations of people in countries like Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, or Sierra Leone, regardless of religion or politics, who have been trained to kill, or have killed others since their childhood with the most powerful weapons available that they can physically handle. Sadly, this is the stuff that doesn’t make it to the news too often. Too many people seem to be ignorant about this.

The AK47 is the most mass-produced automatic firearm on Earth, so it is a pretty established format in terms of weapon arsenals. More than 75 million AK 47s and 100 million AK derivatives and variants have been manufactured worldwide, totalling about 175 million: approximately one AK rifle per 40 people on Earth. I’m guessing they are most popularly used in nations where there is less than one TV set per 300 of its citizens, like Mozambique, whose flag actually has an image of an AK47 machine gun on it as an emblem.** I was thinking of another example of a real politically anarchical shit spot on the face of this globe, and for some reason I instantly thought of Somalia. In the city of Mogadishu alone, according to UN reports, there are estimated to be about 1.3 million AK47, or AK type assault rifles in possession of its citizens. That’s double the number of cell phones in use in all of Somalia.*** When machine guns are more than twice as likely to be available than a normally common form of communication technology, then you know you’re really in a fucked up place.

It’s shameful that devastatingly low-tech/low brow methods of carnage and destruction seem to be more universal and consumer "friendly" than products that are supposedly educational, creative, and constructive high-tech/high brow solutions to things. It shouldn’t be easier and cheaper to buy an assault rifle in the Third World than it is to get an education or medical aid there; nor should it be easier to get a gun there than it is to get one's computer fixed here****.

*- Simple answer. . . if you were starving to death and were desperately becoming indifferent or ignorant to the value of things, you might sell your assets, including weapons, for dirt cheap too. 
**-Travel advice: if you see a weapon of any kind proudly stamped on a nation’s flag, it would probably be in your best interest to STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM THERE!
***-Statistics compiled from NationMaster.com
****-Addendum, Feb 11, 2012: Discovered that the scanning utility on my cheap new 3-in-1 doesn't work. Another goddamned trip to return/exchange shit. . . GRRRRR! I think I'm ready to get my own AK47.