No it won't, because much of the time we effectively don't have a choice. While things look bleak, if more people who had the means to do so started an NGO like Louis has, then maybe we could have made the slightest bit of real progress. "Voting with your wallet" has done precisely jack and shit, especially as "alternative options" continue to dwindle.
And what would that NGO do? Just exist? That would accomplish nothing. Make educational material, try to educate "normies" about why they should buy repairable electronics instead of throwaway junk? Document and catalog which things are repairable and which not? Those things already exist. They're good, but they won't convince the "normies" that either don't understand what the hell you're talking about, or think you're trying to scam or brainwash them. Say they lack the forethought or intelligence to think into the future and make the calculation "I could spend $100 now, but it might break in 1 year, or I could spend $500 and it might last 10 years". I've talked to people who say "I can afford to spend $100 a year for the rest of my life, why should I spend $500 now and be stuck with x thing for 10 years, and have to repair it, when I can have a shiny new model with the latest features every year?" and I've also met old people who say "why should I worry about doing stuff right - fixing machinery properly, investing money into renovating my house properly, when I'm 60 or 70 years old and I'll be dead soon? I'll do the minimal repairs on my car to keep it running, I don't care if it breaks or rusts out in 10 years (that's gonna be my kids problem) and why should I renovate my house properly so that it lasts 100 years (and that my children won't need to renovate it again after the substandard materials fail in 20-30 years) when I'll be dead by then?" Even spending the extra money nowadays doesn't even mean anything, you might be able to find repairable electronics for the same price or cheaper, just spending more money means you might be buying overpriced ripoff junk. But we know how this stuff works and what's reliable and what isn't, a normie doesn't. Expecting NGOs to have enough intelligent manpower to document every piece of junk that might be available on the market is not realistic. They'd run out of money and start taking bribes to misrepresent the value of things - make the briber's stuff seem better and the competition's stuff seem worse.
Would the NGO do political lobbying? What's the end goal of that lobbying? To make laws? What would the laws say? How would you enforce them? Would you have the government set up an agency that has to inspect and approve every product that anyone wants to sell? What would they test and grade in the product? Similar agencies already exist - FCC has to approve everything for electromagnetic compliance (EMI testing). But EMI compliance is able to be defined - there are rules, how much emissions a device is allowed to emit at a certain frequency, for an entire range of frequencies, you have different limits, it can be very complex, even for such a simple thing. How would you make rules - actual measurable objective rules - for "repairability"? Countless things influence that. Not only how a product is designed (it would be possible to make rules for that - is it able to be disassembled easily, does it require proprietary tools, is the service documentation freely available) but you have external influences that the agency cannot grade. Parts availability is influenced by countless things, whether the OEM sells spare parts, whether they go out of business and all the spare parts vanish, whether the aftermarket can copy and make spare parts without the OEM suing them or customs enforcement seizing the parts as counterfeits (due to being bribed by the OEM), whether the part requires code that the OEM deems its IP, and on and on and on.
Do you want another government bureaucracy that has to grade all these things, and want to hope that it won't be corrupted? Is there any big government thing in the modern world that hasn't been corrupted to some degree?
I draw the line here - I don't want the government to become even bigger and more corrupt.
And consider this. Are you actually fixing the root of the problem, or just its symptoms? When you treat a disease, you have to fix the root of the disease, not just treat its symtoms. Just treating symptoms doesn't fix the disease. In fact it often makes the disease progress or change form. You have the disease - depression - caused by shitty life circumstances. You go to the "doctor" and he gives you drugs to make you feel good. But they are addictive and have a shitload of negative side effects, they don't fix the original issue, they just make you think you're doing good while everything keeps burning around you. Sooner or later you're suffocating and burning in the smoke fumes and your brain goes and does an extreme thing like kills itself or shoots up a school.
The root of the problem with unrepairable electronics isn't the OEMs of the electronics, or the "stupid" consumers who buy junk. It's that the current economic system incentivizes production of disposable junk, and incentivizes consumers to buy said junk. The root is in the global banking cartel and international trade. The only reason you have cheap disposable electronics is: a mass of consumers, kept afloat by money printing and credit (both immoral and evil things) and a mass of slaves in the 3rd world, who are taken advantage of by said internatioal banking cartel, to produce said cheap consumer goods, which is also evil. At the same time, strict labor and environmental protection laws means the cost to produce said consimer goods in the same country, in a manner that the people living in it have agreed is ethical, not slavery, and doesn't pollute the environment, is 10x higher than in the 3rd world, where there is no protection against slavery, no environmental protection, and so on.
If you want to fix the enshittification of consumer goods, you have to actually hold the corporations that produce them, to the same labor laws, environmental laws, and consumer protection laws, that exist in the end country where they're sold. This means not allowing goods to be imported from foreign countries where such laws and protections don't exist.
You might think "why don't they do this? surely everyone thinks this is a good thing?". Well, no. There are people who don't think this is a good idea. They are the middlemen, the "supply chain" that can take a cut of the sales price and pocket it. They're the international bankers, that profit from their slavery of the 3rd world. The people that profit from this entire system, want to keep profiting from it. They want to suppress information from going out there and people from boycotting them. They need to force people to stay in their hamster wheel.
Also consider this - if smartphones got 10x more expensive, who would lose the most? The poor, of course, wouldn't be able to afford them. But if you consuder that a 10x price increase might mean a 10x or more increase in reliability or repairability, or on the other hand, a more than 10x increase in consumer buying power (as all the manufacturing would have moved back into the country where the consumers actually live, meaning they have actual productive jobs that might make them more money).
The other class that might lose the most is the intelligence agencies. Every modern "smartphone" is a spying and tracking device. That's priceless data to intelligence and law enforcment. Not only can they track down criminals via location tracking and interception of "private" communications, but they can also track down and eliminate dissidents. Anyone who might be a threat to the system, regardless of the content and truth of their words and actions, can be identified, and neutralized so that they don't pose a threat to the system, and thus to the people who profit from this system.
I personally think that this is the main reason they make cheap unrepairable shitty proprietary electronics. They want to spy on the people so much, they inject as much money as is needed to make sure everyone can "afford" to buy one. Even if they can't afford it, they'll use the stolen money from taxes or money printing to give them a tracker - for "free". Or give them enough social security money to make sure they can buy one. They make sure the international banking and pyramid system operates well enough so that they can always spy on everyone so that they never have a threat of losing power and thus their privileges.
You won't be able to achieve anything until the people in power won't allow you, and in this case, when you're trying to make a change that threatens their continued profiting or even existence, you have no chance of success. If anything, they'll label you as an enemy and you'll be neutralized if you ever come close to threatening their profits too much.
