My translator negotiates a 3 month warrantee for used phone in Ulan Bataar’s mobile phone market. Batteries came with a one week guarantee.

Products can store their own histories – from where they were bought to where they’ve been, how they interacted with what kind of objects, related behaviours such as ‘I see you’ve been downloading from the darknet, weighting risk assessment’, and even your little mishaps. That time you dropped the phone from balcony? Logged. Tried to squeeze your iPod into the back pocket of a pair of low riders? Logged. In the future perfect products are in essence their own warrantee. On the one hand no more looking for where the documentation is stored so you can take it to the store and argue it out with the sales rep, on the other hand no pretending that it wasn’t dropped.

Lets start with a basic question – why do companies offer warrantees for their products? Why do people pay extra for ‘extended warrantees’? And how does this landscape shift if much of the negotiating to and fro that happens today is logged, automatically? How will people’s behaviour change to manipulate the log? How will companies change the conditions of the warrantee in response to these behaviours?

And in a world where bits of data are increasingly communicated in real time why do we have fixed and not relative warrantees?