GADGET FUNERAL-- PROFITS FROM PRESERVING OLD AND BROKEN GADGETS
A unique “gadget funeral” service allows people to preserve outdated and broken devices that they have become attached to.
They say you should not get attached to material things, but most of us cannot really help it. Whether it is our first car, the house we grew up in, or even an old phone, we tend to get attached to our worldly possessions. And since mobile phones and tablets have become almost an extension of ourselves, it makes sense that some of us feel pain in upgrading, even when it is obvious that our old gadgets are not working well. That is where China’s gadget funeral service business comes in, allowing users to preserve their obsolete devices as framed, deconstructed works of art that can be hung on the wall and admired forever.
Lin Xi, a woman from Weifang, in China’s Shandong Province, started her lucrative gadget funeral business in 2019. She had studied in the UK and came into contact with the art of mounting electronic parts, which she found very interesting as a recycling concept. One day she asked herself, “Since I have so many old electronics around, why don’t I turn them into works of art?”
After practicing her skills with her own old tech, Lin started advertising her service online using the slogan: “Don’t lose your used mobile phone; let me re-design it for you!” She posted a few examples of her work, and in just a few days, she had received over 200 orders via social media, which she struggled to fulfill for half a year.
At first, people came to Lin Xi with true electronic relics, like a first-generation Motorola mobile phone from 1970, a Nokia 3650, a rare Vertu phone worth 200,000 yuan, or the first mass-produced Android smartphone, the HTC G1. She honored them all, but as people learned about her service, more common smartphones started coming in.
Last year, a young man came to her with a 2014 handset that was no longer working but which he had become emotionally attached to. The memories tied to the old smartphone were apparently unforgettable, and he couldn’t simply throw it away. He asked Lin Xi to give the old gadget her special treatment so that he could keep it forever as a souvenir.
The so-called “gadget funeral” is essentially the art of dismantling and mounting. Technicians carefully take old or broken devices apart and rearrange their components onto framed canvases as a form of “cyber art.” The technical skill level for dismantling and mounting is very low, but whoever does it needs to have some kind of artistic taste and mountains of patience.
Lin Xi is just one of the hundreds, probably even thousands of entrepreneurs specializing in gadget funerals. Another such young artisan, Chen Xing-yi, said that he sometimes works from 8 am to 12 am at night, trying to complete orders, and he earns up to one million yuan (USD$140,000) per year.Both Chen Xing-yi and Lin Xi feel as if they are helping clients preserve the memories tied to their obsolete or broken gadgets, and at the same time saving the environment.
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