Enshittification

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0:39Now open your eyes, go to monday.com, start for free, and finally, breathe. Just a heads up for listeners with sensitive ears, today's episode includes a curse word that we are leaving unbleeped. You'll understand why as you're listening. Using that word is kind of the point of the whole show, so you've been warned. Enjoy. This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm here today with producer Chris Berube. Hey, Chris. Hey, Roman. So, Chris, what do you have for us today? Okay, today I want to talk to you about a subject that I think is going to make you really mad. Okay, well, I have a pretty high baseline of mad right now, but I'm going to let you go ahead.

1:21Yeah, I feel like right now most people I talk to have like a relatively high baseline of anger. So where would you say you are today, though? I think I'm having a pretty good day. Let's put a set of four. Okay, let's see how high we can get you by the end of this. So this is my experiment today. I want to see how high we can get you on the anger scale from 1 to 10. Okay, that sounds like a plan. So what's the story that's going to make me so mad? Okay, so Roman, I want you to think about smart devices. Okay, okay. I think you're on the right track to making me mad. Go ahead. Yeah, so let's just start.

1:52Think about all the devices that you own that used to be mostly analog. Today, they are now digital in some way. So can you think of some examples in your life? Well, I can think of one very obvious example that drives me crazy. I have a smart thermostat in my house. It came with the house. I did not install it. And I live in the Bay Area, so I don't need heat a lot. But every time I need to turn it on, which is like a few times a year, the smart thermostat is like disconnected from the heater. And for some reason, unknown reason, I cannot make sense of it. And all I want is just an old fashioned brass round Honeywell thermostat, old fashioned analog thermostat that can just turn on and set it to a temperature and turn it off when I don't need it instead of this other thing that drives me absolutely crazy.

2:41So, Roman, this is a pretty common complaint, what you're saying, right? We all have these devices that have some kind of a smart component. They're supposed to make things convenient in our lives. But in fact, they are making things really frustrating. Like, why does my fridge need to be smart and talk to me, right? Today, though, we're going to talk about how this phenomenon, it could be more than just annoying for a lot of people. Because there are times when the digitization of pretty much everything is actively making people's lives worse. And so to demonstrate this point, I want to talk to you about the design of tractors.

3:16Okay. Well, I mean, you strike me as a city kid, Chris. So, like, what do you know about tractors? Very little, if I'm being honest. I know there is a company called John Deere that makes tractors and they have green hats. I assume there was probably a guy named John Deere at some point in the past. You would assume. Not too much else, but I learned quite a bit for this story. So there's one thing that's been vexing farmers that really surprised me, and that is the software in their tractors. So like a lot of things, modern tractors are now run by a computer operating system. And one of the farmers who's not happy with the software in his tractor is a guy I spoke to for this story, a farmer in Missouri named Jared Wilson.

3:58On my lineage, I'm at least a seventh generation farmer on my father's side. So we've been doing this for a while. So Jared runs a family farm. You know, he's deep in the trenches of this world. And he told me something I did not really know about farming equipment. Tractors, harvesters, spraying machines, you know, all of these vehicles that are critical to farming. Today, for the most part, they are run by computers. You know, in the 90s, we didn't have a lot of electronic control units on these machines. Mechanical fuel pumps, everything was mechanical. So you touch something and it has linkage and it's controlling something mechanical.

4:34And now in these machines, when you touch something, everything is electric over some system, electric over hydraulic, if you will. electric over engine controls. And that means that there's software that you're dealing with. I am sure if you're a farmer, this is all incredibly obvious stuff. But, you know, this was a surprise to me. Like, it's the same thing with a lot of cars now, where functions that used to be mechanical, they are now all run by an operating system. And my car, you know, gives me a driving score, for example, which is very, very annoying. But for the most part, Jared told me this digitization of the tractor, it's a really positive thing.

5:12Like, in lots of ways, these controls make his job a lot easier. One of the simplest things that comes to mind is auto steer, right? These tractors, we can create lines in the field and they'll drive themselves. And when you're on a machine for 20 hours and you don't have to steer it, you're in a lot better shape when you get off of it than you are hand driving the machine. Yeah, I mean, that sounds completely arduous to be a driver for 20 hours in something we have to pay attention to every moment of those 20 hours. But I'm anticipating here that there are some negative aspects to this too. Yes, there are some drawbacks.

5:45So Jared told me if there's a problem with the tractor, sometimes the software will just slow down the tractor's horsepower. If anything is not working correctly on the emission system, if you have a sensor, for instance, that has failed or malfunctioned, It won't perform the necessary emissions operations to satisfy the system, and it will do something called a derate of the machine. So a derating, this is when the software basically makes the tractor unusable. Like, it slows down the horsepower so much, you cannot use the tractor to do farming. That sounds so incredibly annoying. But I would assume that this software was doing this for some kind of good reason, like for a safety reason.

6:31Right. So there could be safety reasons for doing this or smaller issues like a sensor isn't working on the tractor. And Jared gave me this example from his life where he had a problem with the tractor and the operating system slowed it down, but it didn't tell him what was wrong. You know, the terminals inside of the machine might give you an error code, but very rarely does that error code actually tell you what's wrong. You have to have an external piece of software to plug into the machine to figure it out. So when this happened to Jared, he was faced with a choice, right? He could either spend a lot of time trying to figure out the problem, you know, waste a day doing that, or he could do the much easier thing, which was call out a technician.

7:12But according to Jared, that's also kind of a pain. So I was forced to call the dealership out. They came out and replaced, I think, one of the delta pressure sensors. And that didn't end up fixing the problem. But the logistics of that mean that the technician comes out. You may have to wait a day or two before there's a technician available. And losing a couple of days during the growing season, that's a total disaster. Because Jared told me losing a day can cost him a ton of money. The soybeans, we'd had a dry year and you could stand in the field and you could hear the pods opening and the soybeans hitting the ground.

7:51So you can imagine how sick to your stomach that makes you. There's no way to reclaim those once they fall on the ground. They're just, that's just lost revenue that's just gone. And it's difficult to convey how frustrating that is when you're sitting on your hands and your crop is literally falling on the ground and you don't have the ability to do anything about it. Jared didn't have a guess about how much these kinds of delays have cost him. But in 2023, the Public Interest Research Group, so they're this advocacy group, they estimated downtime for farmers caused by these repair delays cost them about$3 billion that year.

8:30And this is at a time when farmers are facing all sorts of challenges, like unpredictable weather, tariffs. And then on top of that, you have to figure out these software problems. So the stakes are really, really high for somebody like Jared. The reality is that the costs of these things have eliminated a lot of the margin potential that comes from the savings because we're just passing it back out to the manufacturer. so roman with this in mind where are you at on the anger scale now i'm a six this is sounding more and more like the plight of every modern consumer or user of modern devices like it's really really infuriating yeah like if you own a car if you own a cell phone if you own a printer right yeah you kind of had the same problems and frankly the software is making all of these things if you will pardon my language, shittier for us as consumers.

9:25Because basically with the software, often you cannot fix them unless you go back to the manufacturer. And I started getting interested in this whole subject because of one of my favorite writers. Hi, I'm Cory Doctorow. I'm a novelist, an activist, and a journalist. So listeners at the show may be aware of Cory's work. You know, he's a sci-fi writer. And hey, here is a fun fact about Cory Doctorow. We can reveal perhaps that you and I are, like all the best Americans, Canadian. You had to squeeze that in there. Roman, we are everywhere. Anyway, lately, Corey's been out there popularizing this one big idea that he's had.

10:01So it's a word that he coined that seems to be capturing a lot of what's going wrong in modern society right now. And that word is inshittification. Roman, have you heard the word inshittification? I have. I'm also a big fan of Corey Doctorow. And what I know of it is that this is the idea that, you know, kind of everything on the internet is getting worse. Yeah. So that's a part of it. And there's actually a little bit more to it than that. It's a way to talk about platform collapse, platform decay. It describes this three-stage process where you have platforms that start off being good to their end users, but are also finding a way to lock those end users in.

10:39And then having locked them in, it makes things worse for them in order to make things better for business customers. So let's just lay this out with an example. You're on Facebook. You are part of a Facebook group that likes something very, very niche, right? Like, let's say baseball cards from the 1980s, just to use an example of a hobby someone might have, right? I'm not saying that is me. Someone has this hobby, though. So the first step is Facebook sets up the infrastructure for you to meet lots of new people. Right. So you're finding other fans of 80s baseball cards. You're all becoming friends.

11:12You're building up this community. But then you cannot leave. Like maybe the platform is buying up all the competition. Right. So there's nowhere else to go. Or they make it hard to transport your group somewhere else. And maybe like people don't want to leave because you have years of thrilling 80s baseball card conversations built up. And then you get stuck, right? So if you leave, you're going to lose all of these friends that you've built up and you become locked in. And that's when the big companies will start to make things shittier. They in shitify. And instead of serving the users, they will serve businesses, right?

11:47They'll make things worse for you. They will sell your private data. They will let the platform become filled with these kind of spammy, annoying ads that you can't get rid of. the value is just hoovered up by the platform and given to its shareholders and its executives, even as the platform just turns into a pile of shit. And I think a lot of us can recognize that pattern. Okay. That description makes a lot of sense to me. So here's the other thing with Corey's argument. He says, in shitification, it is not exclusive to being online, you know, on Facebook, on Google, wherever. It can also affect things in the physical tactile world, such as all of our smart devices.

12:24Okay, so how does that work? Well, Corey says this same principle applies to basically all of our smart devices, right? Including our cars, our smart fridges, our tractors, stuff that just wasn't previously digital. William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined the term cyberspace, he's quite a prophet. And in one of his books, he has this line, cyberspace is everting, so turning inside out. And what he means is that like reality is being infected with digital stuff and digitization is becoming a feature of things that weren't digital before. Everything's just becoming a computer in a fancy case.

13:01Let's just talk about how many of our devices today rely on computers and rely on the Internet. So how many smart devices would you estimate you have in your home right now?

13:15Twenty possibly. That's pretty average, if that's right. So according to this survey I found from 2023, the average American household has about 21 connected devices. So that means devices that are connected to the Internet. Wow. Wow. That is way too high. I can already think of the ones that I wish I could eliminate from my house right now. Oh, 100 percent. And the thing with all of these smart devices is that it makes it a lot easier for a company that makes this device to lock you in. Right. So the first step into gentrification, it's locking you in because if something is a smart device, the manufacturer has quite a bit of leeway.

13:51Let's go back to tractors where we started this whole episode. Corey Doctorow says they are a prime example of this. Since Roman times, farmers have fixed their own gear because when the storm is coming and you need to get the crops in, you can't wait for someone else to come and fix your stuff. According to Jared, you know, back in the 90s, the tractor was mostly mechanical, right? And if you wanted to replace a part or fix something in the tractor, it was a pretty straightforward process. You would go down to your local John Deere dealership, and, you know, that was owned by a guy who lived down the road.

14:28I remember as a kid going with my dad, and if you had a complaint, you went to Leland Deems, and he might take you back in the shop and ask what was going on. You know, he wanted the customer to be satisfied, and he knew that if he didn't, you'd go down the road to the next dealership the next time you were buying a piece of equipment. You know, say you have a problem with a wire or you need a replacement part, you go to Leland Deems, right? And if you're not happy with Leland Deems, you could go to another dealership. Or maybe you go to an independent repair person who's somewhere down the road, right?

14:59They'd hook you up, and then you would go about your day. But in Jared's experience, a few times this has happened. He received the error code, didn't get a lot of information from the operating system. And without much to go on, he went straight to John Deere. And at that point, John Deere holds all the cards, right? Because to restart the tractor, Jared needed a technician who knows how to access the tractor's computer. And then at that point, he had to pay that person to come and check it out. The farmers still mostly fix their tractors. They get the part they put it in and so on. It's their farmers.

15:30They don't want to fix their stuff. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work until you get a service call and pay 200 bucks for someone to show up and type the unlock code into your tractor's keyboard. As a farmer, it's not as easy as you go to the repair shop down the road and they fix something for you. Because usually independent repair places, they don't have the tools that John Deere corporate has. Because John Deere is not making that stuff available unless the repair person is paying a big fee. My independent mechanic, I called him up and he said he didn't have the tools to do that because they cost$6 ,000.

16:05So because John Deere makes it expensive for independent repair shops to fix John Deere products, as a consumer, you're stuck paying whatever John Deere is charging. And this is a big way you get locked in. It's replacement parts. So if Jared buys a replacement part, he probably needs to buy it from John Deere because he doesn't have a lot of options for where else you can buy the thing. I'm getting very angry, Chris. This is very upsetting to me. Keep some room. OK, keep some room. We need a ceiling that we could achieve later on in the episode. You're going to get there. So, Roman, in the past, farmers could actually buy a generic replacement part, right?

16:42Like a part that was built by somebody who isn't John Deere. But today, with the software, John Deere does this trick called parts pairing. So if you want to replace a drill, something like that, certain parts are not going to work unless they are compatible with John Deere's software. So that's parts pairing. And this is related to this really important concept called interoperability. I've definitely heard that term before. But what does it actually mean here? Basically, interoperability is whether two things can work together, right? So if you have shoes and shoelaces, if the laces are the right size, they fit inside the shoe.

17:17Those two things are interoperable. And in a digital context, two things are interoperable if they can talk to each other. And parts pairing makes that difficult because with tractors, you know, you can buy some generic parts that is cheaper than what John Deere is selling, but it won't necessarily work because John Deere software might lock it out. So these two things are not interoperable. And tractors are kind of the tip of the iceberg here because this kind of thing can happen with all of our smart devices. And Corey brought up this example to me, which is printers. Your printer company says, we don't like it when you use third-party ink.

17:54And so we're going to block third-party ink installation. Once we do that, we're going to charge you more for the ink that comes from HP or Epson or whatever. It's not that your printer can't run that program. It's that your printer has been designed to reject that program, to say no. Ink's now$10 ,000 a gallon. It's the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a special license. It costs more to print your grocery list than it would if you printed it with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion.

18:28This is why I like Corey. He paints some word pictures. He puts a little mustard on the fastball. And by the way, I did. I looked this up. This is a bit of an exaggeration. Like the Kentucky Derby winning semen is very expensive. It's worth a lot of money. But printer is expensive, too, right? It costs like thousands of dollars a gallon, which is so much money. I mean, shitty is the right word for it. I mean, it's awful. Yeah, it's really shitty. And it's also a big problem with powered wheelchairs. You have smart fridges, you have ventilators. One more example is about the device you are probably listening to this on right now.

19:02So let's say you have an iPhone. I'm sure you've experienced some version of this as someone who owns an iPhone. If you need to repair an iPhone, there's lots of cases where you cannot get a third-party replacement part. Like those will just not be interoperable with an Apple device. So Apple urges you to buy an Apple replacement part and then go to the Apple store or go to an Apple authorized repair person. Tim Cook in 2019 wrote a letter to his investors at the start of the year where he said our biggest risk is that our customers repair phones instead of buying new ones, that they like their phones.

19:36They work fine. And so when they break, they don't just get a new one. Apple uniquely among manufacturers, when you trade a phone in, sends it to be shredded so that the parts can't be harvested to be used in a repair. So to recap, this is the inshittification of things, right? You buy something that has software in it. The software makes it hard to get the thing repaired by some third party. You have to go to the manufacturer and they will jack up the price, right? And perhaps they don't let you use third party parts. So they're just profiting off people because we're stuck, right? We have this stuckness going on.

20:10So this is a vicious cycle. So Roman, now that I have gone through the problem of inshittification with you, where would you say your anger level is at as of now? Let's go for a nine. I'm a nine. Like I'm ready to just like go to the next room, yank that smart thermostat out of my wall and just put in an old fashioned Honeywell analog dial. Roman, I feel your pain and I have some good news. We are going to bring your anger level down a little bit. Oh, excellent. Because there are people who are trying to make things better. There are people fighting back and trying to outlaw this form of incentivification.

20:45Excellent. OK, let's talk about that after the break.

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22:42Breathe in.

22:48So we're back with Chris Berube talking about inshittification. Yes, Roman. So let's talk about some of the people who are trying to fight back against, you know, these big companies who are locking you in, trying to profit off your bad experiences. Right. And there are a couple of ways people are fighting this. So there's kind of the dodgy, questionable, maybe outside of the bounds of the law way. And then there's the law abiding citizen. I want to do everything by the book way. So where do you want to start with this? Well, I definitely want to start with the dodgy questionable outside of the law way.

23:22That sounds way more fun. So Cory Doctorow says we're now seeing a lot of black market or kind of gray market efforts to fix this problem, right? We're seeing people hacking software in an iPhone, for example, and making it work with third party applications, right? When you do that with an Apple product, that is called jailbreaking. But people aren't just doing it with Apple products. They're doing it with all kinds of tech now. And if you're like a bored grad student with an electron tunneling microscope, you can just like have at it, right? Lots and lots of these softwares have been broken into it.