cat

It’s pretty easy for people to take the stance that “nothing ever changes,” that history doesn’t just rhyme nor repeat itself, but that it literally loops. This is the sort of argument employed by people who are skeptical about technology critiques, the people who treat the advent of the internet as just another important invention. I used to be one of those people. I told myself and others that panicking about technological advancement is ridiculous, that the Gutenberg press and subsequent widespread availability of books caused a panic of its own where people were worried that readers would cease to remember things. I hate that I was so obviously wrong.

The internet really did change everything. More and more over time, the internet bleeds into stuff that was always physical and appropriates a growing number of our analog technology. Our music, our books, our jobs and school, our social communication, a bunch of other shit, have all become integrated into our technology. I have used my phone as a ruler more than once.

The things that aren’t directly taken out of reality become partially integrated as like cyborg physical things. The locks, lights, and appliances in our homes connect to apps for control, our cars have ECUs that regulate their function and connect to the internet, even farm equipment and power tools have their own internet-controlled chips. This stuff is always cool in theory, and almost never cool in practice. The ECU in my last-gen Volkswagen wants an update that makes it impossible to use an off-the-shelf OBD2 scanner so that I’ll have to bring it to a mechanic who pays the license for a special official VW scanner. John Deere tractors got an update that made them impossible to repair at home so that farmers had to drive them all the way inland to get them fixed by a dealership or suffer losing their whole livelihood. It’s not hyperbole to say that the John Deere thing is ransom on our most important industry. They only partially rescinded that update because they were forced by state legislatures to allow people to fix their shit, and even then they complained and whined the entire time. John Deere is a specific example, but this kind of stuff is taking place everywhere. I encourage you to take a peruse of consumerrights.wiki to see the sheer amount of companies making shit worse for everyone. The issue at hand isn’t necessarily that John Deere shouldn’t be allowed to sell locked down equipment, nor that Volkswagen shouldn’t be allowed to sell cars that are only repairable by certified dealerships, the problem is that they shouldn’t be allowed to sell people things that they are able to easily self-service and then revoke that ability after the sale without the owner’s knowledge or permission.

Imagine you buy a Brother brand printer because it’s one of very few printers that let you use third-party ink cartridges. It works flawlessly for years and you’ve never even had to use the PC software to get it secured and working. One day you update the PC connected to the printer and it tells you that the ink cartridges you’ve been buying and using all these years are suddenly “incompatible” and you’ll have to buy Brother cartridges at 200% the price if you ever want to print again. Imagine how annoying and impossibly frustrating that would be, especially considering that the only time you would get this message is when you try to print something. THIS HAPPENED! This is a real thing that Brother did. After years of radio silence, they quietly pushed an update to users’ printers which simply made them incompatible with third-party carts. Here is the internet completely changing something for the better (allowing print jobs to be sent over internet from any device in your house) and then making it worse than it was before.

We used to permanently own our music, movies, and video games on media whose theft would entail felony burglary. Now, we pay for the privilege to borrow other people’s movies, music, and video games, and if they choose to stop paying license fees or just get greedy and take “your” media, you have to grovel at their feet and beg for them to give it back. At the very end of 2023, Sony/Playstation announced that they weren’t planning on renewing their license for Discovery and that due to this choice, all of users’ purchased (to own, mind you) shows and movies under Discovery would just be removed forever with no choice or refund.

As of 31 December 2023, due to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library.
We sincerely thank you for your continued support.
Thank you,
Playstation Store
P.S. also fuck you die

It was only after massive backlash that they walked back the decision, but they could just as easily have chosen to ignore the outrage and when they dropped the PS5 it would all go away. Really, this is the default response, “We’re sorry some of you feel that way!”

This is the crux of the decay of capitalism in overdeveloped countries like the U.S.. I like capitalism, and I want it to be successful, but if this is the inevitable path forward, maybe I’m mistaken. Our economy has reached the point where it’s massively more profitable to sell people a whole fuck ton of things that they don’t own than selling them a few things they do own for the same price. Ask any American consumer whether they’d rather spend $12 a month on Spotify or buy all of their music individually, and you’ll find that over 90% of them would rather pay less for permission to access more. Maybe include the fact that Spotify pays artists ~$0.0004 per stream (the worst in the industry), that their algorithms consistently fuck artists over and contribute to volatility in their livelihood, and maybe also that their CEO is (seriously) donating a huge portion of your money to military weapons manufacturers, including most famously a $700M donation to an AI-driven armed UAV project. That might move something like 5% of those paying users.

The truth is, the companies with the most money are the ones who are most beholden to their shareholders, they’re the ones who have hit the tipping point where making their product worse is the only way to increase profit year-over-year, and they’re the ones who are most established in their industry. Adobe is another great example: their products control a huge portion of the creative market because of how established they are and how much they’ve locked in their customers through highly technical design and workflows, and yet they sell terrible products. Using the Adobe suite involves paying anywhere between $20 and 80 a month for permission to use their programs you downloaded to your PC and for them to take all of your creative work to use in their AI so you can share your intellectual property with Adobe and everyone else who is sad enough to do the same. The textbook “enshittification” process goes as follows: Create an innovative and highly useful product that consumers love, introduce convenience that customers get used to in order to lock them in, then gradually make your product worse to extract as much money as possible from your loyal customers. I’m certain you can identify this process in more than one product you use in your life.

The most obvious move toward a solution is to look to the past and figure out why it was better and how far we can go before it gets worse. Unsurprisingly, the ownership culture of the 2000s was considerably better. Owning music, movies, and games meant having the disc or at least a sovereign digital copy, not a license to someone else’s. To lose something you owned, you had to get robbed or repossessed. This culture didn’t come about from a different heart of capitalism, it came about because of necessity. To make your lawnmower connect to the internet for OTA updates, it took so much R&D that it wasn’t even worth the enshittification, especially when your competitors are also analog. It was only when the tech monopolies proved to the small fry that money extraction was viable that we began moving to a culture of disappropriation.

We won’t end here and conclude that we need to freeze technology at the CD and DVR. The real solution is complicated and multifaceted, but allows us to move technology along as we have been, just this time without the whole “you’ll own nothing and be happy” paradigm. Simply having the option to own the things you buy is a good start, but when companies discover that most people don’t choose that option unless they’re forced to, they’ll make their case and try to escape it. Stronger consumer protections seem to be the only appropriate regulatory response, so long as its balanced between the will of the people and what’s realistic for companies. One of the biggest problems is the disclosure of people’s rights; we’ve had terms and conditions and privacy policies for a while now, and everyone knows that the only people who read those are the lawyers that wrote them. Some consumer-friendly companies have opted to make them more sensible by presenting them in highly condensed and summarized form, maybe in a few sentences or a bulleted list to make it more of a conscious choice to avoid. I think perhaps that solution could work, giving the terms and policies a mandatory TL;DR section, and make it so that just linking them doesn’t count– they must be presented directly to the consumer in condensed form in the same place the “agree” button is. More radically, I can see a good future where the (implied or explicit) contract that consumers sign upon purchase of anything is not modifiable without explicit and informed consent.

For now, we capitalist bros have to hope for market forces to compensate to the democratic masses. We already see competitors taking the mantle and providing the discerning consumers an alternative, especially in music: services like bandcamp, 7digital, and Qobuz offer DRM-free purchases for almost all music collectively, which has meant that I can buy my favorite music in high-resolution and burn it to physical media for posterity. For video games, we have Good Old Games, who offer DRM-free purchasing of video games that can also be burned to physical media, although their library is much smaller and focused on classics. For movies, it’s not looking as good right now… you can try to find blu-ray or DVD copies, but otherwise piracy is your friend. For now, piracy is mostly legal if you own the license to a thing when you pirate it, so if you buy the media in some form before pirating, it’s (probably) legal. Or just break the law. Up to you.

For physical products that are locked down, we’re seeing more and more alternatives that offer the same thing without the company controlling it (funnily enough, the cheap made-in-China junk tends to be better for that reason alone), as well as hacks to get around those locks and own your shit. Computers and Android devices have free and open-source (FOSS) operating system alternatives, power tools have battery adapters, cars have ECU tuners, and there are FOSS smart home hubs that offer the same functionality without logging your every move. It’s less simple and you’ll need to commit research time, but it’s worth owning your shit to cast your vote in our markets. Unless you’re cool with owning nothing and being happy, but that probably isn’t true if you’ve read this far.

Ultimately, in lieu of hard lines enforced by our regulators, a cultural shift is necessary. It’s already moving; we’re seeing a rise in piracy and the resurgence of physical media, and the more normalized and widespread that becomes, the more the markets will have to react and move money to the people offering the better service. We seem to forget that the capitalist machine is run not by companies but by the consumer, and our purchasing decisions determine whether companies sink or swim. Divesting from Spotify and owning your music puts you in the group of consumers whose money they’ve lost, and when there are enough individuals in that group, Spotify and their competitors will have to pander to you to try and earn your money again. We consumers together can negotiate with the monopolies and market leaders to apply pressure. That doesn’t mean we have to bankrupt companies to get what we want: all we have to do is give them a few quarters of negative growth, and their shareholders will speak for us. I recognize that this is really hopeful optimism speaking, but I think it’s realistic and possible. The cost to you is convenience, in most cases. So, the choice is really yours as an individual consumer: convenience, or freedom?