83
votes
Autoenshittification: How the computer killed capitalism
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Pluralistic: Autoenshittification (24 July 2023)
- Authors
- Cory Doctorow
- Published
- Jul 24 2023
- Word count
- 4600 words
"The key to good business, is being a good middleman. Bye bye" - Eddie Temple.
There's so little value derived from so many of the tech firms lately. I've even worked in consultancy for years in Tech and Data, and no matter how far they all think they're coming because of digital technologies and data work... It doesn't feel like many businesses have actually thrived, or even got it.
Off topic...
It feels like there's so much crappy busy work floating around now in the tech space. We could work on coll things that add real value and interest to society...
Nope, gotta keep the clients on the Meery-go-round
As a software engineer I actually had a really bad hit of anxiety when I started on a new team and people actually used the software we were building.
5+ years into my career had been building stuff that eventually just got trashed before a real user ever touched it.
Been there mate.
Started my data career faffing with an Access database for a call centre. Moved to a firm that had an onprem SQL Server that needed all sorts of optimisation and commitment to it.
Talk in at the deep end.
Thankfully I've been shipping to real users for years. But still, I have this funny reaction to seeing people actually use the software I make. Because my interactions with it are 99% fixing bugs or writing new features (that don't work the first few times) my internalized opinion is that the software mostly doesn't work. But then I look over someone's shoulder and my reaction's like "Oh jeez! No! Don't click that it'll blow up! Oh... okay no it's fine."
"Competition is for losers" - Peter Thiel, here's a WSJ article about it.
Billionaires know that competition benefits the consumer, not the companies who are competing.
Yup. Thus why we've got so much regulatory capture and monopolisation going on globally.
I loved this article.
I have for several years, been yelling into the wind about the ridiculous downward spiral of cars that have over the air updates. My tech bro buddies in the EV forums, like to spout this as a great advancement in modern transportation, while completely ignoring the fact that a company that can give them a new feature overnight can also take away that feature. And more. And thus the device that once was the epitome of freedom, is now just enslaving them to its maker and their monthly rental.
I will never own a car with Over The Air updates. Give me liberty man, I'm sticking with old school disconnected, non rented wheels, thank you.
I seriously would have thought we'd have learned by now. Some things just don't need updates. I want a car that just works. I don't want tweaks and minor patch revisions on my car..
Look at all the unexpected issues with phone updates. At least when a phone gets messed up from an update it's an inconvenience and isn't as life threatening as a CAR malfunctioning. My mom had an older iPhone years ago that was effectivly bricked by an update that killed her charging port. It was a known issue to them too since they all too gladly replaced her phone to a newer one at no cost to her. I bet that would be fun to be on a road trip somewhere when your car gets an update and bricks some critical componant..
I submit Playstation 3 and OtherOS from 2010. In that case the company removed something SOLD as a feature. If they added something after purchase and later removed it I wonder what the legal implications would be since it wasn't a selling point..
I'm sure this is all headed to a court ruling that will determine just what we own when we buy something.
If I buy a car and it already has heated seats installed (and I cannot buy the car without that option) but I choose not to pay for the monthly subscription then they are effectively useless to me. I would argue that anything physically in or on my car when purchased is mine and the company over-delivered. If they can add a feature with a software tweak (ie heated seats or an ecoboost function that boosts my mileage) and then take it away for anything other than a saftey reason then they literally stole from me, IMO. Obviously if there is some unintended consequence like it ends up causing safety issues like reducing the braking effectiveness they should roll it back.
Could you imagine buying a house and having the builder randomly come in and change your front doorlocks to keyless entry months after you've moved in or tell you that you cannot use the little drawer in front of the guest sink unless you pay a monthly subscription?
“What you own” is already a fluid construct, semi-arbitrarily decided by the government.
Lawyers speak of property as “a bundle of rights.” They are all defined in law, none are absolute. For example, you may “own”’your house. That gives you a right ton”exclusive” occupancy. But you can’t exclude a plane flying overhead, you can’t exclude pollution, someone walking upmto your door, etc. And remember the millshake from There will be bllod? You don’t own the oil underneath. In some states you can’t keep the rain that falls on your roof.
DMCA just extended this. You bought a cd? You don’t own anything but a highly restricted license to use it in certain ways.
You don’t even own your own body. Suicide is illegal, and you can’t have your body disposed of in any but a few ways.
All rights, even so called inalienable rights, are law defined, and subject to limitation and change by those with the power to do it.
I would add that you only "own" your house as long as you pay the property taxes - if you refuse to pay taxes then the state can "repossess" it. The purchase price is effectively payment for the right to rent it from the state.
I've seen this touted as a positive thing, in the vein that "you need to bolt a turbo onto your EG6 Civic to get more power, all I need to do to get more power on my Tesla is install an update". However, what people fail to understand that they can also take power away from you, in both meanings of the word.
Most recently we saw the VanMoof fiasco, something that would never have happened if the bikes used a key, an RFID tag or other non-cloud alternatives. The maxima of any sort of engineering is "less is more" (naturally, within reason). More software/hardware means more complication, more failure points, higher cost. We should reconsider the value of repairability in our devices, and assume that the "smart toaster" you have today is going to eventually fail.
I want to be able to wake up in the morning and have absolute certainty that what I own isn't going to get taken away from me. I don't want the "convenience" of saving 3 seconds on a menial task by automating it away with enough processing power to take men to the moon and back. I want ownership.
Is it even possible to still buy a new car that's just a car? I haven't owned a car in many years, so I don't really know, and I can't seem to find the right search terms to answer the question.
Yes, but generally not newer ones. Almost everything has chips in it these days, but many older models dont need those electronics to run. But you have to go back quite far to get away from them completely. I have a classic car from 1981 that has only one chip in it as far as I know, because I had to replace it, and it controls the fuel supply, but it can run (badly) without it. But over the air updates aren't a thing for vehicles before about 2010 so there are still plenty on the road that dont use it or need it.
Digital controllers are not ipso facto bad. They enable all kinds of good things for power, efficiency, emissions, and safety.
What’s problematic is treating cars as retail software platforms. The incentive becomes marketing features and maximizing income, performance and quality take a (ahem) back seat.
Not to mention that auto manufacturers' specialty is, you know, manufacturing autos! As Doctorow has said elsewhere (and many I'm sure have experienced first-hand), auto manufacturers make really shitty software engineers. Auto software is always buggy, their UIs are pretty much a complete disaster, and they're security dumpster fires.
I see this mindset among a lot of "harder" engineering disciplines where software is dismissed as not being "real" engineering and therefore not that hard. If implementation is bad it's because you're dumb, not because you're underresourced or given conflicting requirements that keep changing.
They could be good. But they aren't And the gap between "could" and "is" has spikes at the bottom.
My experience differs. My ‘76 vw air cooles bus had multiport efi controlled by an ecu. It was a significant improvement on power and efficiency over the carb version.
Computer controlled variable valve timing made similar gains.
Both these systems were stable, helpful, and repairable.
I'm with you. The most advanced car I had was a 2015 GTI and even with that, I didn't really use any of the "luxury" features besides heated seats. Currently, my two cars are 20 and 30 years old and I just have no interest in modern cars with how stupidly feature packed they are and with how you're usually forced to get a touch screen now (which I refuse to do). I just want the feature set of like a 2001 Civic forever.
I'm a little confused by this. As computers become more and more a part of our lives, and therefore software, there will always be improvements that can be made or new features developed as efficiencies are discovered. Do we not want these things to happen? Would you prefer that these kinds of things just get left until the next model refresh, just because that's how it used to be?
I don't view this style as "renting." I paid for the vehicle, I do not pay a monthly fee for any additional features. If I never receive another update that's fine.
It's hard to not draw parallels from old rotary phones to smart phones, and that comparison feels very appropriate in this space.
But if the manufacturer had it's way you would. I abhor the sh*ttiness of a company like BMW that installs seat heaters but wants owners to pay 9.99 a month to keep them enabled or else have them shut off remotely.
I agree that's a very shitty business model and we should have consumer protection laws against things like that, but I don't think that means OTA updates on cars is a bad thing.
That's the problem, though. Cars are becoming like cell phones; they could be upgraded to newer software, but they weren't. And you can't upgrade it to run the new software, either; you just have to throw it away and buy a new one.
Sorry I'm a little confused. This seems like an argument for OTA updates (of which I am pro). The Tesla Model 3 I bought in 2019 is better and has more features than it did when I bought it, and got all of those for free.
Yeah, my lanugage skills seem to be done for the day. What I'm trying to say is that having the ability to remotely update cars means that we are going to get examples of cars losing functionality as they age.
Do we have any evidence of that?
I think @Akir's point is this:
EDIT: I was wrong.
The conversation has shifted here, now focusing on subscriptions for physical hardware, when originally I was discussing the idea of OTA updates. The idea of BMW's seat warmers being a subscription is fucking terrible and we should absolutely have laws protecting consumers from this bullshit behavior.
But just because this one instance is bad, or that the possibility of this thing expanding is bad, doesn't make a car that is capable of receiving OTA updates a bad idea.
Sorry for misunderstanding.
From the originator of the term "enshittification." This is nominally about the use of tech, but really about how it's used to transform our economy from capitalism to feudalism.
I had missed this one, it's a doozy. Here's a factcheck on some of the ad claims, couldn't find the ad itself.
I remember that in a P.H.Dick 's novel ( i think Ubik) there is a point where one guy lives in an apartment full of machines that run on coins. If u wanted a toast u had to insert a coin in the toaster, a 10 mins shower was 2 coins. U wanted to go out? The door expected to be paid. And so on and on during the day.
A death of a thousand cuts.
Reading this article made me think of that novel.
I lived for a while in an apartment in the UK where to get heat for a certain amount of time you put a coin in the heater unit.
It actually used to be very common at one time. It even happened for a while in the US. AFAIK they would send collectors every once in a while to collect the coins.
I'm nostalgic for a time when coins were useful and not just dead weight like they are now.
Im old enough to remember when bathroom stalls in public places, particularly rest stops, had coin operated doors. Slide in a quarter to open the door. Of course, the bottom of the door was usually 2 ft off the floor so in a moment of desperation, all you had to do was give up your dignity and slide on your belly.
Always thought the idea of coin operated toilets should be voted Worst Idea in History.
Still happens in Europe but it's not everywhere.
I'm not familiar w/ that story, but you're right it sounds like it's in the same vein. Doctorow wrote a story along those lines (Unauthorized Bread) where his take was that your toaster could recognize and refuse to toast bread that wasn't approved by the toaster manufacturer (following the Epson printer ink model), and the same w/ other appliances; similarly the elevators were programmed to prioritize the "high value" tenants of the building, forcing the poor schlubs in the building to endure long waits before an elevator would stop on their floor.
I have just finished to read it and I found it really interesting.
Somehow i feel we are going there or at least we were going there full speed during the startup craze (i remember a machine to make orange juice that squeezed juice packets, it just miserably failed but seemed to fit the description of some appliances in the story). Now I dunno but the article shows how the phenomenon is becoming more subtle and it is starting to be applied to more essential things like cars and such...
My take away is:
For the record, you're thinking of Juicero, the ludicrously priced machine that was designed to be more complicated than it needed to be and only accepted DRMed "juice packs" that were also ludicrously expensive (and only available as part of a subscription, IIRC).
That was a great read. The anxiety from how shitty everyone is trying to make everything now on purpose to justify a slow rollout of "features" over the course of a subscription is ridiculous. Why does a task app require a monthly membership? How have we regressed so badly?
IMO the more interesting question is: how can we find products that don't do this? Suppose I'm willing to pay double the price for a washing machine that isn't proprietary, made-to-fail junk - where would I get one?
One answer is "buy the industrial version", which can work but only works when 1) there is an industrial version (industrial dildo joke here), and 2) it's designed for low-maintenance instead of high throughput (e.g. apparently industrial dishwashers are designed for extremely fast dishwashing and to use water that's as hot as possible, so the material of their hoses are designed to last ~3 years and then be replaced by a technician).
Another answer is "buy custom-made", which can work but often is stupidly expensive and kind of misses the point: the problem isn't mass-production, the problem is the money-men.
Well, a lot of the time custom made stuff is so prohibitively expensive because it carries the real cost of production. We're so used to paying much less for products made globally because corporations abuse international workers to keep prices artificially low. Im fine with paying 200 bucks for a toaster made here. I dont know how to make a toaster, that's completely foreign knowledge to me.
The issue is that we gave up the means of production a long time ago to create the middle class, a semi-bourgeoisie, mostly bereft of skill, group of people willing to overlook suffering of their fellow man if it means they can still have their lifestyle cellphone product and german automobile while not having to do any work managing someone who does.
That's one reason why they're expensive. The most common reason custom-made stuff is because there's no economy of scale.
What I want is a mass-produced product line that also carries the real cost of production, and also has been designed to last. Like the Fairphone - if they sold outside the EU (and nowadays the USA).
Money. We've figured out ways to squeeze money out of people in new and creative ways. Why make a utility app for free when you can get money?
I feel a bit punch-drunk after reading this blog. That was an awful lot to take in at one sitting. I've seen bits & pieces of what Doctorow is writing about, but this is the first time I've seen it all in one place - plus a whole lot more I've never seen before. I've always had a bad feeling about the subscription model: where you have to pay a monthly fee to access a service or a piece of software, instead of buying it outright. When I've seen occasional articles about car manufacturers requiring a monthly subscription fee to run a car heater, or something similar, that's triggered that bad feeling. But this blog...? Fuck. I'm overwhelmed right now, by how ubiquitous this practice is becoming, and how right-to-repair is connected to subscription models, and how they're both connected to intermediary technology corporations, and how the whole "Internet of Stuff" paradigm might not be the good thing we've been told.
This is a lot to digest. And I don't think it'll go down easy. I think I'll have psychological indigestion for a while.
I think enshitification is cool and all (I mean not literally, but you know), I am just a little frustrated because as someone who studies social theory and enjoys technology, it feels like people in the tech world are obsessed with trying to invent something new out of something that already exists. Enshitification isn't a new concept, it is just the profit motive that drives capitalism. The profit motive incentivizes making your product shittier so that you can make more money. They just don't make x like they used to is a real sentiment because they really don't. Enshitification is a cool word to describe the process that is inherit to capitalism, but it ultimately describes nothing new, and frankly in my personal opinion, obfuscates the real issue at hand, that being the profit motive. It is for all intents and purposes written in to the our economic system that products will auto enshitify themselves. Maybe it is most prominent in technological circles because much like any culture related to technology or the internet it moves so quickly that something that would normally last a lifetime (a cultural paradigm) could last only a few years.
Just my two cents as someone in the social theory world, enshitifcation feels very surface level, very liberal, insofar that it doesn't explain why products feel like they're becoming shittier. The reason products are shitty is because the company making them is trying to make as much profit as possible, and if it is a public company than really the companies job is delivering an ever increasing profit to shareholders, which is without fail unsustainable unlimited profit growth in a finite world is impossible and yet they continue trying leading to products becoming shittier and shittier.
I have been thinking about this for a while now so I hope it made sense, and I mean no hate, I am just hoping we can all dig a little deeper, look for the problem at the source rather than where we are now. :)
God rent seekers piss me off. Utterly enrages me.