Chapter 1: What is the significance of 'enshittification' in modern society?
Just a heads up for listeners with sensitive ears, today's episode includes a curse word that we are leaving unbleaped. 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?
OK, today I want to talk to you about a subject that I think is going to make you really mad.
OK, well, I have a pretty high baseline of mad right now, but but I'm going to let you go ahead.
Yeah, 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.
OK, 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 one to ten. OK, that sounds like a plan. So so what's the story that's going to make me so mad? OK, so, Roman, I want you to think about smart devices. OK, OK.
I think you're on the right track to making me mad.
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Chapter 2: How do smart devices impact our daily lives?
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? Mm-hmm. 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.
On 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. And 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. Like, 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.
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Chapter 3: What frustrations do farmers face with modern tractors?
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. So you can imagine how sick to your stomach that makes you. There's no way to reclaim those once they fall on the ground. 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.
And 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?
No, it was 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.
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Chapter 4: How does software affect the usability of farming equipment?
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. You'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. They'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. OK, 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. 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.
Well, Julian 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.
Let'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? Twenty? 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.
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Chapter 5: What is the 'right to repair' movement?
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. Let's go back to tractors where we started this whole episode. Cory 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 is 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.
I 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 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. They'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. They're farmers. They 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 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.
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Chapter 6: How are consumers fighting back against corporate restrictions?
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, those 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. And 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.
This 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, 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. So 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, they work fine. And so when they break, they don't just get a new one.
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Chapter 7: What recent developments support the right to repair?
Roman, I feel your pain and I have some good news. We are going to bring your anger level down a little bit, hopefully, because there are people who are trying to make things better. There are people fighting back and trying to outlaw this form of incitification. Excellent. OK, let's talk about that after the break.
So 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. That 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. It's actually pretty easy for someone who has, you know, hacker skills and experience. And obviously this kind of solution hacking into the software like it is not something the company wants you to do. I don't think I need to say that your user agreement usually says I will not do something like this.
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Chapter 8: What future changes can we expect in repair legislation?
In Section 1201, it says it is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine to tamper with or expose weaknesses in or discuss weaknesses of a digital lock.
And now, this law that was designed for MP3 sharing, it is now being applied to all of these other devices that we use every day.
Five years in prison. There should be a prison sentence for passing that law.
Well, Roman, I think you may have to take that one up with both parties in Congress in 1998.
Yeah, no, I know.
Everyone's at fault for that one. So as you can tell, the sketchy solution, you know, it has some problems. Obviously, they're not enforcing this law too often, but it's still a thing that exists that is out there. So they have that option to do that if they catch you with this kind of software.
So this is kind of a hacker path to solving and certification.
But is there a more law abiding path? OK, so in the past couple of years, there has been a movement to pass laws that would limit the power of these big companies. Right. And to make sure that as a consumer, we have more ownership over our stuff. So this is part of a movement that is called the right to repair.
So the Right to Repair movement, it basically says everybody should have the right to fix their own stuff. It's right there in the name. It is in the name. Good name. It's a good name. It's very descriptive. And one of the leaders of this movement is a woman named Gay Gordon Byrne. She has a lot of public speaking about this subject, including a TED Talk that now has two and a half million views.
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