Minor Irritants: All of these high-tech 'tools' trap me in their system
James McLeod on the day the robots started talking back, and the car he cannot update.
Every Christmas, when The Line takes a brief vacation, we like to offer what we call our Gratitude Series — we get some writers we love to share a story of something they’re happy about or grateful for from the past year. It’s a nice corrective to the usual doom-and-gloom. But, as we take a week off to start the summer, to hell with that — for your enjoyment, we’re leaning the opposite way: It’s The Line’s first Minor Irritants Week. Feel our pain. Share our pain. And never fear — The Line will be back next week.
By: James McLeod
A few weeks ago, anticipating warm summer nights, I hung up a couple strings of lights on the ceiling of my apartment balcony. And in an impulsive moment at Home Depot, I grabbed a smart plug.
Nothing about this is particularly ambitious, as far as home-improvement projects go. But it’s nice to have some faux Edison bulbs casting a warm glow on the balcony in the evenings. And it’s nice that I don’t have to fumble with an extension cord plug. I can just say to my Google Home device, “Hey Google, turn on the balcony lights.”
But once I got it set up, something started to bug me. Every time I asked Google to turn on the balcony lights, it cheerfully responded “Balcony lights on.” It insists on announcing itself when it turns the lights off too.
This is slightly annoying to me.
I have three other smart lights in my apartment, and all of them dutifully turn on and off reliably — and silently — when I tell them to do so.
On a basic level, the talkback from the robot offends me. I don’t need the system to tell me it did the job. I know whether it did it! I can see if the lights turn on!
So I dive into the Google Home settings, and can’t find anything to fix it. No luck. No obvious “Make robot stop talking” toggle.
So then I dive into the bloody Home Depot proprietary app for their branded smart plugs, because God knows it’s not enough to have just one corporation processing my data. I can’t find a toggle to prevent the smart speaker from saying “Balcony lights on.”
I try a bit of cursory Googling, but of course Google is crap these days. So now I’m all out of ideas.
This is fine. I have four different smart lights in my apartment, three of them operate exactly the way I want, and the balcony lights have a small quirk that irritates me slightly.
But it’s an irritation that won’t go away. It’s an irritation I encounter every single day, in every part of my life.
It’s the same feeling I get when I log into the software system that I use for approximately 30 per cent of my job, and all the buttons have been moved around. Everything’s still there, it just looks different, and I need to spend a week reprogramming my muscle memory.
It’s the same feeling when I get in my car. About a year and a half ago, I bought a lightly used Toyota Corolla. In the centre console there is a large screen, with buttons around the edge tantalizingly labelled “Map” and “Apps” and such.
But when you press the button, it tells you to install something called the “Entune App” on your phone, and the internet will tell you that Toyota discontinued the Entune App five years ago.
I asked about this at a Toyota dealership once, and they told me that there’s nothing to be done. No way to update the car. No way to connect my Android phone to the system.
Fourteen years ago, Marc Andressen wrote “Software is Eating the World” and by God he was right. Today, every single aspect of our life involves a screen. Cooking dinner, finding love, going to work, meditating, and everything else probably involves looking at a screen and using software.
In the years since Andressen published that essay, a lot has happened with technology. I am very well aware that tech companies have more incentive to build a new feature rather than fix a bug in their old software. I am very well acquainted with the word "enshittification." And I am very well aware that the next turn of the screw is putting ChatGPT into the balcony lights, the car, the meditation app, and everywhere else. Depending on who you ask, the godlike artificial intelligence might even be able to fix all of these little irritations.
But I don't think I'll stop being annoyed. My ire runs deeper. At root, the irritation is about the fact that I don’t really feel in control of any of this stuff, and that's only accelerating.
Sure, I know how to use it well enough. But I can’t fix it when it breaks. I don’t know how it really works. And when my smart speaker talks back, I have no way of knowing or figuring out whether that’s a bug in the system or a setting I cannot control, or just a lazy developer that neglected to build a toggle.
On some level, I know that this is just a natural fact of aging. I turned 40 earlier this year. I’m already five years past my best-before date according to Douglas Adams:
I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
As I sit and ponder my irritation, I think the thing that really irks me is the feeling that I’m not in control. Each of us is walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket, and these interconnected systems are capable of tremendous marvels.
But they’re not tools, dammit. I don’t feel like I actually own them. I don’t control them.
I am a tenant in somebody else’s system. I am a passenger. All I can really do is ask the robot nicely.
And then one day, for no obvious reason, the robot starts talking back.
James McLeod is a writer and communications professional living in Toronto.
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As an 80-something, this essay makes me happy. A forty-year-old is having the same problems with technology that I have. He also feels loss of control. He too can't fix things and he doesn't understand things. Oh happy day!
Here's a correlated irritant, the increasing impossibility to upgrade or fix things, sometimes by mere misfortune, sometimes by design.
Case in point: even basic Mac computers a few short years ago were moderately upgradable or fixable. It was fairly easy to put an SSD in, add some memory or replace the battery.
Now the upgrading is completely impossible, so one has to pay apple a MEGA-premium to get the highest specs right out of the box, for fear of making the already-expensive machine obsolescent even faster. No more ability to buy those upgrades from third parties later down the road at a third of the price.
Or John Deere making it impossible (and in some cases illegal) for a farmer to fix their tractors in the field, so they can get back to work ASAP. Instead, expensive techs with proprietary software are mandated to be able to look under the hood.
I'm a big fan of the right to repair, as companies have no case, moral, economic or otherwise to justify these practices, yet we tolerate them.
The enshittification of everything is indeed real and going to become more of a problem in the future. The problem is we're all dumb enough to keep buying those products instead of flat out refusing them.