Radical Solutions and Future Outlook

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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 ninety nine percent 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 a pretty high baseline of mad right now, but but I'm gonna 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. 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 one to ten. Okay, that sounds like a plan. So so what's this story that's gonna 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. Okay, to making me mad. Go ahead. Yeah, so let's just start. Think about all the dev ices 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 I did not install it. And I 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, hone ywell 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. So 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 gonna talk about how this phenomenon, it can 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. Okay. 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. 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, spray ing 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 nineties we didn't have a lot of electronic control units on these machines, mechan ical 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 twenty 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 mach Yeah. I mean that sounds completely arduous to to be a driver for twenty hours in something we have to pay attention to every moment of those twenty hours. But I'm anticipating here that there are some negative aspects to this too. Yes, there are some drawbacks. So 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, uh if 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 D-rate of the machine. So a D-rating, 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, you know, was doing this for some kind of good reason, like for a safety reason. Right. 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. But according to Jared, that's also kind of a pain . So I was forced to call the dealership out. They came out and uh replaced, I think one of the Delta pressure sensors. And that that didn't end up fixing the problem, but the logistics of that mean that the 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, uh, 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. They're just that's just lost revenue that's just gone. And it's it's difficult to convey how frustrating that is when you're sitting on your hand s and your crop is literally falling on the ground and you don't have the ability to do anything about it . 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 manufactur er . So R,oman, with this in mind, where are you at on the anger scale? Now a six, uh, 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? 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. Because 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 Doctoro. We can reveal perhaps that you and I are like all the best Americans, Canadian. You had to squeeze it in there. Roman, we are everywhere. So anyway, lately, Corey's been out there popularizing this one big idea that he's had. So 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 inshidification. Roman, have you heard the word inshidification? I have. I'm also a big fan of Corey Doctor O. 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 uh platforms that start off being good to their end users, uh, but are also finding a way to lock those end users in, and 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 nineteen eighties, just to use an example of a hobby someone might have, right? I'm not saying that is me. Someone has this hobby though. 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 shittify. 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 hoover ed 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 shidification, 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. Okay, 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, uh, the science fiction writer who coined the term cyberspace, he's quite a prophet. And uh in one of his books, he has this line: cyberspace is averting, 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? Uh 20 possibly? That's pretty average, if that's right. So according to this survey I found from twenty twenty three, the average American household has about twenty one connected devices. So that means devices that are connected to the internet Wow. Wow. That that is way too high. I I can already think of the ones that I wish I could eliminate from my house right now. Oh, 100%. 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 in dig itification, 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 , 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 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 Beams 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. So 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 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. Uh my independent mechanic, I called him up and he said he didn't have the tools to do that because they cost six thousand dollars. So 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. Okay, keep some room. We need a ceiling that we could achieve later on in the episode. You're gonna get there. So Roman, in the past, farmers could actually buy a generic replacement part, right? Like 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 I've definitely heard that term before. So but what 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, 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 uh we don't like it when you use third-party ink. And so we're gonna block third-party ink installation. Once we do that , we're gonna 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 . Inks now ten thousand dollars a gallon. It costs more to print your grocery list than it would if you printed it with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion That's 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. L theike Kentucky Derby winning semen is very expensive. It's worth a lot of money. But Brinter 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 uh buying new ones, that they like their phones. They work fine. And so when they break, they don't just get a new one. Apple uniquely among manufactur ers, 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 insidification 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, so this is a vicious cycle. So Roman, now that I have gone through the problem of inchidification with you, where would you say your anger level is at as of now? I mean let's go for a nine. I'm I'm a nine. Like I'm 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, hopefully. Because there are people who are trying to make things better. There are people fighting back and trying to outlaw this form of inchidification. Excellent. Okay, let's talk about that after the break . Ready to give your home a style refresh? Article makes it easy to create a stylish, long-lasting home at an unbeatable price. They offer a curated selection of mid-century modern coastal and scandy inspired pieces that will make a perfect addition to your home. 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Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results now with indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com/slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring? Do it the right way with Indeed. So we're back with Chris Berube talking about insidi fication. 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. Uh 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 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 Corey Doctor 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, and 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 they need to say that your user agreement usually says I will not do something like this, but it is becoming more and more common. And our farmer Jared he told me he's actually seen this kind of thing pretty often in his day-to-day life, like being used by repair people. There have been a lot of black market things that have been released that independent providers are using the laptops from China that have cracked uh John Deere software on it. So I'm completely on board with fixing this problem. However you need to fix it. But I do think that there's probably a little room to be cautious if you do not know where the software or hardware that you're using to fix the problem came from. Yeah, it does sound sketchy. And Jared on our call, he made clear to me he has never used this kind of technology because, you know, he wants to follow the rules and also you don't actually know what you're putting on your computer when you are working with this kind of thing. So if something goes wrong, you know, you can't call John Deere because at this point you are doing something you're not supposed to be doing. Create some hesitation in using technology like that on your hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machines because you're out of any ecosystem that can help you because you're you're operating outside of the margins. So on top of that, Corey Doctor says that in a lot of cases, this kind of solution, this hackery solution, is probably illegal. Well, that just drives me crazy. So why is it illegal? Well, there's something called a digital lock that is on a lot of these things. And it's a very particular kind of software. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was concern about ripping DVDs and music piracy, stuff like that. So back then, record companies and movie studios, they added digital locks to their files. And in 1998, the US passed a law that made it illegal to break a digital lock. They passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In section 1201, it says it is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a five hundred thousand dollar 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 1988 Yeah, no, I know. There's 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 the hacker path to solving and shidification, but is there a more law-abiding path? Okay. So in the past couple 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. I am a repair geek . I grew up fixing things with my dad. It was what we did. We fixed our TV, we fixed our refrigerator, we fixed stuff that didn't need fixing. Gay Gordon Byrne is the head of this group called the Repair Association. And their argument is, look, if we truly own something, we should be able to fix it. What's really got me irritated is that at this point, the vast majority of products on the market today cannot be repaired by any party without being totally dependent on the manufacturer. And the day the manufacturer decides they don't want you to fix it, it's over. This is a completely artificial problem. And this argument has picked up a lot of followers. There are people fighting for this in Europe, in South America, and actually, one of the people out there advocating for it pretty loudly is our farmer, Jared Wilson. You know, I've been to Washington a few times and spoken with staff from senators and representatives. So, you know, not not really trying to make anything political, just sharing my experiences with the people who were elected to pass laws to govern how things work in this country. Okay. Well, I wanna know, so is there been any success with this? 'Cause this seems like an uphill battle. Actually, it has been pretty successful the last couple of years. And it's been pleasantly surprising to see this movement developing. Europe specifically, there has been a lot of movement on this. So in 2024 , the European Union passed a directive saying every member state needed to have a right to repair law by the summer of 2026. So that is this coming summer. And that will require manufacturers to offer repairs for all health old appliances, including washing machines, even smartphones. So pretty soon we'll have a pretty good idea of how that's being implemented in Europe. But in the United States, there's been some movement as well. So a few states have now passed right to repair laws. Colorado passed a law in 2023 saying that farmers need to have the right to repair. Oregon passed a law covering electronic and powered wheelchairs. We talked a little bit about wheelchair users, you know , they need access to repair tools because they're facing a pretty small market, pretty high rates for getting stuff fixed. And now quite a few states have passed laws about fixing phones and laptops. And that includes states who are otherwise pretty friendly to business interests. Aaron Powell We're getting somewhere with these state right to repair bills. So it's really going well, including Texas, including legislatures that have, you know, considered pretty friendly to big business are still pass ing repair laws. It's great. So the latest development in all of this is a national right to repair bill for cars that is under consideration in the House of Representatives. Uh that bill is bipartisan, by the way. It has been sponsored by Republicans and Democrats. It reflects something from Stein's Law, which is a law of finance that says that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. And I think that people are fed up. And so we're getting some repair bills. It's very hard to be on the wrong side of repair and saying you shouldn't be allowed to fix your own stuff. So this all seems like good news. So there are some laws that might reverse in certification. It is good news. And actually, in response to this push, we have already seen some companies who have started sending out these repair tools. So these are companies trying to get out preemptively ahead of these laws. I bet. And an example of this, a couple of years ago, a little company called John Deere, perhaps you have heard of them from multiple references in this story. A little company called John Deere have put out this software to their customers that's designed to make it possible for farmers to decode these error messages and troubleshoot lots of problems with their tractors. So to fix things themselves. And as of this year, John Deere told me, farmers can actually override a D-rating in some cases. So this is the problem we talked about at the beginning of the show, where the tractor shuts itself down. So this all sounds like good news, but there are still some caveats. Okay, so what it what is this caveat? Well, Jared says there are still flaws with the repair software. He's particularly concerned about the way it collects his data, his harvesting data. He says that's not ideal for him. He's actually been part of a class action lawsuit against John Deere , saying they have an unfair monopoly on repair tools and the software is part of the complaints that they filed. And in a bigger sense, while there's been progress around right to repair, there's no guarantee that things like the federal law about car repairs is going to pass, right? Like there are some big lobbies pushing back against that. Some car companies have opposed more right to repair laws because they worry it could lead to their intellectual property being violated. Their intellectual property about the information on my car. That is an absurd assertion. Yeah, I mean when you put it that way, it sounds pretty silly. Um but these right to repair laws, like they can make a big difference, right? But they aren't a magic bullet. Like many of these laws do not outlaw parts pairing, for example. So they don't solve the problem of interoperability. You know, you can't necessarily put third-party parts on to repair something. So there's an argument that these laws could go further. Yeah. So it can make the platform better, but you're still locked into the platform. You're totally locked into the platform. So in lots of ways, like you need these laws to be more comprehensive. And Corey Doctor says, like, maybe we should start thinking beyond the laws. Like he has other approaches to this. He thinks we actually need to be doing something a lot more radical. Oh, okay. Tell me more. What does he have in mind? One thing Corey is pushing for