Traditional media outlets are catching onto the "you own nothing" culture shift

Hey everybody, how's it going? Hope you're having a lovely day.

So today I'd like to go over an article that came out in The Atlantic that I found to be very interesting. Admittedly, this article, in my opinion, is a little bit melodramatic, but when it comes to this topic, I'd rather that the article writer lean on the side of being melodramatic than lean on the side of saying, "Oh, why are you even complaining? There's nothing wrong with this whatsoever." So I'd like to go over this article and give you some thoughts.

It says, "The first rule of at-home printers is that you do not need a printer until you do, and then you need it desperately. The second rule is that when you plug the printer in, either it will work frictionlessly for a decade, or it will immediately and frequently fail in novel and even impressive ways, ultimately causing a purchase to haunt you like a malevolent spirit," which is something that I've gone over on this channel many times, trying to make a label printer work, and I fight these things on a regular basis, as does Patrick, and we are, sometimes we win, and well, sometimes we lose.

So getting back into this. It says, "So rich is the history of printer dysfunction that its foibles have become a cliché in the early days of personal computing. After years of holding out, my family finally succumbed to a pandemic inkjet purchase." First mistake here is buying an inkjet instead of a laser. You're about to get screwed. Like many, we were doing a lot of online shopping in 2020, which meant a lot of return labels.

But if you're buying a printer and most of what you're printing are return labels, buy a laser. Seriously, you're going to pay so much less in the long run if you just buy a laser. When I was a kid, buying a laser printer meant spending thousands and thousands of dollars. Now, buying a laser printer means like spending a hundred bucks. You're so much better off with a black and white laser printer for 99% of what you're going to do than you are with an inkjet.

And anyway, back to the article. I girded my loins for the agony of paper jams, phantom spooler errors, and the dreaded utterance driver not found. What I did not expect, however, was for my printer to shake me down like a loan shark. The trouble started with a label for a package. My printer was unresponsive. Then I discovered an error message on my computer indicating that my HP OfficeJet Pro had been remotely disabled by the company. When I logged on to HP's website, I learned why. The credit card I had used to sign up for HP's Instant Ink cartridge refill program had expired, and the company had effectively bricked my device in response.

For those not trapped in this devil's bargain, Instant Ink is a monthly subscription program that purports to monitor one's printer usage and ink levels and automatically send new cartridges when they run low. The name is misleading, though, because the monthly fee is not for the ink itself, but for the number of pages printed. The recommended household plan is $5.99 a month for 100 pages. Like, again, neither any of you who understand, any of you who have ever used a proper laser printer know, that's a ripoff.

But anyway, like others, I signed up in haste during the printer setup process, only slightly aware of what I was purchasing. Getting ink delivered when I needed it sounded convenient enough to me, a man so thoroughly coddled by one-click e-commerce that the frontal lobes of my brain likely resemble cottage cheese. The monthly fee is incurred whether you print or not, and the ink cartridges occupy some minimal ownership space. You possess them, but you are, in essence, renting both them and your machine while you're enrolled in the program.

So, this gentleman thought that what he was signing up for was a just, they'll just send you an ink cartridge every month or something like that, or a new one every month or two, and what he was actually signing up for was the ability to print a certain number of pages in his printer. So, even if the printer still had ink in the printer, it would not print unless he paid them every month.

I've struggled in subsequent conversations with friends and family to adequately convey the level and intensity of entitled fury I felt when I realized all of this. Here was a piece of technology that I had paid more than $200 for, stocked with full ink cartridges. My printer, gently used, was sitting on my desk in perfect working order, but rendered useless by Hewlett-Packard, a tech corporation with a $28 billion market cap at the time of writing, because I had failed to make a monthly payment for a service intended to deliver new printer cartridges that I did not yet need.

And to be clear here, I don't like the mentioning of the $28 billion market cap of HP, because it makes it sound like the problem here is a company being successful and having a lot of money. I don't mind, I don't care if your company is worth $28 billion or $28. I don't want a device that does this. It has nothing to do with the net worth or the value on the stock market of your company.

Indignant into making grotesque, frustrated noises that I now understand to be hereditary, Worzel responds as to printer problems, I declare to nobody in particular that I was being extorted by my printer. I am sheepish to air this grievance aloud, lest it be seen as an abuse of my venerable platform. Because he's a journalist for the Atlantic.

And by the way, I'm happy that people are not silencing themselves in that way, saying, you know, I didn't read the fine print perfectly, so I probably shouldn't really talk about the fact that our society is moving towards a subscription model where you don't actually own anything. I'm happy that people with a platform are deciding, I would rather have other people call me an idiot for missing the fine print and saying that I'm abusing my platform than just sit down and take it. Good for you.

I'm an adult of somewhat sound mind and have the ability to read contracts. I did this to myself. But my printer shakedown is just one example of how digital subscriptions have permeated physical tech so thoroughly that they are blurring the lines of ownership. Even if I paid for it, can I really say that I own my printer if HP can flip a switch and make it inert?

What HP is doing is remarkably bad and deeply user-hostile. The writer and activist Cory Doctorow told me recently. Doctorow has written extensively about digital rights management across printer brands. For him, prosaic printer issues like mine help people understand digital rights in ways that companies make devices that resist user modification. The battle for the soul of digital freedom is taking place inside your printer, he argues.

It's not just about the surveillance or the egregious markups on ink and the efforts to stop third parties from undercutting the inkjet cartridge market, he said. It's about the way that consumers are losing control over things they've already paid for.

And this is something that I went over in the last video that I did on this channel where I was talking about one of the things that the Biden administration was looking into whether or not you should be allowed to install applications on a device that you purchased. You spend $1,500 on a computer. Should you be able to choose what applications you install on that $1,500 computer?

And to my great surprise, I'm not surprised at all. I've been reading on Apple for years. In the comments section, you had a bunch of people that were actually arguing against their ability to install applications onto a device they own. To be clear, not even arguing against whether or not these apps go on the App Store so that they are next to apps in the App Store. We're not even talking about just the App Store. They are arguing against the ability to have the choice to install an application of their choosing from a third-party source on a computer they own. That's the point we're at now. That's how crazy this shit is where people are actually arguing against the ability to do what they please with something that they purchased for $1,500. And that is a world that I am pushing back against as often as humanly possible.

One of his favorite examples is when Google break the bunch of sensors after shutting down a service they had acquired. Then there's Tesla, which frequently issues software updates to owners' vehicles, sometimes dramatically altering a car's functionality. In 2017, when Hurricane Irma threatened Florida, the company pushed an update that temporarily increased battery life for owners of vehicles within reach of the storm. Tesla was praised at the time, but people like Doctorow saw the event as an example of the power that tech companies have over customers. The carmaker simply lifted an arbitrary software restriction on a physical battery that was otherwise used to create two different price points for consumers.

They said the app stores powering our devices are convenient, and subscriptions can work great when you have a benevolent dictator, but what happens if they decide to turn the screws on you or increase the prices and your car stops working, he said. You have no remedies then.

I can report that corners of the information superhighway are teeming with individuals who are incandescently furious about HP's Instant Ink program. Together our network gripes form a complex harmony of resentment, a hallelujah chorus of bemoaning. There are tales of woe across HP's customer support site, in Reddit threads and on Twitter.

Pending class action lawsuit in California alleges that the Instant Ink program has significant catches and does not deliver new cartridges on time or allow those enrolled to use cartridges purchased outside the subscription service, rendering the consumer frequently unable to print.

Parker Trow, a spokesperson for HP, told me, Instant Ink cartridges will continue working until the end of the current billing cycle in which a customer cancels. To continue printing after they discontinue their Instant Ink subscription and their billing cycle ends, they can purchase and use HP original standard or XL cartridges.

The problems can extend beyond artificial limitations. Skip Wiseman, who owns his own consulting business in Poughkeepsie, New York, told me that HP Instant Ink would not stop sending him in-check cartridges. Armed with well over a year's supply, Wiseman canceled his subscription. It's called Instant Ink. Nobody told me that if I canceled, then those cartridges would stop working, he said. But they did. It just feels so manipulative. I guess this is our future, where your printer ink spies on you. It's bleak.

Although frustrated consumers routinely call it one, Instant Ink is not a scam, per se. It's just a scam. It's an aggressive, user-hostile business model. Dr. Rowe argues that HP is following in the footsteps of casinos and razor manufacturers, which offer deals, comped hotel rooms, and cheap razors in order to hook a customer into a more lucrative financial transaction once they're inside.

Printer ink is expensive because ink is naturally costly, but also because pricey cartridges help companies recoup the money they lose selling cheap hardware. Think of the original price tag of a printer like a down payment, one printer industry executive told Consumer Reports in 2018. For years, companies have sold their machines at a discount. But programs such as Instant Ink, which use technology to monitor cartridges in disabled machines, feel like an especially predatory step.

And this is something I can understand. Back in 2010, I started a company called Rossmann Supply Group. And one of the things that I noticed is that I had customers that said, man, I really wish that if you had to RMA something that you would send me a label to send the old one back or that you would send me a screen in advance of me sending you the old one back. Or I wish that you tested the screens to make sure they had no stuck pixels before they were sent to you.

And I decided to see what would happen if I made my price literally $2 more than the competition. So the competition would be selling a screen for $55 in free shipping, and I would sell it for $57. What happened is when I raised my price to $57, I went from having a thousand boxes go out the door on eBay, Amazon, and my website to like 20. My customer base was absolutely and utterly decimated.

And if I wanted to lower the price of that screen by a dollar, I'd sell four or five hundred. If I lowered it to the point where I was literally one cent lower, $54.99 from my competitor, I would sell 1,000 and sometimes almost upwards of 2,000 in a day. The effect of being the cheapest when you search by lowest price is insane.

And so I actually decided, okay, I'm going to start two separate accounts, two separate brands. One that charges a little bit more money. Let's say it's going to charge 57 or 58 for this. But if you have a problem, we will next day ship you a replacement screen. That replacement screen will have a label on the box. We'll send back the old one. So we're trusting you to be honest that we can actually RMA this thing back and we're not that you're just lying to us to get a free screen. We are going to double check to ensure that this screen has zero stuck pixels by having an actual human plug it in and actually test it before sending it to you. And we're going to ship it to you double boxed, which costs more money, but lowers the likelihood of this very delicate glass product breaking in the mail.

And what we found after a year is that even though it was only $2 more, that store just died in the vine. At one point we got less than one sale a day. And the other one was doing 500 to 2000 sales a day before I eventually disclosed the company.

And one of the real serious red Polish questions to ask here is, is this something that's being driven by customers or is it being driven by consumers that are constantly looking for the best deal and searching by lowest price rather than searching for the best value? Because my experience, one of the things I had actually heard when I was speaking back and forth with a group of software engineers that have worked in Silicon Valley for over 25 years is he said in half in jest. But he said. If you spend enough time in this industry, you will grow to despise your users. It's just, it's going to happen at some point in time.

And I genuinely wonder at what point they just realize, you know what? Everybody is literally buying by lowest price. That is the only thing that drive sales. So fine. You want cheap, we'll give you a cheap, but you're going to pay for it later. I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying that I like it, but it's genuinely something that I think about when I read a quote like that, I personally am happy to pay extra money for a brother printer.

Because so far, and again, knock on wood, I hope that they don't change this stuff. I think I have a 7860 at the store from a few years ago. It lets me scan whenever I want to scan. It lets me print whenever I want to print. I can use knockoff cartridges on it. It works just fine. There's no subscription garbage. There's no DRM on the cartridges or any grout crap like that. It just prints and it just works.

And every time I read something like this, it registers something in my head. I can't buy HP. I can't. I can't. Cause I don't know when you're going to stick the tip. And I don't know when something like eight instant ink is actually going to mean not that I'm getting ink, but I have to read the fine print of a contract to make sure that you're not going to remotely disable the ink in my printer. I don't want to read the fine print to figure out if you're going to remotely disable a product that I've bought and paid for because I have not paid the subscription. I'd rather just be safe and stay away from anybody that's ever done anything like that in any way, shape or form.

So I buy brother. I like my little brother printer. It's been a little multifunction. It scans, it prints, it does fairly good quality. It doesn't jam. It doesn't screw up. It just sits there and it just works. And it never bothers me for some subscription or you didn't buy the right ink kind of BS. So even if a brother costs 50 or a hundred or $150 more than the competition, I'll keep buying them because I know that they are not going to do this stuff to me. The moment they start, I'm going to move elsewhere and hopefully we don't get to a world where every single company has some sort of nonsense like this that I have to dodge.

John Kruger, a writer in Philadelphia who is also embroiled in a dysfunctional relationship with instant ink, cites the program as proof that we are living the on the internet of shit and entrapped by subscriptions. Like me, Kruger is abashed by his anger, but feels taken for a ride with the printer he essentially only rents.

I paid for this machine and is galling that the company could continue to tell me what I can do with it, Kruger told me. As a dumb American who owns the device, I should be able to use blueberry juice to get this thing to print if I want, boy take it.

That my personal rage circus revolves around a printer, a profoundly unsexy piece of machinery that many use to complete mundane life tasks, such as printing out a passport form or a shipping label. By the way, it can totally be done with a laser printer, dump the ink jets, I'm telling you, your life will be better for it, is an added twist of the knife.

But this is precisely the type of second order problem that people overlook. Like me, they pay little attention during the signup process and like Wiseman and Kruger, continue to pay while feeling fleeced because doing so is easier than an alternative. That it feels so blatantly extractive is a reason to seethe, but also a reason for complacency. Although the execution is modern, there is something timeless about feeling powerless at the hands of an enormous corporation. So much, that so many of us just accept it.

My entire life, my printers have always been broken, Kruger said, so it fits that the first one that hasn't been broken has also decided to hold me hostage. It's funny, but it's sad at the same time.

I don't think that this stuff is going to change unless people decide to stop putting money into this stuff. And listen, you know, 10, 20, 30, you know, even then, I don't think most people knew the degree to which many of these devices were trying to take away the concept of ownership from us. They're trying to take away the concept of repair from us.

But in 2023, there are so many ways to learn. You have online reviews for all these products. You can look things up on YouTube. You can ask a question immediately. This type of news propagates very quickly.

And with printers, I think there is a chance. Again, when it comes to laptops and smartphones, at this point, you have like Fairphone for phones, only very recently. Framework for laptops, again, only very recently. And admittedly, because those companies are not as well capitalized as Apple, Dell, and Samsung. They're a very competitive device competing on specs and everything else and experience for the amount of money you spend. But this is not really a lot of competition.

But in the realm of printers, I do hope that there is enough that people can speak with their wallets and just say, you know what? I read these stories on HPs that don't print unless you pay them every month. Or I read this story on Canon or Lexmark, where I was only able to use their printer. I was on their ink. I read this story about Dymo, where they were only allowing people to use their paper. So just to be safe. I'm not going to spend anything. Any money on a product that has their logo on it until they have made corrective action.

I don't see Dymo changing their ways. The Dymo 550 still appears to be a printer that only works when you use their labels, which is something that really makes me sad that this thing still is actually being sold on a regular basis. I'm glad that the ratings for this thing have plummeted. This used to be a four and a half to five star printer if you look at the reviews for the 450. You know, for the 550. Honestly, this is still even too high. Just the fact that it doesn't work with other labels. I really wish this was closer to one, but I think this stuff will change when the competition decides to market themselves by saying, by the way, we're never going to do this.

And it's also going to be on us as consumers to be open to and willing to spend a little bit more money to not be abused. Don't search by lowest price and just buy the one that has the highest performance at the lowest price, but really dig in a little bit to figure out whether you're getting the best value rather than the best price.

Let me know what you think on that. Let me know what you think in the comments down below. That's it for today. And as always, I hope you learned something. See you in the next video. Bye now.