There was a time when I could walk into a grocery store, see that something was on sale, put it in my cart, and pay the sale price.
Apparently, that was too simple.
Now when I walk into Kroger and see a product advertised at a lower price, I first need to “clip” a digital coupon. That means pulling out my phone, opening an app, signing into an account and digitally clipping something that does not physically exist so that a computer will permit me to pay the advertised price. Kroger currently promotes entire categories of “Weekly Digital Deals” built around precisely this process.
Why does buying cheese need a user account?
There is another grocery-store innovation I would happily send back: self-checkout.
If I am going to scan my own groceries, bag them, troubleshoot the machine and then stand there while it repeatedly accuses me of stealing because I had the audacity to move faster than its software expected, I have a proposal:
Give me 10 percent off.
I am doing part of the job that an employee used to do.
I am not opposed to self-checkout existing as an option. Sometimes I have two things and genuinely want to get out of the store quickly. What irritates me is watching it become the default while staffed checkout lanes disappear.
The labor did not disappear. It was transferred to me.
And somehow the price stayed the same.
I remember when Meijer used to offer customers a small incentive for bringing shopping carts back into the store. There was an appealing honesty to that arrangement: you saved us some labor, so we will share a little of the savings with you.
I miss that mentality.
Today the more common model seems to be: you do the work, we keep the savings, and a camera watches you closely in case you steal something while doing it.
Then there are the apps.
I recently moved into a house and discovered I needed an app to get my home Wi-Fi running. My security system needs an app. Every company wants me to download something, create an account, provide an email address, agree to several thousand words of terms I will never realistically read, permit notifications, surrender some quantity of information about myself and begin what apparently must now be a lifelong digital relationship.
I don’t want a relationship with my grocery store.
I want groceries.
There is a wonderful vulgar word for what has happened to so many of the products and services around us:
Enshittification.
Writer Cory Doctorow coined the term to describe what happens to digital platforms as they mature. The simplified version is that a platform starts by trying very hard to please its users. Once the users are locked in, it shifts value away from them toward advertisers, sellers or other business customers. Eventually it begins extracting more from those business customers too, until the platform primarily serves the interests of the company controlling it. Doctorow’s original explanation is worth reading.
His broader diagnosis matters too. Enshittification becomes possible when the forces that once constrained a platform—competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power—stop exerting enough pressure.
That is why I think the idea has escaped the internet.
We are enshittifying nearly everything.
I Bought It. Why Don’t I Own It?
At the heart of this is something very simple: I believe that when I buy something, I should own it.
That statement has somehow become more radical than it sounds.
For most of human commercial history, a transaction was fairly straightforward:
I give you money. You give me a thing.
The thing is now mine.
But as enshittification spreads beyond software and into physical goods, that simple model begins to dissolve. The “thing” is no longer just a thing. It becomes a gateway into a system.
The software requires a subscription. The television wants an internet connection. The car has an app. The appliance wants Wi-Fi. The printer wants to communicate with its manufacturer. The movie I “bought” lives on somebody else’s server.
Increasingly, the transaction looks less like I give you money and you give me a thing and more like:
I give you money. You allow me to begin an ongoing commercial relationship with you.
Each of those relationships becomes another point of control that extends beyond the moment of purchase.
A feature physically present in a product can now be controlled by software, meaning the manufacturer can potentially decide under what circumstances I am permitted to use hardware sitting inside something I supposedly own.
Once that shift happens, ownership stops being a clean boundary and starts becoming conditional access.
BMW provided perhaps the most beautifully absurd example.
In 2022, BMW began offering subscriptions in some countries to activate heated seats that were already physically installed in the automobile. As The Verge reported at the time, a monthly subscription to activate those heated seats cost roughly $18.
Read that again.
You bought the car.
You bought the seat.
You bought the heating elements.
BMW still wanted another $18 a month to turn them on.
Customers hated the idea so much that BMW eventually backed down. In 2023, BMW board member Pieter Nota said the company would no longer offer seat heating through monthly subscriptions, according to Edmunds.
Good.
Consumers won that one, though BMW continued pursuing other software-enabled features on demand.
But the fact that the idea made it through enough meetings, spreadsheets, executives and lawyers to become an actual product tells us something important. It was not merely a stupid idea. It represented a direction of travel.
I hate subscriptions.
That does not mean I refuse every recurring service. I have Apple Music. I have Apple TV and Amazon. I also subscribe to MLB because I am a Reds fan who lives outside the Reds television area and otherwise cannot reliably watch the team.
I live in the same world everyone else does, and sometimes convenience wins.
But I don’t particularly like the arrangement.
If I truly love a movie, I would rather own the DVD. If I can negotiate a service for a fixed price over a long period—a three-year agreement, for example—I prefer that to an open-ended subscription whose price and terms can continually change.
Subscriptions continue quietly. People forget about them. Prices creep upward. Terms change. What began as a convenience becomes another automatic withdrawal buried among twenty others.
Ownership ends the transaction.
Subscription turns the transaction into a relationship.
Increasingly, companies don’t want the transaction to end.
You Will Own Nothing
There is one phrase that inevitably hangs over this discussion.
In 2016, the World Economic Forum promoted a set of predictions about life in 2030, including Danish politician Ida Auken’s thought experiment, summarized as:
“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, and life has never been better.”
This was not a decree. There is no official WEF program to abolish private property, and that claim has been badly overstated.
What interests me is narrower: a world of reduced ownership was presented as plausible and, in important respects, desirable at an institution that helps shape how executives, regulators and consultants talk about what a forward-looking economy is supposed to look like.
That is how paradigms move.
Not necessarily through a plan, but through a slow consensus about what a modern company, economy or institution is supposed to look like.
Nobody at Kroger has to read Ida Auken. BMW engineers do not need instructions from Davos. Uber executives do not need a WEF memo.
They operate in a business culture where recurring engagement is increasingly assumed to be better than a one-time sale, access can be more profitable than ownership, data has value, and a permanent customer relationship is treated as an asset.
I don’t own the music; I subscribe to the service. I don’t own the movie; I rent access to a library. I don’t simply buy software; I pay for permission to keep using it. A car manufacturer can install hardware in my automobile and attempt to charge me monthly to activate it. My appliances want accounts. My television wants to remain connected to its manufacturer.
Even products I physically possess are becoming gateways into services I do not control.
Nobody had to confiscate anything.
Ownership can disappear much more quietly than that.
It can simply be replaced, transaction by transaction, with access.
Maybe that future is more efficient.
Maybe it is more convenient.
Maybe someone can prove that it is more sustainable.
Maybe it is even safer.
I still don’t want it.
Because efficiency is not my highest value.
Freedom is.
And ownership is one of the oldest practical forms of freedom we have.
My BMW Is Wonderful. I Also Hate It.
I own a 2006 BMW 330i.
When it works, it is an absolute joy to drive.
That qualification—when it works—is doing a lot of work.
There always seems to be something wrong with it, and what frustrates me isn’t simply that a twenty-year-old automobile requires repairs. Of course it does.
It is the unnecessary difficulty of the repairs.
I like working on things. I grew up around tools. I run a manufacturing company. Machinery does not intimidate me. If something breaks, my instinct is to figure out how it works, determine what failed, repair it and keep going.
To be fair, my BMW is repairable.
That distinction is important because it marks a transition point. The car still belongs to an era where ownership and repair were tightly linked. An independent mechanic can work on it. I can work on it. Parts are generally available.
But even here, you can feel the early pressure of what came later.
Starters fail. Electric water pumps fail. Thermostats fail. Crankshaft-position sensors, PCV components and eccentric-shaft sensors fail. These are not immortal components, and no reasonable owner expects them to be.
What I do expect is that a car should be designed with the understanding that somebody will eventually have to replace them.
Instead, on the E90, getting to the failed part can become half the repair.
Then there are things such as the oil-pan gasket—a component hardly famous for routinely failing on every automobile ever built, yet oil-pan leaks are extraordinarily familiar territory to E90 BMW owners. The gasket itself is inexpensive.
Getting to it is not.
My complaint is not:
“My twenty-year-old car broke.”
Of course it broke. Machines wear out.
My complaint is:
“Why was a component that everyone knew would eventually require service designed as though nobody would ever have to touch it?”
Cars like mine increasingly look to me like an early stage in a larger transition.
At first, dependency was mostly mechanical. Make ordinary repairs sufficiently difficult or time-consuming and more owners surrender the car to the dealership.
Then dependency became electronic. Specialized diagnostic equipment appeared, followed by proprietary software and manufacturer-controlled repair information.
Now the argument increasingly concerns the data and software controlling the vehicle itself.
The Federal Trade Commission studied manufacturer repair restrictions and concluded that there was “scant evidence” supporting many manufacturers’ justifications for them. The FTC also found that repair restrictions can increase consumer costs, limit choice and push consumers toward manufacturer-controlled repair networks.
The Government Accountability Office has also examined the problem, particularly as newer vehicles transmit diagnostic information wirelessly back to manufacturers. If independent shops cannot access the same information, dealerships gain a built-in competitive advantage.
That worries me far more than my BMW’s irritating starter location.
A vehicle can be mechanically repairable but practically unrepairable because the necessary software is unavailable, a control module has been discontinued, a replacement component must be electronically authorized by the manufacturer, or diagnostic information is locked behind a proprietary system.
At that point, the question is no longer whether the owner is mechanically capable of repairing his car.
The manufacturer has made the decision for him.
And once automobiles become sufficiently complex, even repairable failures can become economically terminal. Whether or not anyone deliberately engineers a car to die immediately after its warranty expires, an automobile built around expensive integrated assemblies, proprietary electronics and limited repair paths can produce essentially the same result.
A $50 failed component does not matter very much if the only practical remedy is replacing a $5,000 assembly.
The E90 still lets me fight with it.
The car that comes twenty years later may simply tell me no.
Repairability is not merely a convenience.
It is part of ownership.
So Why Is Right to Repair So Difficult?
The argument behind right to repair is simple:
If ownership is real, repair must be possible.
The bipartisan federal REPAIR Act, H.R. 1566, sought to give vehicle owners and independent repair shops access to the data, tools and software necessary to service modern automobiles—including the telematics data increasingly central to diagnosis and repair.
The public appears overwhelmingly supportive.
A February 2026 national poll of 1,000 vehicle owners, conducted by The Tarrance Group for the CAR Coalition, found support for federal right-to-repair legislation above 85 percent. NFIB has separately told Congress that 89 percent of its members support allowing customers and repair shops to access the information necessary to repair products.
Yet on May 21, 2026, the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act, H.R. 7389, by a vote of 48–1.
The committee version codifies the existing 2014 light-duty and 2015 heavy-duty repair agreements, makes the framework enforceable by the FTC and directs the FTC to further study vehicle-repair access.
What it does not contain is the telematics-access mandate at the heart of the original REPAIR Act. NADA itself describes the committee measure as a narrower version that preserves the existing repair framework rather than establishing the broader data-access requirements sought by H.R. 1566.
Even Congressman Neal Dunn, the Republican sponsor of the original REPAIR Act, objected:
“While the version included in yesterday’s markup represents some progress, the legislation considered by the committee does not fully reflect the original REPAIR Act and fails to protect consumers, independent repair shops and aftermarket manufacturers.”
So how does a proposal with bipartisan sponsorship and overwhelming public support become substantially narrower?
In this case, we do not have to speculate.
The National Automobile Dealers Association has publicly opposed the original REPAIR Act.
And in a July 2026 advocacy update, an NADA director wrote:
“Thanks to NADA’s grassroots advocacy, the committee withdrew its problematic draft of the ‘REPAIR Act’ and replaced it with a significantly scaled-back version.”
The same update says NADA expects right-to-repair supporters to attempt to restore the deleted provisions when the legislation reaches the House floor.
That is considerably stronger evidence than simply pointing at lobbying totals and suggesting that money might have influenced the process.
One of the country’s most powerful automotive trade associations is publicly taking credit for helping get the stronger proposal scaled back.
And the fight is not finished. NFIB has urged Congress to restore substantive REPAIR Act provisions as the broader highway legislation moves forward.
My position remains uncomplicated:
If I own the car, I should have the right to fix the car.
If I don’t have the time or inclination, I should have the right to take it to the mechanic down the street.
BMW should not get to decide that only BMW can meaningfully understand my BMW.
Repair Is a Form of Ownership
My father was a mechanic when he was young.
He still owns most of the tools he bought decades ago.
My parents still use a Kirby vacuum cleaner they bought when I was about seven years old.
I am 47.
One vacuum cleaner has performed its extremely unglamorous job for roughly forty years.
Meanwhile we live in a culture that congratulates itself continually for environmental consciousness while routinely manufacturing products whose economic destiny is the landfill.
That contradiction drives me crazy.
I recently spent around $1,400 on a SEBO vacuum cleaner.
That sounds ridiculous.
I bought it precisely because I am tired of buying cheap things.
SEBO emphasizes serviceability, replacement parts and long-term ownership. I can take the thing apart. I can buy components for it. I can repair it.
I don’t need my vacuum cleaner to be cheap.
I need my vacuum cleaner to vacuum—and then continue vacuuming for a very long time.
If something eventually breaks, I want to unscrew the broken part, buy another one, install it and keep going.
That used to be called normal.
Now it is a premium feature.
The same philosophy applies to appliances, lawn mowers, tools, electronics, cars, houses and even building materials.
There is a profound difference between designing something under the assumption that somebody will maintain it for fifty years and designing something under the assumption that somebody will replace it in five.
If I cannot understand it, open it, maintain it, modify it or hire the person of my choosing to repair it, exactly how much of it do I own?
The Environmental Contradiction
This is where our environmental priorities become almost comical.
Consumers receive a nonstop stream of instructions about how our individual behavior must change to save energy and protect the environment. Buy the efficient appliance. Use the high-efficiency washing machine and the detergent designed for it. Reduce your water consumption. Accept lower-flow plumbing fixtures.
The EPA’s WaterSense standard for showerheads, for example, limits qualifying products to 2.0 gallons per minute rather than the federal 2.5-gallon standard.
We are told not to turn our air conditioning too low or our heat too high. Department of Energy guidance has long recommended settings around 68 degrees in winter and higher temperatures during summer setbacks.
We are encouraged to electrify more things. The Department of Energy promotes induction cooking, and federal programs have offered rebates for qualifying electric and induction ranges and cooktops.
Fine.
I’m actually sympathetic to much of the underlying objective.
Waste is stupid. Energy costs money. Pollution is real. Resources should not be squandered.
But here is what I cannot understand:
If reducing consumption is so important, why aren’t we absolutely obsessed with making things last?
Where is the massive political campaign demanding a washing machine that lasts thirty years?
Where is the regulatory obsession with requiring manufacturers to make repair parts available?
Why do we spend so much energy regulating how many gallons per minute come out of my showerhead while tolerating an economic system that encourages me to throw away the entire washing machine when a small proprietary component fails?
Consider automotive transmissions.
There are modern continuously variable transmissions where the practical service solution after certain internal failures is replacement rather than rebuilding. Sometimes the individual repair components simply aren’t made conveniently available through normal service channels.
A relatively inexpensive internal failure can therefore become a multi-thousand-dollar replacement.
How is that environmentally responsible?
Repair leaves the machine in service. Replacement requires another major assembly to be manufactured, transported and installed while the old one becomes waste.
The philosophy is increasingly familiar:
Replace the module.
Replace the assembly.
Replace the appliance.
Replace the machine.
Replace the car.
Then someone tells me to carefully rinse my yogurt container before putting it in the blue bin.
I’m sorry, but I have questions.
If we actually care about consumption and waste, one of the most environmentally responsible things a person can do is brutally simple:
Buy something good and keep it.
Maintain it. Repair it. Hand it down.
My father’s tools are environmentally friendly.
My parents’ forty-year-old vacuum cleaner is environmentally friendly.
A 1929 house still sheltering a family nearly a century after it was built is environmentally friendly.
A repairable appliance is environmentally friendly.
A car kept on the road rather than discarded because an inaccessible electronic module failed is environmentally friendly.
Durability may be the oldest sustainability technology humanity ever invented.
A durable object does not need an advertising campaign explaining how sustainable it is.
Its continued existence is the argument.
Then There Is the Surveillance
Enshittification becomes more sinister when the product stops merely extracting money and starts extracting information.
Why does everything want data?
Because data has value.
Once a product is connected, the manufacturer gains an opportunity that did not exist when it simply sold you a toaster in 1987. It can continue learning from you after the sale—your habits, location, purchases, viewing, driving, preferences and behavior.
This isn’t paranoia about a hypothetical future.
In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission warned about connected automobiles collecting sensitive information, including precise location and biometric information, and about what companies can subsequently do with that information.
A September 2024 FTC staff report on major social-media and video-streaming companies found extensive collection, retention and monetization of personal information.
The agency has also investigated what it calls “surveillance pricing”: using consumer information to tailor prices or promotions.
And the information involved can be remarkably granular.
FTC staff found that behavior ranging from how a person moves a mouse across a webpage to which products are left unpurchased in an online shopping cart can be tracked and potentially used by retailers to tailor pricing.
Think about where that road leads.
The price isn’t necessarily the price anymore.
It can become the price for you.
Which brings me back to Kroger.
A digital coupon is not merely a discount. It is also an invitation to identify yourself, use an account and attach a purchase to a customer profile.
The discount is part of what they pay you for the data.
So I have become increasingly hostile toward unnecessary connectivity.
Why does my television need to know what I am watching? Why does my car need to report where it is? Why does my refrigerator need Wi-Fi? Why does my grocery store need to know that I considered buying Cheerios on Tuesday and bought them on Thursday?
Not every collection of data is malicious. Connected products can provide genuinely useful functions. Remote diagnostics can be valuable. Navigation is useful. Fraud detection is useful.
But we have inverted the presumption.
Instead of a company having to explain why it needs my information, I am expected to explain why I don’t want to provide it.
I would reverse that entirely.
I believe personal data should belong to the person who generates it. If a company wants my personal information because that information has economic value, make it an actual transaction.
Tell me precisely what you want, why you want it and what you intend to do with it.
Pay me for it.
And give me the ability to say no.
Frankly, I would go further. I do not believe companies should be permitted to collect and trade detailed personal information through pages of boilerplate “consent” that nobody realistically reads or negotiates.
What we call consent today is often clicking I Agree beneath a legal document written by an army of attorneys and presented to a consumer who has no practical bargaining power whatsoever.
That is not meaningful consent.
This Is Not Capitalism
This is the section where someone will inevitably decide I have become anti-capitalist.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am aggressively pro-capitalism.
I run a manufacturing business. I believe in private property, competition, profit, entrepreneurship and markets. I believe the possibility of earning a profit is one of the most powerful mechanisms human beings have discovered for encouraging innovation and productive risk.
But capitalism requires competition.
A market in which enormous companies can eliminate competitors, build impenetrable ecosystems, lock customers in and then use political influence to protect those advantages is not my idea of a healthy free market.
Cronyism is not capitalism simply because the corporations involved are privately owned.
Political favoritism is not capitalism.
Regulatory capture is not capitalism.
Eliminating meaningful competition and then extracting rent from captive customers is not the free market I am defending.
Neither is an economy in which every successful small company eventually becomes merely another financial asset to be rolled into something larger.
This is where I think private equity is the elephant in the room.
I have watched the same pattern touch restaurants, entertainment, healthcare, manufacturing and even things as mundane as bowling alleys:
Acquire.
Consolidate.
Standardize.
Cut costs.
Extract.
That doesn’t mean every private-equity investment is destructive or every acquisition is bad. Sometimes new ownership rescues a failing company, supplies needed capital, improves management or creates efficiencies that genuinely benefit customers.
But when the central objective shifts from building a company that will be healthy in fifty years to maximizing the financial performance of an asset over an investment horizon, the incentives change.
In May 2024, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division jointly opened a public inquiry into serial acquisitions and roll-up strategies, asking whether they reduce competition, harm consumers and workers or suppress innovation.
That concern has outlasted a change of administration. In a 2026 request for comment on revised competitor collaboration guidelines, the two agencies again sought input on topics warranting further guidance, including vertical integration and serial acquisitions.
Genuine capitalism depends upon the possibility that somebody else can build a better mousetrap and take your customers.
If instead the successful strategy becomes buying all of the mousetrap companies, controlling their suppliers, lobbying the government and raising the price of mousetraps, we have wandered quite a long way from Adam Smith.
The problem isn’t simply greed.
Human beings did not discover greed in 2015.
It is the incentive structure.
Once a market matures and genuine improvements become harder, companies still face pressure to grow. Growth can then come from raising prices, reducing quality, shortening replacement cycles, creating subscriptions, harvesting data, selling advertising, locking customers into ecosystems, buying competitors, charging for formerly included features, restricting repair or transferring labor to the customer while calling it convenience.
Every individual decision can look perfectly rational on a spreadsheet.
Put enough of them together and everyday life becomes noticeably worse.
That is enshittification.
Bowling: Consolidation You Can See
Believe it or not, bowling may be one of the cleanest current examples.
In May 2026, eleven bowlers filed a proposed federal class-action lawsuit against Lucky Strike Entertainment—the company formerly known as Bowlero—alleging that years of aggressive acquisitions allowed it to consolidate enough of the American bowling industry to raise prices while degrading the experience customers received.
The allegations place the company at more than 350 centers and roughly 35 percent of U.S. bowling revenue.
Lucky Strike denies the allegations, so none of this should be treated as a court finding.
But the consolidation itself is hardly hypothetical. The company’s own public filings and announcements document years of acquisitions, and its SEC filings show that private-investment firm Atairos has been a major shareholder with special governance rights tied to its ownership stake. The company has repeatedly described acquisitions as part of its capital-deployment strategy.
That matters because this section is not really about bowling.
It is about what happens when an industry built around thousands of individual businesses becomes something else.
Before consolidation, the owner of the local bowling alley had an obvious incentive to keep customers happy. He probably lived in the community. His reputation mattered. If the lanes were poorly maintained, the league complained directly to him. If another bowling center across town offered a better experience, customers could leave.
That is capitalism.
Competition disciplines the owner.
Buy enough competing centers and something changes.
The customer has fewer alternatives. The local proprietor disappears. Decisions move farther away from the people actually using the product. The bowling alley stops being primarily a bowling alley and becomes an asset expected to produce a particular financial return.
The troubling part isn’t that someone made money.
I want business owners to make money.
The troubling part is a system in which financial engineering can become more profitable than making the underlying product better.
When acquisition produces better returns than innovation, we should not be surprised when companies become very good at acquiring and considerably less interested in improving.
Uber: The Platform Version
Uber may be an even better example because many of us watched the entire process happen in real time.
When Uber first appeared, it was fantastic.
Instead of standing on a street corner hoping a taxi appeared, you opened an app and watched a car drive toward you. The price was often reasonable. Payment was effortless. Drivers had a new way to earn money using an asset they already owned.
Customers loved it.
Drivers joined.
The network grew.
That is the first stage of enshittification:
Build something genuinely better and win the customer.
Then the platform becomes the marketplace.
By March 2024, Uber represented roughly three-quarters of observed U.S. rideshare spending.
At that scale, it is no longer merely one company offering transportation. It sits between enormous numbers of drivers and passengers and controls the algorithm that determines what one side pays and what the other side receives.
And neither side completely understands what the algorithm is doing.
Oxford researchers analyzed more than 1.5 million trips from 258 UK Uber drivers between 2016 and 2024. After Uber introduced dynamic pricing in 2023, researchers found that driver pay declined, Uber’s share of fares increased, earnings became less predictable and drivers spent more unpaid time waiting for work. Inflation-adjusted hourly driver income fell from more than £22 to just over £19 before operating costs.
Uber disputes the study’s conclusions and says driver earnings in the UK have risen year over year and that drivers receive information about how fares are divided.
That response deserves to be included.
The point is not that every allegation against Uber must be true.
The point is that an algorithm sitting between buyer and seller has acquired enormous discretion over what one pays and what the other receives.
The customer does not know exactly how the price was generated.
The driver does not necessarily know why he was offered his particular compensation.
The platform knows both.
That information imbalance is enormously valuable.
Then we get the subscription.
The Federal Trade Commission sued Uber in 2025 over its Uber One program, alleging that consumers were sometimes enrolled or charged without proper consent, did not receive advertised savings and encountered unnecessary obstacles while trying to cancel.
In December 2025, 21 states and the District of Columbia joined the FTC in an amended complaint seeking civil penalties. The FTC’s case remains pending. Uber disputes the allegations.
But look at the direction of travel.
Uber began by making transportation easier. Then it became the intermediary between driver and passenger. Then that intermediary increasingly controlled the price paid by one and the compensation received by the other. Then came subscriptions, opaque algorithms and more sophisticated ways to extract value from both sides of the transaction.
The driver provides the car, fuel and maintenance.
The customer provides the money.
Uber controls the marketplace connecting them.
That does not make Uber evil.
It makes Uber an almost perfect demonstration of why competition matters.
A product does not have to start out bad to become enshittified.
In fact, it usually starts out very good.
That is how everyone gets locked in.
Convenience Is How We Got Here
The difficult part is admitting that consumers participated in this.
Companies did not force every convenience upon us.
We wanted them.
I wanted them.
Streaming is convenient. Amazon is convenient. Cloud storage is convenient. Self-checkout can be convenient. Having everything connected can be convenient.
And the smartphone may be the greatest example of all.
I have seriously considered going back to a flip phone.
I haven’t done it.
Running a business makes a smartphone almost unavoidable. Email, customers, employees, documents, directions, banking, photographs, calendars and airline tickets all live in one device.
The smartphone might be the greatest productivity tool ever invented.
It might also be one of the greatest productivity destroyers ever invented.
I increasingly think those two forces may nearly cancel each other out.
For every ten minutes it saves us, we somehow find another ten minutes to stare at it.
And, more importantly to me, it has normalized an extraordinary level of tracking and data collection.
I continue to use one because modern professional life makes abandoning it difficult.
But I don’t confuse necessity with virtue.
Sometimes a leash is useful.
It is still a leash.
Convenience has a price beyond money. Sometimes the price is privacy. Sometimes it is independence, resilience, ownership or the knowledge required to do something ourselves.
And sometimes what was introduced as an optional convenience slowly becomes the only practical way to do something.
That is the part I dislike.
I have increasingly decided that I am willing to give up convenience to keep those things.
I think inconvenience is underrated.
Inconvenience builds competence. Difficulty builds character. Suffering, in appropriate measure, makes us stronger. Human beings need some friction.
A life engineered to eliminate every inconvenience eventually eliminates a surprising amount of independence with it.
I will happily give away convenience to preserve freedom.
My Personal Anti-Enshittification Program
I don’t have a grand solution.
I have a few rules.
Buy fewer things, but buy better things. Repair before replacing. Buy used when the older version is better. Keep physical copies of the things you genuinely care about. Avoid subscriptions when a purchase is available. Do not connect something to the internet unless connectivity gives you a meaningful benefit. Support companies that provide parts and repair information. Keep good tools. Learn how your machines work.
And occasionally be willing to pay substantially more for something that will still exist twenty years from now.
That philosophy explains a surprising amount about my life lately.
It is why I bought the expensive vacuum.
It is why I collect records and like old stereo equipment.
It is why I bought a house built in 1929.
And it is increasingly why I want old cars.
In fact, I am seriously considering an absurd-sounding rule for the rest of my life:
Only buy cars made before 1993.
I’ll explain that insanity in another post.
The principle behind it isn’t nostalgia.
I don’t think something is good simply because it is old.
I like things that can still be understood.
I am not trying to recreate 1955.
I like air conditioning. I like (some) modern medicine. I like the internet. I like computers. I run an international business from a device that fits in my pocket.
Technology is wonderful when technology works for us.
My objection begins when the relationship reverses.
I want products that serve their owners.
I want companies that compete to make the best thing.
I want the mechanic down the street to be able to fix my car.
I want the kid who inherits his grandfather’s tools to still be able to use them.
I want ownership to mean ownership.
I also want to be able to buy groceries without establishing a digital relationship with lettuce.
And if I’m going to ring up and bag those groceries myself, I’d still like my 10 percent.
Modern life increasingly teaches us to fear inconvenience.
Fine.
I’ll take the inconvenience.
I would rather own my things than have my things own me.