It's impossible to rise through the corporate ranks without repeating and believing the catechism that there is a *law* that requires executives to lie, cheat and steal if it results in an extra dollar for the investors, in the name of "fiduciary duty":

pluralistic.net/2024/09/18/fal…

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And this attitude has leaked out into politics and everyday life, so that many of our neighbors have been brainwashed into thinking that a successful cheat is a success in *life*, that pulling a fast one "makes you smart":

pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its…

In a world dominated by a belief in the moral virtue and legal necessity of ripping off anyone you can get away with cheating, then, sure, any system that permits cheating is a system in which cheating will occur.

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This shouldn't be controversial, but if so, how are we to explain the whole concept of the Internet of Things? Installing networked computers into our appliances, office equipment, vehicles and homes is an invitation of mischief: the software in those computers can be remotely altered *after* you purchase them, taking away the features you paid for and then selling them back to you.

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Now, an advocate for market-based solutions has a ready-made response to this: if a company downgrades a device you own, this merely invites another company to step in with a disenshittifying plug-in that makes things better.

8/

If the company that made your garage-door opener pushes an over-the-air update that blocks you from using an ad-free, well-designed app and forces you to use an enshittified app that forces you to look at ads before you can open the garage, well, that's an opportunity for a rival company to sell you a better software update for your garage-door opener, one that restores the lost functionality:

pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lea…

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I'm no hayekpilled market truefan, but I'm pretty sure that would work.

However.

The problem is that since 1998, that kind of reverse-engineering has been a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans bypassing "an effective access control"

locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doct…

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Cory Doctorow: IP

You’ve probably heard of “open source software.” If you pay at­tention to the politics of this stuff, you might have heard of “free software” and even know a little ab…

^{Locus Online}

There's a pretty obvious incentive at play when companies have the ability to unilaterally alter how their products work *after you buy them* and *you* are legally prohibited to change how the product works after you buy them. This is the first lesson of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit…

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I've been banging this drum for decades - like when I got into a public (friendly) spat with the editor of *Wired* magazine over their reviews of DRM-based media devices. I argued that it was irresponsible to review a device that could be unilaterally downgraded by the manufacturer at any time, without - at a minimum - noting that the feature you're buying the gadget for might disappear without warning after you've shelled out your hard-earned money:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/03/pai…

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Of course, companies that get a reputation for these kinds of shenanigans might lose market share to better competitors. Sure, if the company that made your phone or your thermostat or your insulin pump reached into it across the internet and made it worse, you're shit out of luck when it comes to *that* device. But you can buy your *next* device from a better company, right?

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Well, sure - in a competitive market, that's a plausible theory of "market discipline." Companies that fear losing business to rivals might behave themselves better.

In theory.

But in practice, the world's "advanced economies" have spent the past 40 years running an uncontrolled experiment in what happens if you don't enforce competition law, and instead allow companies to buy all their competitors.

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The result is across-the-board industrial oligopolies, cartels, duopolies and monopolies in nearly every category of good and service:

openmarketsinstitute.org/learn…

Now, even a duopoly has *some* competition. If you don't like Coke, there's always Pepsi. But again, in practice, companies in concentrated industries find it easy to "tacitly collude" to adopt one another's worst habits.

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Monopoly by the Numbers — Open Markets Institute

The Open Markets Institute uses journalism to promote greater awareness of the political and economic dangers of monopolization.

^{Open Markets Institute}

The differences between the outrageous payment processing charged by Apple's App Store and the junk fees charged by Google Play are about as meaningful as the differences between Coke and Pepsi.

Which brings me to printers.

I know.

Ugh.

Printers are the *worst* and HP is *the worst of the worst*.

16/

For years, HP has been abusing its market dominance - and its customers' wallets - by inflating the price of ink and rolling out countermeasures to prevent you from refilling your old cartridges or buying third-party ink. Worse, HP have mastered the Darth Vader MBA, bushing updates to its printers that sneakily downgrade them *after* you've bought them and taken them home.

Here's a sneaky trick HP came up with: they send a "security update" to your printer.

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After you click "OK," a little progress bar zips across the screen and the printer reboots itself, and then...nothing. The printer declares itself to be "up to date" and works exactly like it did before you installed the update. But inside the printer, a countdown timer has kicked off, and then, *months later*, the "security update" activates itself, like a software Manchurian Candidate.

18/

Because that "security update" protects the security of *HP*, against HP *customers*. It is designed to detect and reject the very latest third-party ink cartridges, which means that if you've just bought a year's worth of ink at Costco, you might wake up the next day and discover that your printer will no longer accept them - because of an update you ran six months before.

Why does HP put such a long fuse on its logic bomb?

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For the same reason viruses like covid evolve to be contagious *before* you show symptoms. If the update *immediately* broke compatibility with third party ink, word would spread, and HP customers would turn off their printers' wifi before the "security update" could be applied.

By asymptomatically incubating the infection over a long, patient timescale, HP maximizes the spread of the contagion, guaranteeing a global pandemic of enshittiification:

eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-…

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Ink-Stained Wretches: The Battle for the Soul of Digital Freedom Taking Place Inside Your Printer

Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}

HP has done this - and worse - over and over, and every time I write about it, people pop up to recommend their Brother printers as the enshittification-free alternative. I own a Brother, an HL3170-CDW laser printer that's basically indestructible, cheerfully accepts third-party toner, and costs almost nothing to run.

But I still don't connect it to my wifi.

21/

The idea that Brother is a better company than HP - that is possesses some intrinsic antienshittificatory virtue - has always struck me as a foolish belief. Brother has means, motive and opportunity to push over-the-air downgrades to block third-party ink as HP.

Which is exactly what they've done.

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