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The Crapification of Everything
Everything sucks today, being made to wear out 0.7 years after the warranty expires. Almost all consumer goods, and many professional items too.
Showers suck. Stoves suck. Washing machines suck. Cars are electronic crap that will not be running 10 years from now because they will be too expensive to repair, if the parts can even be had. Pick anything in your house, and it is designed to fail a few years out. A winning business model for sure.
The whole thing is an ugly exercise is destroying the environment: make more, discard, buy another. Not to mention the frustration of crap that needs repairs and never works as well as predecessor products of quality.
Autoenshittification
2023-07-24, by Cory Doctorow.
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it's a dream they can't give up on.
...The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines...
...Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It's a feudal one:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola
This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits.
...
Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers
Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car's accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve...
This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car's value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that farkakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.
...
WIND: I wonder how long I have to refuse to buy crapified products? Not long.
My 31-year-old SubZero is still running. It’s a power hog, but it still works, freezer, refrigerator and ice maker too. Try getting 5 years out of the shit sold these days.
James G writes:
My SubZero is 31 years also, and still running just fine. I had to replace one of the door light switches after about 10 years (SubZero sent the part free), and the timer for the freezer defrost went out maybe 12 years ago. That was a generic part and the independent repair guy had one in his truck. Parts and labor maybe $150. One of the wheels on the pull-out basket stuck and repeated use wore a flat on the wheel. One of these days I’ll drill out the wheel and replace with a new one. I switched out the incandescent lightbulbs for LEDs a couple years ago.
I looked at the energy consumption vs how much I could save if I switched to a newer SubZero model. The energy savings would have taken 25+ years or more to offset the cost of a new machine plus tax, delivery, install and recycling of the old unit. Even longer, since I have solar.
I called SubZero to see if my math was right and they concurred - keep the old machine. My repair guy also has a side business refurbishing old SubZeros with new seals and what parts he can scavenge.
All my other appliances I would consider disposable. And God help you if it has electronics or even worse, internet connectivity with guaranteed software obsolescence. Why people buy this useless kind of shit is beyond me.
WIND: exactly. And I have other issues: the nook into which the refrigerator goes is an oddball width and depth and that means 98% of refrigerators cannot be used and/or are too narrow or too deep. And they are all total crap designed to fail in 3 years or less.
But my subzero has a cost to it: it runs almost without stopping 24 X 7, and tries to freeze the lower part of the fridge (broken or defective thermostat? the freezer temperature control has no effect). Result is it consumes ~250W nearly 24 X 365 = 2200 kWH per year and is about 1/3 of household electricity usage. At $0.42/kWH, that’s $924 a year. And out here, just getting someone to show up in 2 weeks will cost you $300 before any parts.
