Do you know how controlled you are?

A repost from 2023

This is the second outing of a popular piece from last summer.

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Time was that machines were designed to serve human needs, and human convenience.

If you are younger than 40, this essay may not make much sense to you. You’ve grown up in a world where the design and function ethos of machines is vastly different from the way machines have been conceived throughout history.

You have grown up in a world in which machines have slowly, but steadily, started to govern your decisions. The machines you’re familiar with now give you orders. They schedule you. They demand that you pay attention to them on their schedule, even if only to have to move your finger to dismiss yet another “important notification” on your phone.

You have grown up in a world in which designers are purposefully breaking the very functionality that you purchased the machine for. If they don’t outright break the machine, they deliberately introduce obstacles and forced interaction to compel you to have to work harder to make the machine do the thing it used to do automatically.

These are design choices, not inevitable outcomes of “progress.”

Have you stopped to consider how radical that is? That machines are now designed to thwart your intentions, or to make them unnecessarily tedious?

But surely, Josh, that’s not true. Why would designers do that?

1. “To save the planet”

2. “To help you manage screen time”

3. “To help you [insert compliance with whichever alleged social and public goals are the Current Thing]”

4. Because government mandates on things like efficiency are threats backed up with real fists of power, so the shit rolls down onto you, the buyer.

Below I’m going to present you with one example. Just one. By itself, it’s “small.” By itself, it’s the kind of thing that many will see as “just a disgruntled guy. . .like, why is he so upset lol”? Those too young to remember a different world usually don’t appreciate what they don’t have. It’s easier to say the old people are like, old and stuff, than it is to be the one fish who notices the water and tells other fish about it.

Like “small” tax increases—a half cent on paper bags here, another .1 percent on your property tax rate there—they add up over time. What is small in the span of one month is large after 20 years of accumulation.

So it is with appliances. They’re nearing the tipping point of decades of accumulated “nudging” and consciously chosen bad design.

This week I’m staying at Kevin’s house (friend, business partner, co-owner of Disaffected). To my benefit, Kevin loves air conditioning, so there are window units all over the house, most blessedly in the upstairs bedroom. Summers in upstate New York, in case you didn’t know, feature brutal humidity.

Here’s the one in my bedroom:

The brand is “Hisense.”

This company has built a deliberate “nudge” into its operation. It has done so at the expense of the most basic feature every air conditioner in history has had until now: the ability to remember the temperature you set when the appliance is turned off, so that it will maintain the same temperature when it is turned back on.

Oh, but it hasn’t really “forgotten” how to do that. It knows how to remember your settings. It just won’t do it unless you comply with its implicit moral judgment.

What do I mean? “Saving the earth” is built in to the very design (yes, it’s quite ridiculous on so many fronts. Consider your point stipulated in advance.).

I have to set this up so you understand. The air conditioner, like most, has an “eco” mode. Kevin insists that means “economy” and that I’m going too far. He’s wrong.

It means “ecology,” and has meant that for a long time. How do I know that? Because “eco” is exclusively used in conversation with “friendly.” This is an environmentalist point of view.

In addition, most “eco mode” buttons on any appliance also have a little icon of a leaf. I rest my case.

So this air conditioner has “eco” mode. This means that, when this mode is chosen, the air conditioner will not run constantly. Remember, even air conditioners that run constantly are running the fan constantly, not the compressor. So “eco” mode doesn’t do a damned thing except turn the fan on and off excessively to sample the air temperature. If it decides the temp has not risen too much, it shuts off the fan.

Notice: This has no bearing at all on when the compressor runs. Remember that it is the compressor, not the small fan, that draws a lot of electricity. So “eco mode” is a useless feature. But it does leave the room hotter because the algorithm has clearly been programmed to fudge the temperature and err on the “let it get hotter before you turn on” side.

There’s more. Here’s how it works:

1. Set the air conditioner to “cool” mode, and set the thermostat at 68 degrees.

2. When you get up in the morning, turn the machine off so as not to cool an empty room.

3. When you return to the bedroom in the evening, turn the machine on.

4. Notice that your set temperature—68 degrees—has been remembered by the machine, as you would expect.

5. But wait—notice that the machine chose to put itself on “eco mode”. You did not. This is programmed into the machine.

6. But you want “cool” mode, because it works better.

7. You select “cool” mode.

8. Bam. The machine instantly “forgets” your colder temperature, and resets the thermostat to the hottest temperature on the machine. In this case, it’s 75 degrees, which is too warm in humidity.

9. To make the machine do what you want, it forces you to push one of those flat panel “buttons” that take a lot of finger leverage (and have a built in delay between presses, adding time) to work. You must do this if you want 68 degrees again.

This is what’s going on: the machine has been programmed to thwart your desire to use it for its intended full cooling purpose. It has a built-in “nudge” that is also a “scold.” That’s the “forcing you to reset the temperature if you won’t agree to use eco mode” thing.

It forces you to use its clunky “buttons” to get back to where you set it last time. It does this every time.

I resent this. Sure. It’s “small” and a “first world problem.” But it’s not, because it’s one “small” thing among countless others in machines that have all added up over the decades to machines that deliberately make themselves less functional and consciously inconvenient because the current thing is to freak out over “the environment.”

Kevin thinks I’m going too far. I disagree. I believe I have figured out exactly what’s going on, and I’ve seen this phenomenon in cars and other appliances.

This is not a free market capitalist economy. It is a government-meddled, hobbled economy that produces shitty, passive aggressive products that act as Mommy Government’s Head Girl in your own home.

Look at the ridiculous Ford F-150 Lightning, the all-electric version of the famous work truck. Nobody wants it. It has shitty range. Load it down like you would any truck, and its range is even worse. And it costs much more than the normal truck.

Ford isn’t making these because of customer demand. Ford is making them because of US and increasingly international demands—demands they have no moral or legal right to make—to service ESG goals.

You can take one of two thing away from this article:

1. Josh has a personal problem, and he’s just old. What he says is just personal to him, and only “boomers” complain about this stuff.

2. We all have been slowly boiled in a pot of government interference until we no longer remember that man built machines to serve the needs of human customers. That we used to have that world, but we don’t any longer. Perhaps there’s something to examine, even if you’re not convinced by just one example.

Your thoughts?

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