The Termites Eating Our Time and Money

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Termites do their work out of sight and out of mind.  We might notice some tiny holes or granular droppings, but we might not realize the damage they've done until our house falls down. That's our collective situation today: the economic termites eating our time and money are consuming our lives.

Here's our situation stated bluntly: corporations' time and money is valuable, government's time and money is valuable, but our time and money are not valuable, and can be consumed by corporate-state termites without limit.

Let's start with two correspondents' accounts of the way economic termites consume our lives a bit at a time.

David E.:
"Here’s another example of the economic termites at work. 

I have several DeWalt battery 18V powered tools (a small circular saw, a drill, and a Sawzall), that I have had for 25 years.  At times they get extensive use.  At others, very little.  It all depends.  I have replaced the batteries a couple of times, but otherwise, they are solid, reliable tools. 

I have recently started more extensive use of these tools after some time off, and have discovered that the batteries may need to be replaced again.  However, it turns out that DeWalt no longer makes the 18V batteries.  Instead, I can buy the 20V batteries, which require an adapter (sold separately, of course), and to no one’s surprise, the 20V batteries cannot be used in my 18V chargers, so I would have to buy another charger or two as well. 

Plus, the adapter doesn’t really fit in the carrying case I have now. 

I see this a lot with tech.  Companies basically “bricking” thousands/millions of perfectly good tools or devices, and forcing an upgrade cycle that actually makes things worse (and don’t get me started on the forced conversion to another unwanted system – Windows 11).  Or Intuit, which did away with the stand alone version of QuickBooks and force companies to spend $35/month for access to their own data."

Keith:
"Your recent post about your negativity had me laughing, although in a depressing way. I had just got off the phone with GE about my broken washing machine, so it was very timely. We bought our machine brand new in December 2021 and it has already failed so spectacularly that we must decide between a $400 part and buying a new machine. After some basic Google searching this is a widespread problem, so not a one-off failure. Fortunately I can do the repair myself, but it feels like a waste if the same thing is going to happen again in less than 3 years. It's insulting to have to listen to our leaders explain how prosperous we are using fancy charts, when our lived reality is so different. I'm only 40, but I helped my dad repair our family washing machine many times growing up. Always easy to repair, parts were cheap, and consequently my parents owned the thing for 20+ years. Now I get "features" like an app to control my washing machine via WiFi, but the thing can't last 3 years. That ain't prosperity".

I've recounted my own experiences with the termites of abysmally low quality--Cory Doctorow's "ensh**ttification" of goods and services--and also my experiences with the time-termites of government agencies making me trudge the endless halls of Kafka's nightmarish bureaucratic Castle to get my address changed (a two-year process) or change the registration of a car. 

(The California DMV demanded proof that I hadn't secretly shipped the car to Hawaii to avoid paying the California registration fee. Yes, true. How fiendishly clever the citizenry have become, spending over $1,000 to ship an old car out of state to avoid paying us our rightful registration fee!)

Then there's our name-brand dryer that failed, and the replacement motherboard cost half the price of a new dryer, for $20 of simple circuit boards and  cheap commodity chips encased in a plastic casing with a few wires. The digital codes that were supposed to diagnose the problem (helpfully listed on the instructions buried inside the washer after you disassemble the top) were a worthless time-sink, too. 

If you think this is an American-only problem, think again. The very expensive Zojirushi rice cookers made in Japan have a predictable point of failure that forces consumers to replace their otherwise perfectly good rice cooker: the rice cooker's battery is buried deep inside the device, and soldered in so it can't be replaced without a stupidly arduous effort. The rice cooker doesn't work with a dead battery, of course.

Note that some of these termites are the result of soaring complexity with little payoff (the WiFi connection to your water heater--really?), while others are designed in (the rice cooker battery) and others are intentionally "bricked" by software upgrades, changing the configuration of batteries, and countless other termite-tricks, and still others are the result of poor quality control / low-quality components that are so bad one wonders if they're intentionally unreliable and prone to failure.

Nothing beats third-party termites for squandering time and money. To cite one recent example from a reader, the process of qualifying as a professional healthcare provider for payment from Medicare was once a relatively straightforward submission of documents. Now it has been offloaded to a third-party provider--keepers of the inner circle of Digital Hell--which charges $3,000 for providing a truly Kafkaesque labyrinth of frustrating incompetence.

Then there's the immense amount of unpaid Shadow Work we have to perform to keep our digital world from falling apart.  Here's an account of my experiences with chatbots and other time-sinks: Digital Service Dumpster Fires and Shadow Work.

Here's my account of "the illusion of choice" in our digital servitude: Is Anyone Else's Life as Stupidly Complicated by Digital "Shadow Work" as Mine Is?

It's not a choice when you're informed you must "update business information" (though nothing has changed) or you get a one-way ticket to the Demonetization Gulag.

All of this can be summarized as The Decay of Everyday Life, or less politely, as The Ghetto-ization of American Life.

These are only the most visible termites. Deep inside the posts and beams of the economy are swarming multitudes: surveillance pricing, junk fees, price-gouging, price-fixing, rapacious bank fees--the list is virtually endless: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy
FTC vs surveillance pricing, (Cory Doctorow)

In summary: corporations and the state get to feast off our  time and money, with no visible limits or pushback. Where does this go, and where does it end?