Month: August 2025

Why Everything Feels Broken

Once upon a time, if you wanted to watch television (a football game, a show, or whatever) you pushed a button and twisted a nob. That was the entirety of the user interface. The channels were clearly marked and number 2 through 13 and ‘U’. If you twisted the top knob to ‘U’, you had the choice of a whole slew of channels on a lower knob, marked UHF. These tended to be local, low-budget, smaller stations and public broadcasters. They were the kind of station that had a ‘Creature Feature’ movie night where the station owner’s nephew pretended to be Dracula. The whole interface was an on-off button, and a pair of knobs (or a keypad on a remote to select 00-99). When our family went to cable in the 1990s, it was at most 3 buttons pushes to select a channel. (And if you hit ‘4’ and just waited instead of typing in ‘004’ – chances are it would turn on channel ‘4’).

At my parents’ house, they now turn on the TV and are presented with the Roku welcome screen. Then they need to select their TV provider, Hulu, by navigating to that icon and selecting it. They are then taken to a list of users, for ‘personalized’ content. The just have the one. Then they need to hit the left arrow to switch to the left side of the navigation and the down arrow to select ‘live’. From there they can use the right arrow to make the current screen the focus. Using the ‘down’ array (for some reason) allows them to select a channel. But it doesn’t show them all the channels. Just the channels they traversed recently (although I think Hulu’s logic on ‘recent’ is a little screwy). For all the channels, they need to return to the left side navigation again, select what subset of channels they might want, and then scroll around until they find that channel.

Dozens of button clicks, four or five menus (depending on what you count), and having to navigate from Roku to Hulu, all to do something that once required nothing more than twisting a knob. And that’s if you do everything correctly.

For elderly people like my parents, this is a nightmare. For them the TV is clearly broken. They sometimes hit the wrong key. They sometimes get confused as to why they are prompted for new information. They forget if their show is on Hulu or Netflix. Depending on when you bought the Roku, the four buttons to take you directly to a service may or may not include any of the services you use. The interface is intentionally confusing to guide you to Roku’s or Hulu’s content or sponsored content or partners. And god forbid they have to log in to Hulu again for some reason, or there’s a new privacy policy to agree to, or there’s some promotional message. I’m often around as I help take care of them, so they hand me the remote in frustration and I put on the local news. But that’s old people, right? They don’t really count. (Have I got some news about what the future has in store for you, as well…)

Why does a lack of well designed products for the end user indicate a systemic problem in our society? From our perspective these things are broken. Products are now designed for the benefit of the provider and the third parties harvesting data. From their perspective, this is great. We have scroll through content we don’t want to watch or have to dig twice as hard to find something we need. We might get tricked and watch their ads. This is a feature for them. The TV manufacturer, Roku, and Hulu have no incentive to take my parents directly to a local channel to watch news at 6 pm. They have every incentive to drag them through all sorts of other content because it makes a little more money.

At no point, during my childhood and early adult-hood, did I have to agree to a EULA or privacy policy to watch television. Not because the executives at the TV manufacturer were better human beings, but because they had no way of collecting that data. But if they had a means of collecting that data, people would have blown a gasket. Keeping track of the books I read, the shows I watched, or where I went, was dystopian and Orwellian. Something we try no to think about, as the services and products we use capture that information and much more. And it’s easy to forget about the data market-places were this data can be aggregated from multiple sources and sold (without warrant) to the government. After a couple of decades of technological progress and slow incursions on our privacy, we are now the frogs looking at the boiling water and wondering ‘how did this happen?’

When you buy a smart TV, the makers argue sponsored content and information harvesting deals lower the cost to the consumer. You are told it’s good for you. Why would someone help subsidize your TV for some data and to push their content? So you buy things you don’t need. Can’t afford it? No problem – do it in four easy payments. (Including groceries – ugh!) The advertisers and content pushers want you to think you’re smarter than they are and somehow immune to their efforts. (Which is obviously true because you drink the beer of smart people everywhere, right?) How much does your data and attention ‘lower the price’ of the television? We have no idea. It could be $5 or it could be half the cost. But if it is half the cost, think how much the advertisers are getting out of that deal!

Data predation is coupled with a lack of options. It’s good for the consumer to have one search engine. It’s good for the consumer to have one operating system. It’s good for the consumer to have one choice, right? If it lowers prices, it’s got to be good for the consumer, right? That is the monopolist’s new trick. Just (promise to) keep the sticker price down. Unfortunately we can’t run the world with two different set of policies. When an anti-trust case is litigated, we can’t both break the monopolist and not break the monopolist to see which option results in a better world, ten years hence. We just have a mob of economists come through with their “objective” estimates of how much prices will go up or down. I can assure you that every monopolist has convincingly argued the world is a better place if they are allowed to integrate and lower costs to consumers.

But price isn’t the only lever a monopolist has. For example, they can be paid to push content you don’t want. Are you a business using Windows 11 Enterprise Edition? Why are some games pre-installed on your enterprise desktops and laptops? Would you be surprised to know that’s sponsored content? Look at the clickbait feed when you open Microsoft Edge or the start menu. Should that be on a work computer? What about a laptop you buy at the store, only to find you can’t uninstall some of the software? You could buy a premium product, like an Apple Mac. Or maybe you can’t buy a Mac, because your kid’s school, your work, or maybe just games you like are only on Windows. Microsoft can do this because they know you don’t have a choice. As a business you have few options, none of them exceptionally palatable.

Leena Khan tried to do something about it. She was hated by both the right and left (well, the donor part of the right and left). Ms. Khan always seemed in danger of being asked to step down. She was probably not the world’s greatest manager. She was willing to go after big tech, the woke companies the Republicans wanted to hurt, so even JD Vance once sang her praises. Flawed, and sometimes awkward, she did push back.

This is part of the fall. You are hung on a hook like a fattened pig and butchered to become a vendible commodity. Even if you don’t have an intellectual grasp of your exploitation, you feel it. It’s not that people in power have no incentive to fix it. They have the exact opposite incentive. The wealthy profit from this machine. And neither side is immune. You might find more sympathy among Democrats – but not necessarily more effort. Even if I sometimes thought her choices were peculiar, Ms. Khan was a rare moment when something was actually tried. So was the CFPB, which I’ll link through Wikipedia because I don’t know how much longer they will be around. The interests are aligned toward further extraction of your value, further monetization of your attention, and further driving you into debt.

Where is it taking us? At some point the exploitation is not compatible with a good life. One of two things can happen. We could have a genuine rebellion. We rise up and smash the machine. This sounds romantic, but as someone who has read a little history, I can tell you that revolutions can go very bad. The ballot box is less bloody and more predictable than the barricades. Whether it’s the terror following the French revolution, the rise of the authoritarian bolsheviks after the Russian revolution, or countless smaller coups and insurrections that lead to psychotically brutal regimes, a revolution can quickly turn autocratic. Some of which might be playing out in the current administration.

The second option is to meander forward. The temperature is managed well enough so the frog never knows it’s being boiled. Each year life gets shorter and more miserable. In this period, everyone is out for themselves. Everyone is cynical. The country descends into kleptocracy. We’ve already seen many of our leaders go from modest means to fantastic wealth on their government salaries. If you have sufficiently low morals and good connections, you live well during this future. Otherwise the good things slowly become memories. Remember when you just went to a doctor because your job provided health insurance? Or you could afford to buy a house? Or children weren’t a luxury good? Or teeth weren’t just rich people bones? Or you could just pay for a Big Mac meal once and not in four easy installments?

I would argue we are taking the second option. And that’s why it all feels broken. Because it is breaking, from our perspective. But it’s not a sudden, catastrophic event. It is getting slowly worse as we are mined for attention and data so we can be sold increasingly needless and expensive products. Our leaders are wielding power for the benefit of the wealthy, and the wealthy are rebuilding the world in their favor. The few protections our leaders once put in place to foster competition or prevent companies from predatory practices are being lifted, as the wealthy rewrite the rules. To do that they must break our world. We continue to elect leaders that are there because of the generous support of the monied interests that want to exploit us, rather than rejecting those leaders outright. At some point we should be asking why the predators at the door are so eager for us to support their candidates.

And that local UHF TV station? That’s been consolidated in the The Sinclair Group. The station owner’s nephew doesn’t do ‘Creature Feature’ any more. He peddles right wing talking points.

Meditations On Infrastructure

I wonder what Charles, son of Pepin the Short, king of the Franks and Lombards, thought as he made his way through Rome to be crowned by Pope Leo. Once a city of over a million souls, Rome had dwindled to between 50,000 and 100,000. Still, Rome was twice as populated as Paris and larger than the (by comparison) hamlets in the Carolingian empire. Most of Rome’s elites and maybe 1 in 7 ancient Romans overall were literate. In Charlemagne’s retinue, only a handful were literate. Almost certainly none of his rank and file soldiers. The great city in the year 800, Constantinople, was roughly half the size Rome was at its peak.

People no longer care for the term “Dark Ages” for the period between the fall of Rome and the more orderly middle to late Medieval period. But it was a step backward. Art, literacy, trade, and culture became smaller, more rare, and simpler. When Rome was briefly re-invaded by the Eastern Roman armies, reestablishing Roman control, it might have seemed that things were on the mend. During those centuries there were good years and bad years. From the summit to the nadir, it would be surprising if people saw the fall of Rome for what it was. I imagine many could not spot the rot from within, and of those who did, some exploited it for their gain, others refused to believe it, and the rest failed to act.

What does this have to do with technology?

Everything.

An empire provides two benefits. The first is trade and the second is communication. Trade allows for greater well-being. You can sell your stuff in more places and you can buy stuff from other places. Your quality of life, including your diet, are much better as goods flow freely through trade networks. Second, is the flow of ideas. You have access to many more thoughts and ways of thinking. Your progress is no longer limited to the smartest person in your village. You have access to the thoughts of the smartest people as far as technological reach allows.

The modern micro-processor the product of vast trade and communication networks. Designers from California, fabricators in Asia, sand from North Carolina, machines from Europe, and tens of thousands of companies. Hundreds of thousands of individuals are necessary to provide you with one modern CPU. Millions more provide the support chips, mother boards, assemblies, designs, and software to make the chip do something useful. The collaboration is possible because of safe networks (ASML can ship a machine to Taiwan without worrying India will steal it on the way), and intellectual goods (you can speed the design of a chip by licensing parts of it from other vendors).

But wait, didn’t the United States make its own chips? Yes, it did. But it wasn’t necessarily cost-effective. When the micro-processor had tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even a few million transistors, they were fabricated in Texas, Washington, or California. But modern CPUs are at the very edge of physics, along with the much larger demand. Complexity and demand have made chip fabrication a highly refined and specialized industry. TSMC amortizes the insane costs of making a modern chip over many customers. Intel cannot amortize the cost of producing Intel chips just over Intel customers. Running a fab profitably means running it near capacity. Intel understands it’s competition is TSMC, not AMD. It is unlikely to succeed.

The modern world that produces an EPYC processor with 128 cores for a reasonable number of thousands (or hundreds) dollars may already be collapsing. We won’t know until we have the benefit of a few hundred years of hind-sight. The United States has been the guarantor of safe trade in goods. The US is stepping back from that role, focusing on a more narrow problem of one island in the Pacific. The Island that fabricates most processors. At the same time, the US has erected trade barriers and tariffs, slowing international trade. For the first time in a long time, there is a prospect the free flow of commerce may become less certain. It won’t be sudden. Like the fall of Rome, it will take decades. For example, the start may be increased insurance, or no insurance. But slowly routes will close.

The current administration is also attacking the free flow of information. This includes an assault on the statistics and information provided by the government itself. Data considered “DEI” related has been scrubbed, and the researchers and teams providing that information fired. We see an attempt to control Universities, which are parts of the flow of information. We even have the prospect that government statisticians will be fired if they announce unwelcome information. Information and research provides our modern life (electronics, medicine, arts, and culture), and freely disseminating that information makes us richer. Along with an attack on research, through lawsuits against news outlets, we are seeing private sector organizations self-edit if not self-censor. Over time, quality information will be more rare and more expensive.

But the current administration won’t live forever, right? Even if repudiated in the next series of elections (and putting aside the slim but credible notion of a coup to stay in power), the population supporting that administration is still there. They are cheering as the existing system is ripped apart. The breakdown of foreign trade and stifling information is a feature. For some it is because parochial, xenophobic, or tribal loyalty is more important than even their own well being. For some it is because the current chaos is hurting the parts of society they don’t like. For some, it will because they profit from the chaos. In that chaos they are free to pursue policies that make themselves richer.

After this administration the people who made it possible are not going away. Charlemagne rode into a long-defeated city not because the invading barbarians were superior to Rome in technology, society, economy, or government. Rome rotted from within. Because the rot was too profitable for some, or the cost of fixing the rot to great for others, or they preferred the rot for other reasons. Once it sets in, the rot may be ultimately irreversible. Nothing else I say will make sense unless these ideas are understood: that the fall is largely invisible to those falling; the fall results in a smaller, sicker, more parochial, less developed world; and that some are incentivized to participate in the fall. I’m not altogether sure any more than a handful (if any) of Charlemagne’s subjects understood how much poorer and smaller their world had become. Or that it would be hundreds of years more before real progress returns to Western Europe.