Stuff of Nightmares

~ Clarissa

I don’t know if this exists but the mere possibility fills me with terror:

I’m not referring to the old washer, of course, but to the new one that is connected to a cloud. That stuff freaks me out royally.

Another thing I hate passionately are subscriptions. I saw online that there’s now an app that finds the subscriptions you long forgot about and helps you cancel them. Why we agreed to the fishy, dishonest subscription model in everything is incomprehensible. It’s a money drain on customers that gives us zero value.

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Published by Clarissa

39 thoughts on “Stuff of Nightmares”

  1. Solidarity. I have a new dishwasher that shows up in my laptop’s list of “nearby devices.” I have no desire to text my dishwasher. I’m not going to send it photos or listen to its playlists. wtf??? Who wanted this?

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  2. In addition, any appliance that uses delicate circuitboard stuff required to connect to wifi, and *also* employs heat and/or moisture (i.e. pretty much every household appliance), has a five year *expected* lifespan (often less) because delicate circuitry doesn’t mix with heat and moisture. In 3-5 years, when (not if) your appliance breaks, you will find out one of two things:

    1. It’s the circuitboard, and it’s the most expensive part to replace: given its lifespan, you’d be better off just buying a new (or better, used vintage refurb)– and less delicate– appliance.
    2. It’s the circuitboard, and that model, along with all parts for it, has been discontinued. You may be able to track down one of the last six in existence with some ebay sleuthing and fix the thing, but then when it breaks again in 3.5 years for the exact same reasons, you’ll need a new appliance.

    Yeah it’s also super creepy that all devices are designed to spy on you. But if you think your washer’s bad, wait’ll you see what’s in your car and your laptop.

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    1. methylethyl

      Sadly, most appliances cannot be fixed, because you simply cannot get the parts, new or second hand. My wife sort of expected me to repair things, she claimed that “honey-do’s” were covered by the “and cherish” promise ;-D

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      1. My sibling worked in appliance repair for years. Most of the large appliances (stoves, fridges, washers, dryers, dishwashers) can be repaired, but a lot of the newer ones aren’t worth it. And some of them they just stop making parts for– but you won’t find out which ones until yours breaks, so any way around, it’s a bad gamble. I have a Maytag washer that was probably made in the 80s, still chugging along.

        Small appliances though– blenders, toasters, mixers, slowcookers, air poppers, waffle irons etc: those mostly can’t be repaired, and if they can, they aren’t worth it. Nobody makes parts, they’re made of low-quality materials, and there are so many different brands and models (new one every couple years) that it’s nearly impossible to even junkyard-strip them for parts. If you’re even a little bit handy, it’s worth the gamble to pick up four or five old ones secondhand, maybe replace the power cord, and you’re likely to end up with one that works well and may last the rest of your life.

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    2. Subscription services have been some of the biggest American winners in the global economy. For example Netflix has mostly wiped out local pay TV in SA.

      This is to be expected in a global market that will naturally create winners and losers. Of course, it is unhelpful to tell unemployed auto workers to learn to code, but it is equally unrealistic to expect tech workers benefiting from the current situation to want to go back to a factory.

      Personally, I think the build the wall strategy was better in terms of improving the job market for American workers without disrupting the greater economy.

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      1. I understand and don’t mind Netflix charging a subscription. But it’s gotten so ridiculous. Here’s an example. I’ve been using an app for 2,5 years. I PAID to use it. Paid what they asked after the first 24 hours. And I keep using it. But now they are informing me that they are switching to a subscription model. I would have never agreed to have anything to do with the app if I had known this. There’s a million apps, and I would have gone with something else. I think it’s nuts to ask me to pay again and again and again for something I already bought. In the past.

        Also, I’m very mad at Microsoft’s subscription model. I don’t need their stupid updates. I don’t want to be on the hook forever. I want to buy a product and then just own it. Like my dress. I bought it, I own it. Thankfully, for now, the store I bought it from isn’t coming back to keep charging me in perpetuity for wearing the dress. But soon it will because why not? The result is that we don’t own anything. We pay and pay but we don’t own.

        I’m not ranting at you, PaulS, I’m ranting at the unfairness of the situation. Please don’t take it as a personal attack.

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        1. This is how most modern business works. That’s why it is pointless worrying about who makes stuff compared to who can do the maintenance.

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            1. Bangladesh has cheap labor. China has a massive domestic market, which favors capital investment in mass production. These things can’t be changed, although they can be mitigated to some extent.

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        2. “don’t mind Netflix charging a subscription”

          Remember vinyl records? Probably not.. I’m sure they were hard to get in the CCCP (at least ones people wanted to listen to… complete crap might have been more available…).

          Anyhoo…. Beginning in the late 1970s the commercial music market had run into a problem… they couldn’t really raise prices but they had to in order to keep healthy profit margins… after some experimentation they found the solution….

          cassette tapes – they couldn’t really charge more for them but they were notoriously… prone to getting stuck in the machine and breaking so they had more planned obsolescence.

          CDs – cheap as dirt to make and with some careful PR it was easy to convince people that they would last forever ( ha ha ha ha ) so they cost twice as much.

          CDs were the way they raised the price of recorded music.

          Then they got greedy and tried to convince people that they need to exchange all their vinyl for CDs which helped kill new releases…

          Anyway….. my point is that subscriptions are the way that companies raise prises. Period. All the rest are post hoc justifications.

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          1. And as a result, I own absolutely no music at all. At least, I still own books because I have paper copies of all the favorites. What I will do when I’m asked to move out of my Chair’s office is anybody’s guess because there are many, many books. But at least I have them.

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          3. You can get an OK record player, new for under $100. Used for $20 if you frequent thrift stores enough. Used records here are $1. We have a small collection, and for reasons I can’t articulate well, we all prefer the record player, to playing music from the internet… even though there’s more variety on YT, it’s free, and in some ways the sound quality is better. There’s no substitute for riffling through the cardboard covers, blowing the dust off, setting the needle just so.

            The kids rebel if I subject them to my precise favorites from the internet. But they’ll listen to *anything* on a record.

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        3. We first ran into this with Rosetta Stone. I purchased their beginner Spanish course around 2010. On CD-ROMs. I owned it. I and the kids used it until around 2017, when with some random unintentional click of a button in the program, it used the internet connection to connect to HQ… and then it became impossible to have more than one user. Contacted the company and oh, hey, actually we’re a subscription service now (they weren’t when we bought it) and you’ll have to pay us a monthly fee to have the same functions the program had in 2010 when you bought the CD-ROM package. They TOOK AWAY features, and held them for ransom.

          So we threw it in the trash and haven’t used it since.

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          1. That’s exactly the disgusting stuff I’m talking about. I hate it beyond belief. Of course, it’s enjoyable to get paid and paid and paid for something you already sold, but why should we be in thrall to that? It sucks.

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  3. Why we agreed to the fishy, dishonest subscription model in everything is incomprehensible.

    Right. About 10 years ago I noticed people starting to become convinced that instead of owning things, the hip new thing was to rent them and be stuck paying for access indefinitely. It made no sense the and it makes no sense now.

    At least I know that my physical books and dvds aren’t going to just mysteriously vanish one day because the company that made them goes out of business.

    (commenter formerly known as AcademicLurker)

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  4. The Internet of things. Was supposed to be the next big thing about ten years ago, then Covid struck and it seems to have been put on hold for a while.

    I suppose it’s coming back, and in the case of cars it is quite the thing: I mean, everything is remote-controlled, you no longer get a physical key but a remote control thingy instead, and the company is able to lock/unlock your car anywhere in the world apparently, though I may be wrong here as I do not drive and have never owned a car in my life.

    My new washing machine – a top of the line product replacing one that lasted 7 years which had replaced an earlier one that had lasted 19 years – only has very basic functions. If I want to do something even a little bit more sophisticated for my laundry, I need to download an app and then through Wi-Fi I can – so says the accompanying user’s manual – do all sorts of splendidly advanced things with this latest wonder. Needless to say, I’m not going to use any app. As a result I’m stuck with a super-expensive, super-refined washing machine that can barely do the minimum number of cycles: cotton, mixed and hand-washing; that’s basically it. And they call this progress.

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    1. LOL, I now use my late wife’s car, it has more buttons than some helicopters. A couple of years ago I suddenly got a very hot butt, and discovered that there was a seat warmer ;-D

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      1. Had to use a rental recently. Took me like ten minutes to find the dang parking brake. They had replaced it with an electronic button doohickey. Which means if you have electrical problems, there is no way to engage the parking brake at all. Or disengage it. Ran across a similarly bizarre problem with a not-even-new car– Mazda hatchback, I forget what year. Anyway, in the back, there’s a storage compartment you get to by pulling up the ‘floor’ of the cargo area. It’s meant for storing your roadside emergency toolkit. And since the latch on the hatch door is 100% electronic, if your car breaks down, dead battery, anything electrical goes wrong… you can’t open the back hatch at all, there’s no lever or anything manual to do that, and with the hatched closed, there is no way to get at the tool compartment. Your tools are trapped, because that cargo floor goes up under the edge of the hatch door and you can’t get at it from the inside, with the car closed up, at all.

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        1. That sounds really dumb. And this is exactly the problem with this blanket digitalization stuff. We become completely dependent on this one thing that can easily break down.

          My students routinely lose or can’t access their work because they don’t understand the idea of saving it on a physical carrier. Time and again, I see them stare at a screen that simply wouldn’t connect for whatever reason. But nothing is learned from this experience.

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          1. Because they grew up with slick user interfaces, and have no idea how any of it actually works.

            Never thought I’d be grateful for it, but dang, at least when we slogged through doing stupid things like running programs in QBasic or DOS where we had to type in commands, we learned *something* about what the machinery was doing, underneath “click on the pretty button”. Even windows was pretty primitive when we got our first computer.

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          2. “My students routinely lose or can’t access their work because they don’t understand the idea of saving it on a physical carrier”

            Years ago, I was in the ‘computer room’ and students were all working on a translation assignment…. I had tried to drill the importance of frequently saving work to little effect.

            Then, the power in the building went off…. not for long, just a few seconds (I had nothing to do with it) but as the computers whirred back up to life I asked “Who saved their work?” and was met by a bunch of tragic faces…

            It was a lesson they remembered…..

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            1. The power to the building goes off quite regularly in SA thanks to our state power company. A good reminder of the benefits of socialism.

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  5. I just refuse to purchase anything that connects to the cloud. Outside of a cell phone and laptop. Kinda need those. I have always been subscribed to the idea of buying older vehicles (in good shape ones,) that are not filled with the electronic junk. Can’t get around the made to fail appliances though, but I still make an effort not to get the ones that connect to the internet.

    One thing I do want to bring up. A number of years back, sometime before the covid nonsense, I remember either reading, or being told, that Tech people, and some other group (in a similar field,) were abstaining almost to a man from having anything that connected to the internet inside their house (appliances, echo devices, Alexa Devices, ring cam doorbells, internet based refrigerators, etc.) Again computer and cellphone excepted.

    When I heard or read that. Well that would have been enough to convince me that having a (smart house) was not just a bad idea money wise, but probably a horrible idea security wise too. If I had not already been of the mind of this is a bad idea.

    • – W

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      1. My friend’s house has that Amazon smart house system thing all over the house and it fills me with dread whenever I stay at his place. How can one live with the knowledge that you’re being surveilled? In your own home where you’re supposed to feel the safest. It listens to everything! His house is big so he and his husband pretty much use the speakerphone to communicate with each other when they’re in different locations. You’re sitting on the couch reading a book and all over of a sudden you hear his voice over one of the speakers embedded in the walls, “Dinner in 30 minutes?” It’s funny when you’re visiting for a day or two, but I could never be able to live comfortably in this situation.

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    2. There’s a modest and growing market out there for restored vintage appliances, as well as new pro-quality appliances that are made to vintage specs, for all of these reasons: people really want something that looks nice, works well, and will last long enough they never have to buy another one. And no fiddly electronics.

      What’s weird is the snooty, angry pushback people get on the internet when they make inquiries like “where can I get a fridge with no computer in it?”

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      1. Yup, pushing “touch-sensitive” buttons that give you no tactile feedback on appliances is so annoying. Give me knobs to turn!

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        1. gosh yes. Our current stove fortunately has knobs for all the essential stuff, but to use the timer, you have to “push” some completely unmarked area on a polished rectangle of black glass. It depends on some kind of electrical conductivity in your skin, like a touch screen– and half the time my fingers are too dry to make it work and I end up doing something unsanitary like licking my finger first. And then there’s a gross looking smudge on it. Even then it’s temperamental. I hate that thing so much I’ve stopped using the oven timer and gone back to writing down the start and end times, and magneting the paper to the fridge.

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      2. “There’s a modest and growing market out there for restored vintage appliances, as well as new pro-quality appliances that are made to vintage spec”

        Slowing market: impersonal digital ‘conveniences’

        Growing market: personal… artisanal services, either remade vintage or deprogrammed modern appliances.

        The rise of personal over impersonal services has been going on a while (in Poland it’s mostly young urbanites driving it) I’m not sure about the US.

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        1. At our homeschool co-op: several families, more than twenty children between us, from babies to teenagers. Every week they play boisterously in the churchyard after class. None of the children have phones. We did not make any rules about that– it didn’t occur to anybody. Parents who homeschool and also attend church have a mysterious invisible consensus on this.

          The kids are remarkably well-behaved.

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    2. Even in the original proposals– being able to check out a guitar or a board game from the library– I think we all had visions of some hellish dystopia where we couldn’t have or use anything but the toys in the daycare: pre-broken by some antisocial jerk who got to it before you, maybe chewing gum stuck to the bottom.

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