Enshittification

ROMAN MARS: Just a heads up for listeners with sensitive ears, today’s episode includes a curse word that we are leaving unbleeped. You’ll understand why as you’re listening. Using that word is kind of the point of the whole show. So you’ve been warned. Enjoy. 

This is 99% Invisible. I’m Roman Mars. And I’m here today with producer Chris Berube. Hey, Chris. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Hey, Roman. 

ROMAN MARS: So, Chris, what do you have for us today? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay, today I want to talk to you about a subject that I think is going to make you really mad. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, well, I have a pretty high baseline of mad right now, but I’m going to let you go ahead. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, I feel like right now most people I talk to have a relatively high baseline of anger. So, where would you say you are today though? 

ROMAN MARS: I think I’m having a pretty good day. Let’s put a set of four. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay. Let’s see how high we can get you by the end of this. So this is my experiment today. I want to see how high we can get you on the anger scale from one to ten. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, that sounds like a plan. So what’s this story that’s going to make me so mad? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay, so Roman, I want you to think about smart devices. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. Okay. I think you’re on the right track to making me mad. Go ahead.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, so let’s just start thinking about all the devices that you own that used to be mostly analog. Today they are now digital in some way. So, can you think of some examples in your life? 

ROMAN MARS: Well, I can think of one very obvious example that drives me crazy. I have a smart thermostat in my house. It came with the house. I did not install it. And I live in the Bay area. So I don’t need heat a lot. But every time I need to turn it on, which is a few times a year, the smart thermostat is, like, disconnected from the heater for some reason–unknown reason–I cannot make sense of it. And all I want is just an old-fashioned brass round Honeywell thermostat–old-fashioned analog thermostat–that can just turn on and set to a temperature and turn off when I don’t need it, instead of this other thing that drives me absolutely crazy. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Roman, this is a pretty common complaint–what you’re saying–right? We all have these devices that have some kind of a smart component. They’re supposed to make things convenient in our lives, but in fact they are making things really frustrating. Like, why does my fridge need to be smart and talk to me, right? Today though, we’re going to talk about how this phenomenon can be more than just annoying for a lot of people because there are times when the digitization of pretty much everything is actively making people’s lives worse. And so to demonstrate this point, I want to talk to you about the design of tractors. 

ROMAN MARS: Uh, okay. Well, I mean, you strike me as a city kid, Chris. So, like, what do you know about tractors? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Very little, if I’m being honest. I know there is a company called John Deere that makes tractors, and they have green hats. I assume there was probably a guy named John Deere at some point in the past. 

ROMAN MARS: You would assume. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Not too much else, but I learned quite a bit for this story. So there’s one thing that’s been vexing farmers that really surprised me, and that is the software in their tractors. So, like a lot of things, modern tractors are now run by a computer operating system. And one of the farmers who’s not happy with the software in his tractor is a guy I spoke to for this story, a farmer in Missouri named Jared Wilson. 

JARED WILSON: On my lineage, I’m at least a seventh generation farmer on my father’s side. So we’ve been doing this for a while. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So Jared runs a family farm. He’s deep in the trenches of this world. And he told me something I did not really know about farming equipment. Tractors, harvesters, spraying machines, and all of these vehicles that are critical to farming, today, for the most part, are run by computers. 

JARED WILSON: In the ’90s, we didn’t have a lot of electronic control units on these machines. Mechanical fuel pumps… Everything was mechanical. So you touch something and it has linkage and it’s controlling something mechanical. And now in these machines, when you touch something, everything is electric over some system, electric over hydraulic, if you will, electric over engine controls… And that means that there’s software that you’re dealing with. 

CHRIS BERUBE: I am sure if you’re a farmer, this is all incredibly obvious stuff. But this was a surprise to me. It’s the same thing with a lot of cars now, where functions that used to be mechanical are now all run by an operating system. And my car gives me a driving score, for example, which is very, very annoying. But for the most part, Jared told me this digitization of the tractor is a really positive thing. Like, in lots of ways, these controls make his job a lot easier. 

JARED WILSON: One of the simplest things that comes to mind is auto-steer, right? These tractors–we can create lines in the field and they’ll drive themselves. And when you’re on a machine for 20 hours and you don’t have to steer it, you’re in a lot better shape when you get off of it than you are hand driving the machine. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, I mean, it sounds completely arduous to be a driver for 20 hours in something where you have to pay attention to every moment of those 20 hours. But I’m anticipating here that there are some negative aspects to this, too. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yes. There are some drawbacks. So Jared told me, if there’s a problem with the tractor, sometimes the software will just slow down the tractor’s horsepower. 

JARED WILSON: If anything is not working correctly on the emission system–if you have a sensor, for instance, that has failed or malfunctioned–it won’t perform the necessary emissions operations to satisfy the system. And it will do something called a “derate” of the machine. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So derating is when the software basically makes the tractor unusable, like it slows down the horsepower so much that you cannot use the tractor to do farming. 

ROMAN MARS: That sounds so incredibly annoying. But I would assume that this software–you know–was doing this for some kind of good reason, like for a safety reason. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Right, so there could be safety reasons for doing this or smaller issues like a sensor isn’t working on the tractor. And Jared gave me this example from his life where he had a problem with the tractor and the operating system slowed it down. But it didn’t tell him what was wrong. 

JARED WILSON: You know, the terminals inside of the machine might give you an error code. But very rarely does that error code actually tell you what’s wrong. You have to have an external piece of software to plug into the machine to figure it out. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So when this happened to Jared, he was faced with a choice, right? He could either spend a lot of time trying to figure out the problem–you know, waste a day doing that–or he could do the much easier thing, which was call out a technician. But according to Jared, that’s also kind of a pain. 

JARED WILSON: So I was forced to call the dealership out. They came out and replaced, I think, one of the Delta pressure sensors. And that didn’t end up fixing the problem, but the logistics of that mean that the technician comes out. You may have to wait a day or two before there’s a technician available. 

CHRIS BERUBE: And losing a couple of days during the growing season–that’s a total disaster because Jared told me losing a day can cost him a ton of money. 

JARED WILSON: The soybeans… We’d had a dry year. And you could stand in the field and you can hear the pods opening and the soybeans hitting the ground. So, you can imagine how sick to your stomach that makes you. There’s no way to reclaim those once they fall on the ground. That’s just lost revenue that’s gone. And it’s difficult to convey how frustrating that is when you’re sitting on your hands and your crop is literally falling on the ground and you don’t have the ability to do anything about it. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Jared didn’t have a guess about how much these kinds of delays have cost him. But in 2023, the Public Interest Research Group–so they’re this advocacy group–they estimated downtime for farmers caused by these repair delays cost them about three billion dollars that year. And this is at a time when farmers are facing all sorts of challenges, like unpredictable weather, tariffs, and then on top of that, you have to figure out these software problems. So the stakes are really really high for somebody like Jerry. 

JARED WILSON: The reality is that the costs of these things have eliminated a lot of the margin potential that comes from the savings because we’re just passing it back out to the manufacturer. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Roman, with this in mind, where are you at on the anger scale? 

ROMAN MARS: Now I’m a six. This is sounding more and more like the plight of every modern consumer or user of modern devices. It’s really, really infuriating. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, like if you own a car, if you own a cell phone, or if you own a printer, you kind of had the same problems. And frankly, the software is making all of these things, if you will pardon my language, shittier for us as consumers because basically, with the software, often you cannot fix them unless you go back to the manufacturer. And I started getting interested in this whole subject because of one of my favorite writers. 

CORY DOCTOROW: Hi, I’m Cory Doctorow. I’m a novelist and activist and a journalist. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, listeners of this show may be aware of Cory’s work. He’s a sci-fi writer. And hey, here is a fun fact about Cory Doctorow.

CORY DOCTOROW: We can reveal perhaps that you and I are, like all the best Americans, Canadian. 

ROMAN MARS: You had to squeeze that in there. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Roman, we are everywhere. So, anyway, lately Cory’s been out there popularizing this one big idea that he’s had. So it’s a word that he coined that seems to be capturing a lot of what’s going wrong in modern society right now. And that word is “enshittification.” Roman, have you heard the word “enshittification?” 

ROMAN MARS: I have. I’m also a big fan of Cory Doctorow. And what I know of it is that this is the idea that kind of everything on the internet is getting worse. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, so that’s a part of it. And there’s actually a little bit more to it than that. 

CORY DOCTOROW: It’s a way to talk about platform collapse–platform decay. It describes this three-stage process where you have platforms that start off being good to their end users but are also finding a way to lock those end users in. And then having locked them in, it makes things worse for them in order to make things better for business customers. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So let’s just lay this out with an example. You’re on Facebook. You are part of a Facebook group that likes something very, very niche, like let’s say baseball cards from the 1980s, just to use an example of a hobby someone might have, right? I’m not saying that is me. Someone has this hobby though. The first step is Facebook sets up the infrastructure for you to meet lots of new people. So you’re finding other fans of ’80s baseball cards. You’re all becoming friends. You’re building up this community. But then you cannot leave. Like, maybe the platform is buying up all the competition, so there’s nowhere else to go. Or they make it hard to transport your group somewhere else. And maybe people don’t want to leave because you have years of thrilling ’80s baseball card conversations built up. And then you get stuck, right? So if you leave, you’re going to lose all of these friends that you’ve built up and you become locked in. And that’s when the big companies will start to make things shittier. They enshittify. And instead of serving the users, they will serve businesses. They’ll make things worse for you. They will sell your private data. They will let the platform become filled with these kind of spammy, annoying ads that you can’t get rid of. 

CORY DOCTOROW: The value is just hoovered up by the platform and given to its shareholders and its executives, even as the platform just turns into a pile of shit. And I think a lot of us can recognize that pattern. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. That description makes a lot of sense to me. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So here’s the other thing with Cory’s argument. He says enshittification is not exclusive to being online, on Facebook, on Google, or wherever. It can also affect things in the physical tactile world, such as all of our smart devices. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay, so how does that work? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, Cory says this same principle applies to basically all of smart devices, including our cars, our smart fridges, our tractors, stuff that just wasn’t previously digital. 

CORY DOCTOROW: William Gibson, the science fiction writer, coined the term “cyberspace.” He’s quite a prophet. And in one of his books, he has this line, “cyberspace is everything,” so turning inside out. And what he means is that reality is being infected with digital stuff. And digitization is becoming a feature of things that weren’t digital before. Everything’s just becoming a computer in a fancy case. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Let’s just talk about how many of our devices today rely on computers and rely on the internet. So, how many smart devices would you estimate you have in your home right now? 

ROMAN MARS: Uh… 20? Possibly. 

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s pretty average if that’s right. So, according to this survey I found from 2023, the average American household has about 21 connected devices, so that means devices that are connected to the internet. 

ROMAN MARS: Wow. Wow. That is way too high. I can already think of the ones that I wish I could eliminate from my house right now. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Oh, 100%. And the thing with all of these smart devices is that it makes it a lot easier for a company that makes this device to lock you in. So the first step in enshittification is locking you in because, if something is a smart device, the manufacturer has quite a bit of leeway. Let’s go back to tractors where we started this whole episode. Cory Doctorow says they are a prime example of this. 

CORY DOCTOROW: Since Roman times, farmers have fixed their own gear because when the storm is coming and you need to get the crops in, you can’t wait for someone else to come and fix your stuff!

CHRIS BERUBE: According to Jared, back in the ’90s, the tractor was mostly mechanical. And if you wanted to replace a part or fix something in the tractor, it was a pretty straightforward process. You would go down to your local John Deere dealership and, you know, that was owned by a guy who lived down the road. 

JARED WILSON: I remember as a kid going with my dad. And if you had a complaint, you went to Leland Deames. And he might take you back in the shop and ask what was going on. He wanted the customer to be satisfied and he knew that if he didn’t, you’d go down the road to the next dealership the next time you were buying a piece of equipment. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Say you have a problem with a wire or you need a replacement part, you go to Leland Deames. And if you’re not happy with Leland Deames, you could go to another dealership. Or maybe you go to an independent repair person who’s somewhere down the road, right? They’d hook you up, and then you would go about your day. But in Jared’s experience, a few times this has happened, he received the error code, didn’t get a lot of information from the operating system, and without much to go on, he went straight to John Deere. And at that point, John Deere holds all the cards because to restart the tractor, Jared needed a technician who knows how to access the tractor’s computer. And then at that, he had to pay that person to come and check it out. 

CORY DOCTOROW: The farmers still mostly fix their tractors. They get the part, they put it in, and so on. So they’re farmers. They don’t want to fix their stuff. But it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work until you get a service call and pay 200 bucks for someone to show up and type the unlock code into your tractor’s keyboard. 

CHRIS BERUBE: As a farmer, it’s not as easy as you go to the repair shop down the road and they fix something for you because usually independent repair places don’t have the tools that John Deere corporate has because John Deere is not making that stuff available unless the repair person is paying a big fee. 

JARED WILSON: My independent mechanic–I called him up and he said he didn’t have the tools to do that because they cost $6,000. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So because John Deere makes it expensive for independent repair shops to fix John Deere products, as a consumer, you’re stuck paying whatever John Deere is charging. And this is a big way you get locked in. It’s replacement parts. So if Jared buys a replacement part, he probably needs to buy it from John Deere because he doesn’t have a lot of options for where else you can buy the thing. 

ROMAN MARS: I’m getting very angry, Chris. This is very upsetting to me. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Keep some room, okay? Keep some room. We need a ceiling that we can achieve later on in the episode. You’re gonna get there. So Roman, in the past, farmers could actually buy a generic replacement part, like a part that was built by somebody who isn’t John Deere. But today, with the software, John Deere does this trick called “parts pairing.” So if you want to replace a drill, something like that, certain parts are not going to work unless they are compatible with John Deere’s software. So, that’s parts pairing. And this is related to this really important concept called “interoperability.”

ROMAN MARS: I’ve definitely heard that term before, but what does it actually mean here? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Basically “interoperability” is whether two things can work together. So if you have shoes and shoelaces, if the laces are the right size, they fit inside the shoe, those two things are interoperable. And in a digital context, two things are interoperable if they can talk to each other. And parts pairing makes that difficult because with tractors, you can buy some generic parts that are cheaper than what John Deere is selling. But it won’t necessarily work because John Deere software might lock it out. So these two things are not interoperable. And tractors are kind of the tip of the iceberg here because this kind of thing can happen with all of our smart devices. And Cory brought up this example to me, which is printers. 

CORY DOCTOROW: Your printer company says, “We don’t like it when you use third-party ink. And so we’re going to block third-party ink installation. Once we do that, we’re going to charge you more for the ink that comes from HP or Epson or whatever.” It’s not that your printer can’t run that program. It’s that your printer’s been designed to reject that program–to say no. Ink’s now $10,000 a gallon. It’s the most expensive fluid you can buy as a civilian without a special license. It costs more to print your grocery list than it would if you printed it with the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion. 

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHS] This is why I like Cory. He paints some word pictures. 

CHRIS BERUBE: He puts a little mustard on the fastball. And by the way, I looked this up. This is a bit of an exaggeration. The Kentucky Derby-winning semen is very expensive. It’s worth a lot of money. But printer ink’s expensive too, right? It costs thousands of dollars a gallon, which is so much money. 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, “shitty” is the right word for it. It’s awful. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, it’s really shitty. And it’s also a big problem with powered wheelchairs. You have smart fridges. You have ventilators. One more example is about the device you are probably listening to this on right now. So, let’s say you have an iPhone. I’m sure you’ve experienced some version of this as someone who owns an iPhone. If you need to repair an iPhone, there’s lots of cases where you cannot get a third-party replacement part. Like, those will just not be interoperable with an Apple device. So, Apple urges you to buy an Apple replacement part and then go to the Apple store or go to an Apple authorized repair person. 

CORY DOCTOROW: Tim Cook in 2019 wrote a letter to his investors at the start of the year where he said, “Our biggest risk is that our customers repair phones instead of buying new ones–that they like their phones. They work fine. And so when they break, they don’t just get a new one.” Apple, uniquely among manufacturers, when you trade a phone in, sends it to be shredded so that the parts can’t be harvested to be used in a repair. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So to recap, this is the enshittification of things, right? You buy something that has software in it. The software makes it hard to get the thing repaired by some third party. You have to go to the manufacturer. And they will jack up the price. And perhaps they don’t let you use third-party parts. So they’re just profiting off people because we’re stuck, right? We have this stuckness going on. So this is a vicious cycle. So, Roman, now that I have gone through the problem of enshittfication with you, where would you say your anger level is at as of now? 

ROMAN MARS: I mean, let’s go for a nine. I’m a nine. I’m ready to just go to the next room, yank that smart thermostat out of my wall, and just put in an old fashioned Honeywell analog dial. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Roman, I feel your pain. And I have some good news. We are going to bring your anger level down a little bit, hopefully, because there are people who are trying to make things better. There are people fighting back and trying to outlaw this form of enshittification. 

ROMAN MARS: Excellent. Okay, let’s talk about that after the break. 

[AD BREAK]

ROMAN MARS: So we’re back with Chris Berube talking about enshittification.

CHRIS BERUBE: Yes, Roman. So let’s talk about some of the people who are trying to fight back against, you know, these big companies who are locking you in, trying to profit off your bad experiences. And there are a couple of ways people are fighting this. So, there’s kind of the dodgy, questionable, maybe outside of the bounds of the law way. And then there’s the law abiding citizen, “I want to do everything by the book” way. So where do you want to start with this?

ROMAN MARS: Well, I definitely want to start with the dodgy, questionable, outside of the law way. That sounds way more fun. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, Cory Doctorow says that we’re now seeing a lot of black market or kind of gray market efforts to fix this problem. We’re seeing people hacking software in an iPhone, for example, and making it work with third-party applications. When you do that with an Apple product, that is called “jailbreaking.” But people aren’t just doing it with Apple products, they’re doing it with all kinds of tech now. 

CORY DOCTOROW: If you’re, like, a bored grad student with an electron-tunneling microscope, you can just have at it, right? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Lots and lots of these softwares have been broken into. And it’s actually pretty easy for someone who has hacker skills and experience. And obviously this kind of solution–hacking into the software–it is not something the company wants you to do. I don’t think I need to say that. Your user agreement usually says, “I will not do something like this.” But it is becoming more and more common. And our farmer, Jared, told me he’s actually seen this kind of thing pretty often in his day-to-day life being used by repair people. 

JARED WILSON: There have been a lot of black market things that have been released. Independent providers are using the laptops from China that have cracked John Deere software on it. 

ROMAN MARS: So I’m completely on board with fixing this problem however you need to fix it. But I do think that there’s probably a little room to be cautious if you do not know where the software or hardware that you’re using to fix the problem came from. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, it does sound sketchy. And Jared on our call made clear to me he has never used this kind of technology because he wants to follow the rules. And also you don’t actually know what you’re putting on your computer when you are working with this kind of thing. So if something goes wrong, you can’t call John Deere because, at this point, you are doing something you’re not supposed to be doing. 

JARED WILSON: It creates some hesitation in using technology like that on your hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machines because you’re out of any ecosystem that can help you because you are operating outside of the margin. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So on top of that, Cory Doctorow says that, in a lot of cases, this kind of solution–this hackery solution–is probably illegal. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, that just drives me crazy. So, why is it illegal? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, there is something called a digital lock that is on a lot of these things. And it’s a very particular kind of software. Back in the late ’90s, early 2000s, there was concern about ripping DVDs and music piracy and stuff like that. So back then, record companies and movie studios added digital locks to their files. And in 1998, the U.S. passed a law that made it illegal to break a digital lock. 

CORY DOCTOROW: They passed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In Section 1201 it says, “It is a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine to tamper with or expose weaknesses in or discuss weaknesses of a digital law.”

CHRIS BERUBE: And now this law that was designed for MP3 sharing is now being applied to all of these other devices that we use every day. 

ROMAN MARS: Five years in prison. There should be a prison sentence for passing that law. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, Roman, I think you may have to take that one up with both parties in Congress in 1998. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah, no, I know. Everyone’s at fault for that one. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So, as you can tell, the sketchy solution has some problems. Obviously, they’re not enforcing this law too often, but it’s still a thing that exists that is out there. So they have that option to do that if they catch you with this kind of software. 

ROMAN MARS: So this is kind of a hacker path to solving enshittification. But is there a more law-abiding path? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Okay, so in the past couple of years, there has been a movement to pass laws that would limit the power of these big companies and to make sure that, as a consumer, we have more ownership over our stuff. So this is part of a movement that is called the “right to repair.” 

So the right to repair movement basically says everybody should have the right to fix their own stuff. 

ROMAN MARS: It’s right there in the name. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It is in the name. 

ROMAN MARS: Good name. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It’s a good name. It’s very descriptive. And one of the leaders of this movement is a woman named Gay Gordon-Byrne. She does a lot of public speaking about this subject, including a Ted Talk that now has two and a half million views. 

GAY GORDON-BYRNE: I’m a repair geek. I grew up fixing things with my dad. It was what we did. We fixed our TV, we fixed our refrigerator, we fixed stuff that didn’t need fixing…

CHRIS BERUBE: Gay Gordon-Byrne is the head of this group called the Repair Association. And their argument is: “Look, if we truly own something, we should be able to fix it.”

GAY GORDON-BYRNE: What’s really got me irritated is that, at this point, the vast majority of products on the market today cannot be repaired by any party without being totally dependent on the manufacturer. And the day the manufacturer decides they don’t want you to fix it, it’s over. This is a completely artificial problem…

CHRIS BERUBE: And this argument has picked up a lot of followers. There are people fighting for this in Europe, in South America… And actually one of the people out there advocating for it pretty loudly is our farmer, Jared Wilson. 

JARED WILSON: I’ve been to Washington a few times and spoken with staff from senators and representatives. I’m not really trying to make anything political, just sharing my experiences with the people who were elected to pass laws to govern how things work in this country. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. Well, I want to know. So has there been any success with this? This seems like an uphill battle. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Actually, it has been pretty successful the last couple of years, and it’s been pleasantly surprising to see this movement developing. In Europe, specifically, there has been a lot of movement on this. So, in 2024, the European Union passed a directive saying every member state needed to have a right to repair law by the summer of 2026, so that is this coming summer. And that will require manufacturers to offer repairs for all household appliances, including washing machines and even smartphones. So pretty soon we’ll have a pretty good idea of how that’s being implemented in Europe. But in the United States, there’s been some movement as well. So, a few states have now passed right to repair laws. Colorado passed a law in 2023 saying that farmers need to have the right to repair. Oregon passed a law covering electronic and powered wheelchairs. We talked a little bit about wheelchair users. They need access to repair tools because they’re facing a pretty small market–pretty high rates for getting stuff fixed. And now quite a few states have passed laws about fixing phones and laptops. And that includes states who are otherwise pretty friendly to business interests. 

CORY DOCTOROW: We’re getting somewhere with these state right to repair bills. So it’s really going well, including Texas and legislatures that are considered pretty friendly to big business still passing repair laws. It’s great. 

CHRIS BERUBE: So the latest development in all of this is a national right to repair bill for cars that is under consideration in the House of Representatives. That bill is bipartisan, by the way. It has been sponsored by Republicans and Democrats. 

CORY DOCTOROW: It reflects something from Stein’s Law, which is a law of finance that says that anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops. And I think that people are fed up. And so we’re getting some repair bills. It’s very hard to be on the wrong side of repair and say you shouldn’t be allowed to fix your own stuff. 

ROMAN MARS: So this all seems like good news. So there are some laws that might reverse enshittification. 

CHRIS BERUBE: It is good news. And actually, in response to this push, we have already seen some companies who have started sending out these repair tools. So, these are companies trying to get out preemptively ahead of these laws. An example of this a couple of years ago: a little company called John Deere– Perhaps you have heard of them from multiple references in this story. A little company called John Deere has put out this software to their customers. That’s designed to make it possible for farmers to decode these error messages and troubleshoot lots of problems with their tractors. So to fix things themselves. And as of this year, John Deere told me that farmers can actually override derating in some cases. So this is the problem we talked about at the beginning of the show where the tractor shuts itself down. So this all sounds like good news. But there are still some caveats. 

ROMAN MARS: Okay. So what is this caveat? 

CHRIS BERUBE: Well, Jared says there are still flaws with the repair software. He’s particularly concerned about the way it collects his harvesting data. He says that’s not ideal for him. He’s actually been part of a class action lawsuit against John Deere, saying they have an unfair monopoly on repair tools. And the software is part of the complaints that they filed. And in a bigger sense, while there’s been progress around right to repair, there’s no guarantee that things like the federal law about car repairs is going to pass. There are some big lobbies pushing back against that. Some car companies have opposed more right to repair laws because they worry it could lead to their intellectual property being violated. 

ROMAN MARS: My god. Their intellectual property about the information on my car? That is an absurd assertion. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Yeah, I mean, when you put it that way, it sounds pretty silly. But these right to repair laws can make a big difference, right? But they aren’t a magic bullet. Many of these laws do not outlaw parts pairing, for example, so they don’t solve the problem of interoperability. You can’t necessarily put third-party parts on to repair something. So there’s an argument that these laws could go further. 

ROMAN MARS: Yeah. So it can make the platform better, but you’re still locked into the platform. 

CHRIS BERUBE: You’re totally locked into the platform. So, in lots of ways, you need these laws to be more comprehensive. And Cory Doctorow says, “Maybe we should start thinking beyond the laws.” He has other approaches to this. He thinks we actually need to be doing something a lot more radical. 

ROMAN MARS: Oh, okay. Tell me more. What does he have in mind? 

CHRIS BERUBE: One thing Cory is pushing for is countries outside the United States to basically break the digital locks–to allow third-party manufacturers to make replacement parts and things like that. So, Canada and Mexico are in a trade war with the U.S. right now. And Cory says, “Look, what if those countries made generic replacement parts that go around the locks and then export those generic parts all over the world?”

CORY DOCTOROW: We could do the same for tractors and tractor parts and cars and car parts. We have all the car part factories in Ontario. If we can’t ship those across the border anymore, we can just make generic car parts in Ontario and sell them all over the world along with the software to turn off the car part checking tool in the cars. We could have third-party ink manufacturing. And you know what? If we don’t do it, someone else is going to do it. 

ROMAN MARS: [LAUGHING] It is a very Cory Doctorow thing to turn Canada into a lawless land of jailbreaking. But I do love it. I don’t see it ever really happening in that way. But I do love it. 

CHRIS BERUBE: That can feel like a long shot, but we do have to think about different ways to fix this problem. 

ROMAN MARS: I totally agree. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Roman, there’s so much going on in the world right now, but this issue feels pretty urgent to me because if we don’t act–if we don’t do something about these kind of everyday frustrations, this general shittiness of things, but also this big cost for lots of people–it’s just going to get worse. And on a much simpler level, Roman, I would like to live in a world where somebody like Jared can just fix his tractor. 

JARED WILSON: It doesn’t benefit us, the citizen, to have stuff that we buy that we can’t fix when it breaks. It’s not good economically. It’s not good environmentally. Allowing these companies to stymie competition is not in our best interest. And I really hope that people can take that to heart. 

ROMAN MARS: Well, amen to that. Thank you, Chris. Even in my incandescent anger, I’m having fun with this story. I appreciate it. 

CHRIS BERUBE: Oh, good. Okay, so this was infuriating but also entertaining. That’s what I was going for today. 

ROMAN MARS: Exactly. Like good punk rock. 

CHRIS BERUBE: That’s the first time I’ve ever been compared to good punk rock. So thank you for that. 

ROMAN MARS: In April, 2026, as we were finishing this episode, John Deere agreed to pay $99 million to settle the class action lawsuit about right to repair concerns. Jared Wilson, the farmer from our episode, was part of that lawsuit. We reached out to John Deere to discuss claims made in the story. In response, they sent us information about their consumer repair software. And John Deere told us that they estimate there are third-party replacement parts for about 60% of all John Deere parts on the market today. We also reached out to Apple. A representative told us that Apple supports third-party replacement parts except in cases where there are security concerns. Apple also told us they have recently expanded access to their repair tools for consumers and have a recycling take-back program in most countries that sell Apple products. 

99% Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube. Edited by Emmett FitzGerald. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Music by Swan Real and George Langford.

Cory Doctorow’s latest book is “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse, And What to Do About it.” It is super fun and infuriating–but mostly fun. You can find it wherever you buy books. 

Special thanks this week to Nathan Proctor at the PIRG.

Kathy Tu is our executive producer. Delaney Hall is the senior editor, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. 

The rest of the team includes Jayson De Leon, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, Lasha Madan, Jeyca Medina-Gleason, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. 

The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. 

We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building… in beautiful, uptown… Oakland, California.

You can find us on Bluesky, as well as our own Discord server. You can find a link to that, as well every past episode of 99PI, at 99pi.org.