In choosing to make Charlie Warzel's printer stop working because of an expired credit card, the corporate giant HP picked the wrong consumer to pick on. Warzel happens to be a staff writer at The Atlantic. In "My Printer Is Extorting Me," Warzel excoriates HP and the general tendency of Big Tech to keep long strings attached to items that we thought we'd bought, only to find that the old notion of "fee simple title," meaning total possession of a thing, is history as far as digital stuff is concerned.
It happened this way. Back in 2020 during the pandemic, Warzel decided his family had to have an inkjet printer, and he went online—practically the only option then—and bought an HP model for more than $200. Without really knowing what he was doing, but making what was a rational decision at the time, he also signed up for an HP program called Instant Ink. Allegedly, Instant Ink monitors your ink cartridges, and when one of them is getting low, it automatically generates a shipping order and delivers the requisite cartridge to your door before you even knew you needed it. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.
The cost for this service was $5.99 a month, based on the number of pages you typically print in a month (100 pages for $5.99). I checked the HP website for this service, and it's unclear what happens if you sign up for the 100-page plan and unintentionally print, say, 101 pages in February, the shortest month. Does that bump you up to the next highest level?
Anyway, that and many other aspects of the program were not clear to Warzel, who began to receive ink cartridges until the day that the credit card he'd used for the service expired.
If your credit card number expires or has to be changed, one of the vicissitudes of modern life is trying to remember all the different places you've given it to, so as to hunt them up and tell them what the new number is. When this happened to Warzel, HP was one of the places he forgot to notify. But they reminded him quick.
One day not long after his card expired, he went to print something and found that his printer had quit working. Looking into the matter, he was dismayed to discover that the reason it had quit was that his credit card had expired, and "the company had effectively bricked my device in response."
Apparently, all he had to do to get it running was to go out into the real world and seek a set of genuine (not imitation!) HP printer cartridges, and his printer would start working again. He doesn't say whether he did that or resolved to go back to quill pens and foolscap. But the type of problem he experienced is increasingly common, and Warzel discovered several other examples of situations in which tech companies exert eerie and disturbing control over things that consumers thought they had purchased outright.
As Warzel points out, HP is only engaging in a particularly nasty form of commerce that traces its roots back to at least the early 1900s. The first consumers who installed light bulbs and later discovered that, unlike a kerosene lamp, an incandescent lamp burns out with alarming frequency, may have felt something close to the outrage that Warzel felt when his printer quit. It may have been the electric-lighting industry that gave rise to the business saying, "The weakness of the goods is the strength of the trade." Back in the early days of electric lighting, you might buy only a few lamp fixtures, but you'd buy hundreds of light bulbs over the years, furnishing a steady revenue stream for GE or whoever was making bulbs at the time. It's for the same reason that Kodak sold cheap cameras, because they made back any money they lost on camera sales by selling the film for them.
The digital printer industry is only the latest version of this kind of system, which I hesitate to call a scam. But by using its ability to trace each individual cartridge and exert remote control over them, and the printer that uses them, HP may have pushed their advantage a bit too far. It was too far for Warzel, at any rate.
The Polish philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) wrote a book entitled Liquid Life. I haven't read it, but the notices of his work I have come across attribute to him the perception that one of modern life's strong tendencies is to blur formerly clear-cut distinctions. Take privacy, for example. As recently as the 1970s, when one made a phone call, one could be reasonably assured that nobody was listening other than the person you called at the other end of the line, and that if your phone rang, it was another person who had a legitimate personal reason to call you. Nowadays, of course, our very conversations, on and off the phone, are monitored by digital spies who start throwing ads for printer cartridges at us if we so much as mention printers in casual conversation.
And there was an invisible barrier a typewriter crossed, say, when you walked out of the store with it. Up to that moment it belonged to the store. But once you paid for it, it belonged to you—you could type with it, use it for a paperweight, or take it out to the lake and use it as a boat anchor (some of the old IBM Selectrics would have served this purpose admirably). And nobody—not the store, not IBM—could have stopped you.
Perhaps we'll just have to get used to the leaky liquid nature of digital ownership, but Warzel seems to think we will have lost something important in the process.
Sources: Charlie Warzel's article "My Printer Is Extorting Me" appeared on The Atlantic's website at https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/02/home-printer-digital-rights-management-hp-instant-ink-subscription/672913/. I also referred to the HP Instant Ink website at https://instantink.hpconnected.com/us/en/l/v2 and the Wikipedia article on Zygmunt Bauman.
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