Is Your HP Printer Really Yours?

 

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.

Getting Used to Liquid Modernity

 

I do not own a conventional smart phone.  Instead, I intentionally use a style of flip phone whose rugged case and physical numeric keypad buttons won't be injured by a drop of three or four feet to a concrete surface.  It can receive some texts on its small screen, and I can even send texts after a fashion with the twelve numeric keys, tapping them rapidly one to four times to select the correct letter or punctuation mark.  It won't do capitals, but you can read texts from me without capitals and still get the message.  It took me a while to get used to that method of texting, but in the five or six years I've had a phone like this, I've gotten to where I can do it as fast as I need to. 

 

Until a couple of weeks ago, that is.  One day I went to send a text and the keypad didn't respond as usual.  If I wanted to start a sentence with "C," for example, I tapped the "2-ABC" key four times.  It used to be that I'd get a C that way.  But no longer.  Now, if I tap the "C" key four times, I don't get "C"—I get "BBC." 

 

Much as I admire the British Broadcasting Corporation, it was not my intention to discuss it when all I wanted was a C.  Further investigation revealed that some little menu showed up every time I touched a key longer than really short, and the thing expected me to navigate the menu to the letter I wanted, using a separate up-and-down button that I never had to fool with before when I was texting.  It's two weeks later and I still haven't figured out how this new system is supposed to work.  I've been too busy to call my phone provider and chew them out about this, because I don't send texts that much and the ones I do send are things like, "OK" and "LVG NOW" ("leaving now," not "living now," although that's not a bad interpretation either), and I've been able after much struggle to send those messages after taking out extraneous spaces and idiotic guesses of the software as to what I was really trying to say.

 

I shouldn't complain, though, because this is a tiny example of what the late sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called "liquid modernity."  Living in liquid modernity requires that you take an approach to life that is more like a tourist on a vacation than a conventional citizen of an organized, institutionalized society. 

 

The only constant of liquid modernity is change, chiefly of the self, but also of the self's surroundings.  Jobs, relationships, commitments, political or sexual orientation—all are subject to the whims of the sovereign self.  And firms that fail to adapt to liquid modernity will of course be left in the dustbin of history.  The onslaught of liquid modernity has accelerated in recent decades, and the contrast can be seen by another thing that happened to a piece of personal electronics of mine recently.

 

Somewhere around 1984, I bought a Hewlett-Packard HP15C pocket calculator.  It was a state-of-the-art machine when I got it, capable of all the standard scientific math operations plus programming and even numerical integration.  To use it, you had to learn something called "reverse Polish notation" involving stacking numbers in an imaginary stack, but I was younger and eager then and didn't have much problem learning it.  The beauty of it was that it avoided having to use parentheses in complicated math expressions, which was good because the small one-line display wouldn't have accommodated parentheses very well anyway. 

 

That calculator served me well for over thirty years until a couple of weeks ago, when it fell from a height of two feet underneath a book that also fell on it, and the glass display screen cracked.  I was able to find a used one on eBay, so I can still calculate with reverse Polish, but the point here is that a product that didn't change fulfilled its purpose in my life—hardly a week passed when I didn't use it for something—for over thirty years.  I kept doing the same sort of thing, and it kept right up with me.

 

You might call that "solid life"—an approximation to the eternity of bliss promised to the faithful by the religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

 

In marked contrast to that is liquid life, in which a cell phone you buy isn't really yours in the full sense.  In order for it to remain useful, the phone company continually messes with it and reserves the right to change important fundamental aspects of its operation. 

 

What happened to my phone was minor compared to some of the things that New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert describes in a recent piece about the fluid nature of ownership in a high-tech world.  Her emphasis is on the way that legal concepts of ownership have lagged far behind what firms like Apple and Google actually do, shielded by incomprehensible legal boilerplate that it is practically impossible to opt out of.  Besides providing all sorts of details about our private lives that we don't even know our phones and other electronics are sending to their makers, the software we try to use is subject to change at any time, and usually does.  If you don't like it, well, your liquid self can just flow over to the next opportunity and change phones, or service companies, or even start using carrier pigeons if it strikes your fancy. (But you'll have to get everybody you know to switch to carrier pigeons too. Good luck with that.)

 

The freedom that high-tech life presents is largely illusory, because it has to remain within the bounds of what the dominant high-tech firms allow us to do.  I could pitch my flip phone and buy a smart phone, but I suspect that would just be leaving the frying pan for the fire.  So as long as I don't move by myself to a cabin in the woods, I suppose I'll just have to deal with whatever arcane system for sending texts that the phone company imposes on me.  But I wonder what this sort of thing multiplied by millions does to our collective psyches.

 

Sources:  Elizabeth Kolbert's "What's Mine is Mine" appeared in the Mar. 15, 2021 issue of The New Yorker on pp. 78-80.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on Zygmunt Bauman and Late Modernity.