I am altering the deal — pray I don't alter it any further

Tech companies have always been on normal one, but in the last decade or so they've been on an especially normal one.

I remember when I bought an email app for my various Apple devices. I think I paid about £5 for the iOS version, and then £20 for the Mac version. I might be wrong because I can't find any invoices or receipts going back that far, but the point still stands: I paid something for it.

The thing is, paying for it wasn't enough. One day, out of the blue — without any advance warning — the developer of the app decided they wanted me to pay for it again. And again. And again. Every month, in fact, by way of a subscription.

Sigh.

The developer justified it by saying the monthly cost was cheap (by who's metric?) and that they needed a steady income stream to justify continued feature upgrades. Apparently slapping a number 2 or 3 on their app's title for a big feature update — and giving their customers the option to decide whether those features were worth it or not — wasn't enough of a steady income stream.

Instead, they decided to cosplay as a landlord: pay your rent or get the hell out.

What followed was inevitable, and I'm not talking about disgruntled users on the App Store giving them 1 star reviews for the rug-pull. I'm talking about a few years later, where the developer is now tripping over their own feet to ship half-baked updates, constantly on the minimal feature treadmill to keep their subscription grift going.

Fun fact: I'd actually forgotten the name of the email app in question, and I spent the best part of an hour digging it out. Back when I purchased it, every listicle under the sun praised it as one of the best email apps. It won awards and traded on its 5 star App Store reviews.

They altered the deal without the other party's consent, and then realised it wasn't the land of milk and honey that they'd hoped for.

Now, everyone's forgotten it even exists.

This happens time and time and time again. Apps and tools you love get completely ruined by one mandatory update, the deal you both signed altered by one party without so much as a little heads up.

Tech companies have a bad habit of doing this. I try not to buy too many apps because of this, but I'd say at least 50% of the time that I do pay for an app, I get burned.

And it's not just a subscription bait-and-switch. The grift takes other forms too.

This month, Roku has gone on an advertising feeding frenzy, shaking up their Smart TV operating system to fill it full of annoying ads. Ads that people who bought their Smart TV sticks didn't consent to in any common sense way (but probably did legally via those EULAs no one reads).

To make matters worse, they're even looking into HDMI hijacking — waiting for a pause in your game or movie to fill your screen with ads for things they want to sell you.

It's grotesque, but they're not the only one trying stuff like this.

Microsoft wants to flood your Windows 11 Start menu with crap, and Google has hijacked the screensavers of Apple TVs with YouTube installed, preventing the device from putting your TV to sleep (and potentially shortening the life of that expensive OLED you own). Given it's YouTube, ads on this new hijacked screensaver will no doubt follow.

Enshittification seems to be the desired business model for tech companies — not something they should be wary of — and that's a real and tangible threat not only to our bank balance, but to our privacy and liberties.

Extracting as much cash for growth and quarterly shareholder value means these companies will stop at nothing to spin a dime, and we're all a playing a role in this revenue maximisation psychodrama.

Doesn't all this feel unsustainable? If not for the companies, then for us. And if it's unsustainable for us, it eventually becomes unsustainable for them.

I'm not going to pretend I have the answer to this — it's going to require that people change their purchasing habits and which platforms they engage with, not to mention taking a political dimension with legislation — but the unending stream of grifts that I and everyone I know seems to fall victim to in one way or another has worn me down to the point that I need to vent.

Which gets me to the long-winded point of this: I usually vent by creating.

I've had the idea of a novel percolating for quite a while. I actually wrote a draft of it that was not quite right. Watching the modern tech industry continually and willingly vomit over everything decent and good, and pretend it's normal and in fact actually quite healthy, has a way of helping me get to the core of what I want to write.

My book's theme was DRM on the body and society, and it's been that theme for years. But I think that's too narrow an analysis of the problem.

Technology weaponised as a blunt instrument used to consume, corrupt and ultimately destroy us feels like a broadening of that, but in a way that's infinitely more compelling to tell a story in.

The creative process is a funny thing, and every person's process forms in a different way. Mine is (currently) sharpened by the intersection of technology, privacy and politics — the fact that it's all so grim right now just makes me want to keep on writing.

I'd take not having to live in this horror show than having a muse, but hey, when life gives you lemons...