Everything is getting worse.
You’ve probably noticed that by now. Websites are chock-full of ads, whether you’re balancing your checkbook, reading the news, or just, God forbid, even trying to buy the thing they’re asking you to buy. Windows 11 is slower and clunkier than Windows 10 and wants to force you to buy a new computer. Capital groups use barely-legal tricks to take over beloved companies like Toys ‘R Us and drain them of every penny. We went from in-flight movies and hot meals to “just be lucky the plane didn’t crash this time.” Insurance companies are so bad that their CEOs are getting shot. Donald Trump, adjudicated rapist and close friend of child molester Jeffrey Epstein, is now an American tinpot dictator, supported by a crazed terrorist organization that calls themselves MAGA, and is leeching the life out of what once was the Last Best Hope. And social media is so toxic that X introducing “Mecha-Hitler” barely even makes the news anymore.
Everything but everything is steadily spiraling down the toilet, as enshittification sucks the entire Western World to the bottommost depths of hell itself. The rich get richer, and everybody else is getting screwed, and then the Wall Street types freak out when anybody dares to asks why things suck so bad. Ermagerd, “class warfare!” It’s almost as if people don’t like getting screwed.
Anyway, today’s entry in the “everything is getting worse” category is Hewlett Packard HP. I bought a new printer from them in late 2021, a snazzy M255dw color laser, and it worked darn well. But, of course, we’re no longer allowed to just have nice things. You can’t just buy a nice product and be done with it. Everything’s a service, even if it isn’t. You’re expected to pay through the nose, every day. For protection.
Which is why today my printer decided that the brand-new toner cartridge I’d bought for it just a few months ago was not to be allowed, as it was “Not HP.” Never mind that that’s just marketing bullshit, and there’s absolutely no technical reason why the printer can’t just send the “spin” and “dispense” signals to the cartridge, just like the HP printer I owned for nearly thirty years before this one did. That one was built like a tank, and it Just Worked for decades, like an actual well-made product should. Nope, I might’ve spent my hard-earned money on this new printer, but in HP’s eyes, printing is a service, and I’m “borrowing” the right to use my own printer, which means that if I don’t do exactly what they want, when they want, I don’t get to print.
You’d think, being highly technically adept, I’d have noticed that hidden twenty-seven miles down in a screen you need multiple special skills to access, there’s a tiny checkbox that says “Allow HP to remotely fuck with your printer.” But nope. I hadn’t noticed that. There’s a good reason for all the many, many, many, many well-deserved class-action lawsuits against HP.
Related: I would like to invite HP’s current leadership to fuck all the way off. Bill and David would be ashamed of your money-grubbing. Hope you all enjoy it now, because you can’t take it with you.
The sad part is that the hardware’s really pretty good. It’s fast and efficient. But the company behind it went from “highly respectable and trustworthy” in the ’90s to “makes the cable company seem great” in twenty years flat, and they deserve every last jot and tittle of the negative press they regularly get. Including this blog posting.
The even sadder part is why I was printing in the first place: I was printing out the owner’s manual for my new refrigerator, which now is only provided online. Because, y’know, why spend $0.25 of paper and ink on a thousand-dollar fridge when the consumer can do that themselves?
So the cycle of enshittification continues. One has to wonder if we can, as a species, pull out of this. Maybe we’re just collectively doomed to put up with the worst, greediest, cruelest impulses of our worst, greediest, cruelest people. Right now, the Magic 8 ball is looking pretty fuzzy on that, with all signs pointing to “maybe” at best.
In the meanwhile, I have a printer that doesn’t print, so like a good little consumer, I’m going to shut up and buy another toner cartridge.
But not from HP.
