“We have to entertain each other, while they collect the rent” — McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse?
After the fiasco that was the release of Cyberpunk 2077 — a game estimated to cost more than 300 million dollars, including the performance of actor Keanu Reeves —, many people began to question how far the so-called late stage capitalism can go. Produced by CD Projekt studio, the game was released in December 2020 as if it were ready, but it was clearly at an early stage of development, presenting a long series of issues [1]. Many users of different platforms asked for a refund. The previous-gen console versions were basically unplayable, forcing Sony to remove the game from its online store. Meanwhile, several developers involved in the production complained bitterly of strenuous working hours, humiliation from their bosses, poor pay and all sorts of chaos [2]. But Cyberpunk 2077 is just one example out of countless equally frustrating stories.
In September 2021, Fitbit (a subsidiary of Google) launched the smartwatch Charge 5, which according to specialized reviews, has a series of chronic issues [3]. The GPS’s internal antenna is setup in such a way that it requires the user to adjust the strap so that they can slide a finger between the wrist and the watch, making it so loose that it not only makes sport activities uncomfortable, but worse than that, it prevents the watch’s heart monitor from working. And there is no solution: either the user has a GPS signal or they have a working heart rate monitor. Even though some of the advertised features are currently unavailable, the watch has been selling normally. And Fitbit has not yet announced when the features will be ready.
The South Korean giant Samsung launched in 2016 the disastrous Galaxy Note 7, which sold millions of units in a few days, but was soon banned from use on air planes and then sales were suspended, forcing the company to carry out a massive recall. The cause of the problem was a design mistake that allowed the device to overheat the battery, eventually causing explosions and injuring the users, and in some extreme cases even leading to them being hospitalized [4].
In September 2021, the company released the Galaxy Watch 4, its newest flagship smartwatch. The product has some serious usability issues: the GPS is quite imprecise and often stops recording the current position; the heart rate monitor is also unreliable; the touchscreen doesn’t work from the moment it comes into contact with any liquid, whether it is water or sweat [5]. In addition, Samsung shows off their blood pressure measurement feature, which requires calibration with medical equipment to function [6], but the measurements are inaccurate anyway [7]. The watch is not compatible with Apple phones, and some features only work if the user has a Samsung smartphone. Although the battery life has received a lot of criticism in the previous models, they decided not to make any changes for the current one.
Apple, known for supposedly delivering sleek products, launched in 2010 the iPhone 4, still under the tutelage of Steve Jobs. Within hours of release, users flooded the internet to complain about dropped connections and abrupt reductions in internet speed. The problem, according to Jobs, was with users holding the iPhone 4 with their left hand [8]. As this was a hardware issue, it was never really solved.
Two years later, Apple made another goof when it launched its map service that was intended to replace Google Maps. The product was so badly broken that it didn’t even do the basics. The navigation system often gave incorrect directions, displayed non-existent points of interest such as airports, while train stations appeared in the middle of the sea [9]. In Australia, authorities had to rescue several drivers who ended up in an inhospitable wild park, 70 km from the point of interest entered in the app. With no water or telephone signal and with temperatures of 46 degrees, the location is considered very dangerous [10].
A few years went by and the company launched the infamous 12.1.2 version of the iOS system, leaving countless iPhones around the world without access to wifi and mobile data [11]. Apple’s recommendation at the time involved a series of procedures that ultimately did not resolve the problem.
Tesla, the electric vehicle company chaired by Elon Musk, has been selling since 2015 a package called Autopilot that gives its vehicles a certain autonomy. The feature was extended to the so-called FSD (Full Self-Driving), which, in a beta stage of development, was initially made available to a small group of users, most of them company employees. In mid-2019, Elon Musk said the FSD would be complete by the end of the year, and that by the middle of the following year about a million Teslas would be on the streets fully autonomous, without a single human driver [12]. After numerous missed deadlines, in September 2021 the FSD was finally released to the general public costing $10,000 or a monthly subscription fee of $200, but is still in beta stage [13]. Countless videos have shown that the algorithm’s ability to drive is far from being reliable, requiring the driver not only to be constantly aware, but also frequently taking control to avoid accidents [14]. Even limited to a small number of people, since 2016 Tesla’s autopilot has already caused several accidents, killing 10 individuals and injuring dozens [15][16][17]. No wonder the US Department of Transportation follows SAE recommendation and keeps Tesla’s vehicles at level 2/5 for autonomy, which means that a person is still responsible for driving.
While Tesla sells to the general public the idea that its vehicles are about to become fully autonomous (hence the name Full Self-Driving), to the California Department of Motor Vehicle, the company gave a less delusional account, admitting in 2020 that FSD never aimed to make Teslas autonomous [18]. The reality behind this is that, by putting the FSD out to the public, the company is collecting an unimaginable amount of data everyday, feeding the artificial intelligence that powers its cars. Instead of paying drivers for this, especially considering the risks, Tesla is charging them, which showcases how such distorted market is becoming the norm.
Tesla, which only became profitable when it started receiving tax incentives from the US government — more than 3.5 billion dollars so far —, is surfing on hype that is perhaps only comparable to that created by Apple [19]. Although the company sells the image that it doesn’t spend money on marketing, the reality is that it advertises through different platforms compared to those adopted in the 20th century, engaging people through massive use of social media, including their CEO’s personal account, as well as flashy events like Tesla AI Day, sending a car to space, etc [20]. It comes as no surprise that the market value of Elon Musk’s company is equivalent to the 12 largest car manufactures in the world combined, placing it in sixth place in the ranking of most valuable companies on the planet, ahead of Facebook and Samsung.
But perhaps the most dramatic example is the Boeing 737 Max, launched in 2016. Boeing’s idea was to revamp the model created in the 1960s, ensuring that pilots flying the original model wouldn’t need too much training to adapt. Upon announcing the development of the 737 Max, the hype among airlines was so great that nearly 4,000 aircraft were pre-ordered, injecting billions of dollars into Boeing’s account. The company decided to design the plane with bigger engines, which changed the aerodynamics in such a way that it was more susceptible to stalling [21]. To fix the problem, Boeing developed the so-called MCAS, an autonomous system that pushes down the plane’s nose when it detects a stall. The result: in just 5 months, two 737 Maxes crashed, killing 346 people. Black box analyses concluded that the disasters occurred due to the MCAS malfunctioning [22]. A senior Boeing engineer said that in order to keep costs down, the company rejected a safer system that could have reduced risks. The airline was fined a tiny fraction of its profit from sales of the 737 Max, which today remains popular among airlines [23].
Similar examples could follow almost indefinitely, including many other corporations such as Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Intel, etc. There are, however, several less outrageous cases that don’t attract people’s attention simply because they have been standardized by the industry. Leaks of sensitive user data, for example, happen several times a year and affect billions of people, yet the companies responsible continue to operate normally [24] — during the writing of this article, The Verge reported a massive leak of data from Twitch users, and, according to them, former employees claimed that the company’s philosophy has always been speed and profit over the safety of its users [25]. Another trend is the release of products that kind of work, but that nevertheless have a series of small issues and instabilities that often need to be fixed with updates — or in many cases the problems remain forever.
Microsoft is perhaps unbeatable in this regard. And in making this claim we needn’t limit ourselves to the disastrous Windows Vista or even the iconic blue screen during Windows 98 presentation [26]. There have been vast numbers of Windows 10 updates that in recent years have broken critical system components, affecting millions of users [27]. Despite being the most used desktop system in the world, the image of Windows 10 was so damaged that Microsoft abandoned the idea that it would be the last version of Windows [28], and decided to release in October 2021 ‘Windows 11’, a barely altered re-brand of Windows 10. One day after its release, several issues were identified, but they could all have been easily fixed if Microsoft bothered to test it thoroughly [29][30][31].
In 2019, the company released an entirely new version of its terminal for Windows 10, promising a better performance. However, user Casey Muratori was not convinced, claiming that the performance was still far from what could have been done without much effort. To prove his point, Casey developed in just a few days an open source prototype that performed 200 times better than Microsoft’s new terminal [32]. This case, however, is not an isolated one: for basically every application originally shipped in Windows there is a free equivalent with better performance and more flexibility (7zip, IrfanView, Notepad++, etc).
The list of epic failures produced by Microsoft seems endless: from the long time pushing of the terrible Internet Explorer, to the Windows Phone failure, the Bing search fiasco [33], the consecutive messaging app disasters (MSN, Skype and Teams), to scandals involving hidden collection of user data. Despite all this, it has recently become the most valuable company on the planet, surpassing Apple, which held this position for more than a decade [34].
In the article Software Disenchantment, author Nikita Prokopov exposes how bad software has become commonplace in our daily lives [35]. From programs that get incredibly bigger and slower with each new version, offering little or nothing more in return, to the fact that they get worse as they are used, to the most complete chaos that is the software development process.
For example, when creating an empty (!) project in npm for web development more than 50,000 files are downloaded, taking about 350 MB. This house of cards is so fragile that it gives rise to situations that are, to say the least, embarrassing. In 2016, an npm library called Left-pad, downloaded about 2 million times a month, was removed from the repository by its author, resulting in many web projects around the world crashing, including large corporations, forcing npm to revert the deletion [36]. The library, which contained 10 trivial lines, could be implemented in a few minutes even by programming students.
Jonathan Blow, responsible for developing the iconic games Braid (2008) and The Witness (2016), made a presentation in 2019 entitled Preventing the Collapse of Civilization, in which he argues that software is in decline in quality and that society should discuss this issue now or run the risk of going into a deep technological crisis [37]. According to Blow, one of the reasons for this decline is that developers are increasingly using external dependencies to help them deliver systems with unrealistic deadlines.
Developing software has become very similar to assembling LEGO, where each piece is like a black box made by a company or person we don’t usually know. Because of this, we have lost control of what is inside the programs, making them much larger, slower and more susceptible to bugs and instabilities. So it’s not as if the challenges that programs are trying to solve nowadays are necessarily much more complex, but rather the way the software is being developed is.
We need to remember that the business model of most big tech companies changed a decade ago, leaving software sales as a secondary thing, thus focusing on the use and sale of user data. To track every move we make on their systems, these companies use several technologies, which, of course, add complexity and compromise the usability of the programs. From food recipe pages [38] to operating systems [39], we accept that software is a compulsive collector of our personal data because, after all, it seems a small price to pay for having free access to these platforms. We forget that, by accepting such conditions, we are making ourselves not customers, but products, and this product is consumed by obscure companies that want to manipulate us in different ways, including not just marketing [40].
The growing inefficiency and ineffectiveness of software, however, is not a recent complaint. A search for terms such as software getting worse, software bloat and web obesity shows that the issue has been discussed for some time. Articles from the early 2000s pointed to the dark places where the software industry was heading [41]. In 2012, the expression page bloat was emerging, referring to the fact that webpages were increasingly heavy and unstable [42]. Shortly after, the term web obesity began to be used and gave rise to a series of articles [43]. In 2017, Hacker Noon published the article Web Bloat Isn’t A Knowledge Problem, on which it explains why the web is becoming increasingly chaotic [44].
But why do we keep buying bad products? In many cases because there is no other option available. In others, because before buying them we simply do not know how they are in practice, and without access to better references, we accept what is sold to us as if it were good. While there is plenty of good quality information online, accessing it requires active effort, while advertisements, on the other hand, are a multi-billion-dollar resource that insidiously invades our daily lives and manipulates the primitive part of our brain. Armed with an increasingly massive and persuasive marketing arsenal, companies shape our expectations and make us slaves to consumerist anxiety.
Social networks, in turn, not only bombard us with countless advertisements, but also encourage immediacy, false information and the exhibitionist and envious side of people. Not to mention the lightning pace of the market, which, to keep the consumer engaged, is constantly launching new products, making us believe that new is always better. Creating tiny doses of dopamine, small updates of unfinished or fraudulent products combine the perfect formula for the market: selling at a lower cost, forcing us to be paying testers and making us addicted to this endless cycle.
On top of that, intellectual references have shifted to CEOs, who get constant exposure on social media, letting their followers believe they have some personal connection. So people unconsciously trust that these companies produce good quality products. We forget that the goal of capitalism is ever-increasing profit, so anything else is either an obstacle or a resource to this end.
When we look at the basis of modern capitalism, we notice that the main aspects that make corporations richer are exactly those that make software worse:
- Keeping the best production/cost ratio, including employees’ wages, in order to increase profit (as seen in the case of Cyberpunk 2077)
- Artificially increasing customer demand through advertising, aesthetic appeal and planned obsolescence (as seen in the cases of Fitbit, Samsung and Apple)
- Using power to legislate in their favor and having access to powerful law firms that help to neuter state prosecutors (as seen in the case of Tesla and Boeing)
But isn’t software development inherently complex, and as demands evolve, isn’t inevitably becoming harder to deliver a good quality product? It is worth remembering that we continue to successfully send autonomous probes into space. The level of complexity and risk of these missions is substantially higher than most applications we use in our everyday lives. However, because there is no market pressure, there is enough time to test these systems to ensure that they are in fact stable and functional. The Curiosity probe, for example, was sent to Mars in 2011 with a 2 megapixel camera, when at the time of its launch there were already sensors with more than 40 megapixels [45]. One of the reasons for this is that when the project development began, in 2004, the available sensors were only 2 megapixels, but to ensure the mission’s success, exhaustive testing work was conducted without technological changes [46].
Well, then maybe the problem is that, from an economic point of view, it is unsustainable to make decent software. However, when we analyze the increase in productivity compared to the increase in wages, we see that, for decades, the former has grown at a much faster pace than the latter. Currently, this gap is almost 50%.
More and more we see new ultra-rich people [47], like Jeff Bezos, who has a fortune that cannot be understood by the human mind [48]. The net cash balance of large corporations has never been so high: 650 billion dollars just among the top 5 — all of them tech companies [49]. Capitalism has never put so much money in so few hands as it does nowadays, and it is just getting worse every year. There is less real competition in the market, as companies are buying each other, centralizing power. For example, in 1983 there were around 50 media companies in the United States, but in 2011 there were only 6 [50]. The same happens with financial companies, tech companies, food companies, etc. Not to mention old and questionable practices adopted by capitalism to control the market, such as holding companies, cartel formation, dumping and many others. These corporations — also regarded as too big to fail [51] — are not in a fragile situation. On the contrary, from an economic point of view they have never thrived this much.
Apparently, legislation is moving at a much slower pace than the market’s greed. Most lawmakers don’t even understand how current technology works, and are unable to impose proper limits on corporations. Another example, in addition to the ones already mentioned, is WhatsApp (one of Facebook’s subsidiaries), which, with more than 2 billion active users, claims to have end-to-end encryption technology, which in theory would prevent even the company from having access to its users’ messages. However, because the application is not open source, such a claim depends on faith, which is difficult to maintain, since not only is Facebook’s business model based on collecting information from users, but it has already been involved in several scandals of data leaks and even data sales [52].
Software created by companies is a black box to which citizens and regulators are denied access. Insidiously, these algorithms have been shaping reality and dictating the lives of billions of people, compromising human relationships [53] and democracy [54]. Even when the bullshit is exposed, nothing happens to these companies so that they would be forced to change dramatically. Worse than that, now they want not only to maintain this logic, but also to normalize it so that it cannot even be discussed. We are allowing too much power to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of money, not a human project for society. Maybe it is time for us to stop for a while and ask ourselves who this frenzy is really serving.
