Overview

This episode of *99% Invisible* explores the concept of "enshittification," a term coined by writer and activist Cory Doctorow to describe the systematic decay of digital platforms and smart devices as companies prioritize profits over user experience. Host Roman Mars and producer Chris Berube trace this phenomenon from the frustrating smart thermostat in Roman's home to the existential threat it poses to farmers like Jared Wilson, whose $500,000 tractor can be rendered useless by a software glitch during the critical harvest window. The conversation moves from anger-inducing diagnosis to a cautiously hopeful look at the right-to-repair movement, blending dark humor with genuine outrage at how manufacturers have turned ownership into a conditional privilege.

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0:00The Smart Device Trap

The episode opens with Roman Mars and producer Chris Berube establishing a shared frustration: the creeping digitization of everyday objects has made them less reliable, not more. Roman describes his smart thermostat, which came with his house and routinely disconnects from the heating system, leaving him unable to turn on heat during the few cold days in the Bay Area. He longs for a simple analog Honeywell thermostat—a brass dial that just works. Chris notes that this complaint is nearly universal: smart fridges, smart locks, and smart appliances all promise convenience but often deliver frustration.

The conversation quickly escalates from annoyance to something more serious. Chris argues that this phenomenon isn't just inconvenient—it's actively harmful. To make his point, he pivots to tractors, a subject he admits he knows little about as a self-described "city kid." But what he learned from speaking with farmers reveals a systemic problem: modern tractors are essentially computers on wheels, and when the software fails, the consequences are catastrophic.

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4:04The Farmer's Nightmare: Software-Locked Tractors

Chris introduces Jared Wilson, a seventh-generation farmer in Missouri who runs a family farm. Jared explains that in the 1990s, tractors were mostly mechanical—fuel pumps, linkages, and parts you could touch and fix. Today, everything is controlled by electronic control units and software. This digitization has benefits: autosteer, for example, allows a tractor to drive itself in straight lines across a field, which is a godsend during 20-hour workdays.

But the downsides are severe. When a sensor fails or an emissions system malfunctions, the tractor's software initiates a "derate"—it deliberately slows the engine's horsepower to the point of uselessness. The machine gives an error code, but that code rarely tells the farmer what's actually wrong. To diagnose the problem, Jared needs an external piece of software that only authorized technicians have. Calling a dealership means waiting a day or two for a technician to arrive, and during the growing season, that delay can be ruinous.

Jared describes standing in his soybean field during a dry year, hearing the pods open and the beans hit the ground. "There's no way to reclaim those once they fall on the ground," he says. "That's just lost revenue. That's just gone." In 2023, the Public Interest Research Group estimated that such repair delays cost American farmers about $3 billion. For Jared, the cost of these software-driven failures has "eliminated a lot of the margin potential" from his operation, effectively transferring profits from farmers back to manufacturers.

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10:29Cory Doctorow and the Theory of Enshittification

Chris introduces Cory Doctorow, a novelist, activist, and journalist who has popularized the term "enshittification." Doctorow describes it as a three-stage process of platform decay. First, a platform—whether Facebook, Amazon, or a smart device manufacturer—is good to its end users. It builds a community, offers value, and locks users in by making it hard to leave. Second, once users are trapped, the platform shifts its focus to serving business customers—advertisers, sellers, or third parties—at the expense of users. Third, the platform extracts maximum value for shareholders and executives while the user experience deteriorates into a "pile of shit."

Doctorow illustrates this with Facebook: you join a niche group (say, 1980s baseball cards), build friendships, and accumulate years of conversations. But Facebook buys up competitors and makes it difficult to export your group elsewhere. Once you're locked in, the platform floods your feed with spammy ads, sells your data, and prioritizes advertisers over your experience. The same logic applies to physical devices: a smart tractor, a printer, or an iPhone all use software to lock you into the manufacturer's ecosystem, then extract money through repairs, replacement parts, and planned obsolescence.

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12:43From Cyberspace to Everything: The Digitization of Reality

Chris and Roman discuss how the digitization of everyday objects has accelerated. Chris cites a 2023 survey finding that the average American household has about 21 connected devices—smartphones, smart thermostats, smart fridges, and more. Roman estimates he has around 20, and he's already thinking about which ones he wishes he could eliminate.

Doctorow references William Gibson, the science fiction writer who coined "cyberspace." Gibson observed that "cyberspace is everting"—turning inside out. The digital world is no longer confined to screens; it has infected physical objects, making everything a computer in a fancy case. This gives manufacturers enormous leverage. They can lock users in by making it impossible to repair devices without going back to the manufacturer, and they can charge exorbitant prices for parts and service.

The tractor example is the tip of the iceberg. Doctorow points to printers, where companies like HP and Epson block third-party ink cartridges, forcing consumers to pay thousands of dollars per gallon for ink. "It costs more to print your grocery list than it would if you printed it with the semen of a Kentucky Derby winning stallion," Doctorow says, in a characteristically vivid analogy. (Roman later notes that this is an exaggeration—but not by much; printer ink really does cost thousands of dollars per gallon.)

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15:30Parts Pairing and the Loss of Interoperability

Chris introduces the concept of "parts pairing," a practice where manufacturers design software to reject any replacement part that isn't officially approved. This is a form of what Doctorow calls "interoperability"—the ability of two things to work together. In the analog world, if you need a new shoelace, any lace of the right size will fit. In the digital world, manufacturers can lock out generic parts, forcing consumers to buy from them at inflated prices.

Jared Wilson describes how this plays out on his farm. In the past, if a tractor needed a replacement part, he could go to Leland Diem's dealership down the road—a local business owned by someone he knew. If he wasn't happy there, he could go to another dealership or an independent repair shop. Today, independent mechanics often lack the tools to work on John Deere tractors because John Deere charges $6,000 for the diagnostic software. Jared's independent mechanic told him he simply couldn't afford it.

The result is a monopoly on repair. Farmers still fix their tractors—they buy the part, install it, and do the mechanical work—but the tractor won't run until a John Deere technician shows up, pays the $200 service call, and types an unlock code into the keyboard. "It doesn't work until you get a service call and pay $200 for someone to show up and type the unlock code into your tractor's keyboard," Chris summarizes.

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19:21The Apple Example and the Shredding of Trade-Ins

The episode extends the argument to consumer electronics, particularly iPhones. Apple has long been criticized for making it difficult to repair its devices with third-party parts. Chris cites a 2019 letter from Tim Cook to investors, in which Cook identified the biggest risk to Apple's business: "that our customers repair phones instead of buying new ones." Apple, uniquely among manufacturers, sends traded-in phones to be shredded so that parts cannot be harvested for repairs.

Roman's anger, which he rated a 6 at the start of the episode, climbs to a 9. He's ready to rip his smart thermostat out of the wall and replace it with an old-fashioned analog dial. Chris promises to bring his anger level down by discussing the people fighting back.

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24:42Fighting Back: The Gray Market and Jailbreaking

Chris outlines two approaches to resisting enshittification: the "dodgy, questionable" path and the law-abiding path. Roman chooses the dodgy path first. Chris explains that people are increasingly hacking the software in their devices—a practice called "jailbreaking" for Apple products, but applied to everything from tractors to printers. Jared Wilson has seen independent repair people using laptops from China loaded with cracked John Deere software.

But this approach has risks. Jared has never used such software because he wants to follow the rules and because he doesn't know what the hacked software might do to his expensive machinery. If something goes wrong, he can't call John Deere for help. And as Cory Doctorow notes, this kind of hacking is often illegal, thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998.

The DMCA was originally designed to prevent DVD ripping and music piracy. Section 1201 makes it a felony—punishable by five years in prison and a $500,000 fine—to tamper with or even discuss weaknesses in a "digital lock." This law, intended for MP3 sharing, is now applied to tractors, printers, and smartphones. Roman is incensed: "There should be a prison sentence for passing that law."

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28:26The Right to Repair Movement

The law-abiding path is the right-to-repair movement, led by Gay Gordon-Byrne, head of the Repair Association. Gordon-Byrne argues that if you truly own something, you should be able to fix it. She grew up fixing TVs and refrigerators with her dad, and she's frustrated that most products today cannot be repaired without total dependence on the manufacturer. "This is a completely artificial problem," she says.

The movement has gained significant traction. In 2024, the European Union passed a directive requiring every member state to have a right-to-repair law by summer 2026, covering household appliances, washing machines, and smartphones. In the United States, Colorado passed a law in 2023 giving farmers the right to repair their equipment. Oregon passed a law covering electronics and powered wheelchairs—a critical issue for wheelchair users who face a small market and high repair costs. Several other states, including Texas, have passed laws about fixing phones and laptops.

A national right-to-repair bill for cars is under consideration in the House of Representatives, sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats. Chris notes that it's "very hard to be on the wrong side of repair"—no politician wants to argue that you shouldn't be allowed to fix your own stuff.

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32:28Corporate Responses and Lingering Caveats

In response to the right-to-repair push, some companies have started offering repair tools preemptively. John Deere, for example, has released software that allows farmers to decode error messages and, as of this year, even override a derate in some cases. Apple told the show that it supports third-party replacement parts except where security concerns exist, and that it has expanded access to repair tools and offers a recycling take-back program.

But Jared Wilson remains skeptical. He's concerned about how John Deere's repair software collects his harvesting data, and he's been part of a class-action lawsuit against the company alleging an unfair monopoly on repair tools. (As the episode notes in a postscript, John Deere agreed to pay $99 million to settle that lawsuit in 2026.) Chris points out that many right-to-repair laws don't outlaw parts pairing, meaning consumers are still locked into the manufacturer's ecosystem even if they can fix their own devices.

Cory Doctorow argues for more radical solutions. He suggests that countries like Canada and Mexico, currently in a trade war with the US, could manufacture generic replacement parts that bypass digital locks and export them worldwide. "We could have third-party ink manufacturing," he says. "If we don't do it, someone else will." Roman loves the idea of turning Canada into a "lawless land of jailbreaking," but acknowledges it's a long shot.

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36:04Conclusion

The episode ends with a sobering reflection: the enshittification of everyday objects is not just an annoyance—it's an economic and environmental crisis. Farmers lose billions of dollars in downtime. Wheelchair users face exorbitant repair costs. Consumers throw away perfectly functional devices because they can't be fixed. The right-to-repair movement offers hope, but it's not a magic bullet. As Chris puts it, "It doesn't benefit us, the citizen, to have stuff that we buy that we can't fix when it breaks. It's not good economically, it's not good environmentally."

What stays with the listener is the image of Jared Wilson standing in his field, hearing his soybeans hit the ground while he waits for a technician to unlock his tractor. That image—of a farmer rendered helpless by software—captures the absurdity and cruelty of enshittification. The episode matters because it names a phenomenon we all experience but struggle to articulate, and it points to a movement that is quietly, stubbornly fighting back.

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Key takeaways

• Enshittification is a three-stage process: platforms are good to users to lock them in, then shift value to business customers, then extract everything for shareholders while the user experience collapses.
• Modern tractors are computers on wheels; software failures can trigger a "derate" that renders the tractor unusable, costing farmers billions in lost harvest time.
• Parts pairing is a practice where manufacturers use software to reject third-party replacement parts, forcing consumers to buy from the manufacturer at inflated prices.
• The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, originally designed to prevent music piracy, now makes it a felony to break digital locks on tractors, printers, and phones.
• The right-to-repair movement has achieved significant wins: the EU will require member states to pass repair laws by summer 2026, and several US states have passed laws covering farmers, wheelchair users, and electronics.
• John Deere settled a class-action lawsuit for $99 million in 2026, and has released repair software that allows farmers to override derates in some cases.
• Cory Doctorow proposes radical solutions, including having countries like Canada manufacture generic parts that bypass digital locks and export them worldwide.