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        The first rule of home printers is that you don’t need a printer until you need it, and then you desperately need it. The second rule is that when you plug in a printer, it will either work flawlessly for ten years or fail immediately, often in new and even spectacular ways, with the result that the purchase will haunt you like a genie. The history of printer dysfunctions is so rich that their failures became clichés in the early days of personal computers.
        After years of persistence, my family finally gave in to buying inkjet printers because of the pandemic. (Like many others, we did a lot of online shopping in 2020, which meant a lot of return labels.) I’m prepared for the pain of paper jams, phantom spooler errors, and the dreaded “couldn’t find driver”. However, what I didn’t expect was that my printer would crush me like a pawnbroker.
        The problems started with the label on the package. My printer is not responding. I then found an error message on my computer that said the company had remotely disabled my HP OfficeJet Pro. When I went to the HP website, I found out the reason: The credit card I used to sign up for the HP Instant Ink refill program had expired and the company responded effectively to my device.
        For those not in the devil’s trade, Instant Ink is a monthly subscription plan designed to keep track of printer usage and ink levels, and automatically send out new cartridges when ink runs out. The name is misleading because the monthly fee is not for ink, but for the number of pages printed. (Recommended family plan is $5.99 per month for 100 pages.) Like everyone else, I rushed to set up the printer to sign up with little awareness of what I was buying. Delivering ink when I need it sounds convenient to me, someone so spoiled for one-click e-commerce that my frontal lobe is like cheese. There is a monthly fee with or without printing, and ink cartridges take up limited space. You own them, but you essentially rent them and your car when you enroll in the program.
        In subsequent conversations with friends and family, I struggled to fully express the level and intensity of the anger I felt when I realized all this. Here is a technique I bought for over $200 with full cartridges. Lying lightly on my desk, my printer worked fine, but it was broken by HP, a $28 billion technology company at the time of writing, because I didn’t plan to pay a monthly maintenance fee. Provide new cartridges for printers that I don’t have yet. no need. I was distressed and made creepy, frustrated noises that I now understand were Varzel’s genetic response to printer problems, and I didn’t tell anyone that I was being blackmailed by my printer.
        I am ashamed to express this dissatisfaction aloud, otherwise it will be perceived as an abuse of my respectable position. I am a reasonably sane adult and able to read contracts: I do it myself. But my printer’s downtime is just one example of how digital subscriptions have become so entrenched in physical technology that the boundaries of ownership are blurring. Even if I pay, can I really say I own my printer if HP can flip the switch and make it stop?
        “What HP is doing is terrible and very hostile to users,” author and activist Corey Doctorow told me recently. Doctorow has written extensively on digital rights management for various brands of printers. To him, mundane printer issues like mine help people understand digital rights and how companies build devices that can’t be modified by the user. “The fight for the soul of digital freedom [is] inside your printer,” he argued. It’s not just about surveillance, excessive ink markups and attempts to keep third parties from disrupting the inkjet cartridge market, he says. It’s about how consumers lose control of what they’ve already paid for.
        One of his favorite examples is when Google turned a bunch of sensors into bricks after shutting down an acquired service. Then there is Tesla, which frequently releases software updates to owners’ vehicles, sometimes significantly changing the functionality of the vehicle. In 2017, as Hurricane Irma threatened Florida, the company released an update that temporarily extended battery life for vehicle owners within range of the hurricane. Tesla was praised at the time, but people like Doctorow saw the event as an example of how energy companies are working on customers – the automaker simply lifted arbitrary software restrictions on physical batteries, otherwise that physical battery would have been used to create two different price points. for auto. consumer. “The app stores that power our devices are convenient, subscriptions work great when you have a benevolent dictator, but what happens if they decide to pressure you or raise prices and your machine stops working?” – he said. “Then you can’t do anything.”
        I can report that there are people on every corner of the information superhighway who are crazy about HP Instant Ink. Together, our online complaints form a complex harmony of resentment—the hallelujah of complaints. There are tragic stories on the HP customer support site, Reddit and Twitter threads. A pending California class-action lawsuit alleges that the Instant Ink program had “serious problems” due to its inability to deliver new ink cartridges on time or to allow registered users to use cartridges purchased outside the subscription service, which often prevents consumers from printing. HP spokesman Parker Truax told me, “Instant Ink cartridges will continue to work until [the customer cancels] the end of the current billing cycle. Standard or XL cartridges.
        These problems may go beyond artificial limits. Skip Weissman, who has his own consulting firm in Poughkeepsie, New York, told me that HP Instant Ink would not stop sending him inkjet cartridges. With more than a year’s supply, Weisman canceled the subscription. “It’s called Instant Ink – no one told me that if I refused, all the cartridges would stop working,” he said. But they did. “It seems so manipulative. I think this is our future, where your printer’s ink is watching you. It’s dark.”
        While it is often called a scam by frustrated customers, Instant Ink itself is not a scam. This is just an aggressive business model that is hostile to the user. Doctorow says HP is following in the footsteps of casinos and razor makers offering deals (free hotel rooms and cheap razors) to get better financial deals whenever consumers want. Printer ink is expensive because the ink itself is expensive, and because expensive cartridges help companies recoup the money they lose by selling cheap equipment. “Think of the upfront price on the printer as more of an upfront payment,” one printer expert told Consumer Reports in 2018. Companies have been selling machines at discount prices for years, but programs like Instant Ink, which use cartridges to control technology—and turn off the machine—seemed to be a particularly predatory move.
        Even if you haven’t been trapped in Ink Hell, the story’s template should feel uncomfortably familiar. Most people are bound by walled gardens and the restrictions imposed by digital rights management practices. If you’ve ever had trouble accessing a movie, book, or song you bought from Apple or Amazon, you know the feeling. Or maybe you’re a gamer who has long been frustrated with single-player games that require internet. It’s not just that people miss the days of CDs, DVDs, and static updates – many of the conveniences promised by our internet-connected tools have had a secondary effect, taking away small parts of our agency and leaving us with a lot of beneficiaries. looking for a big profit company.
        Philadelphia writer Josh Krueger, also involved in a dysfunctional relationship with Instant Ink, cites the program as evidence that we “live on a shitty internet” and have fallen into the subscription trap. Like me, Krueger is ashamed of his outrage but feels betrayed by the printer, which he actually only rents. “I paid for the car and it annoys me that this company can keep telling me what I can do with it,” Krueger told me. “As a stupid American who owns this device, I should be able to print this thing using blueberry juice if I wanted to.”
        My personal circus of rage revolves around the printer—the very unattractive machine many people use for mundane life tasks like printing out passport forms or shipping labels—with the extra twist of a knife. But this is precisely the second-order problem that people ignore. Like me, they paid little attention to the registration process and, like Weissman and Krueger, continued to pay, feeling cheated because it was easier than other options. The feeling of such flagrant exploitation is cause for indignation and cause for complacency. As modern as the performance is, the feeling of helplessness in front of a large corporation is timeless – so much so that many of us just have to live with it.
        “All my life my printer has been broken,” Krueger said. “So it’s only fitting that the first one that didn’t break also decided to take me hostage.”