Big Tech is gaslighting us into waste

After being nudged to ditch yet another working device, I’ve had enough

Jean Kabasomi

Jean is a consultant working with financial and Christian organisations. She also writes and broadcasts.

A flat screen on a desk displays a colourful pattern.

BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash,

I wasn’t supposed to write this article. Actually, I was going to about a month ago. But I decided against it because I had a good experience with a Big Tech company, but today I changed mind. Let me start from the beginning.

Back in 2018, I bought a Samsung flatscreen TV for a flat I was renting in Southfields, if you don’t know South London well, that’s basically Wimbledon. I had just moved back to London. I remember I was excited about it because I hadn’t bought a TV for any of the other places I had lived in. I remember doing all the research. I wanted a Samsung because I am not an Apple person. I couldn’t afford the latest Samsung flatscreen, so I got a mid-range one. It was just as good as I thought it was going to be. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality for the price I paid.

When I moved back home during the pandemic, it became the kitchen TV and is still going strong. This Samsung TV is fantastic. The picture is crisp. If I am streaming a show in HD, it gets even better, noticeably better. Compared to the new, bigger TV, in the front room, it’s like night and day. Imagine my surprise when, some of the apps I regularly use on my good old kitchen TV stopped working. The TV works perfectly, but the apps no longer support my TV. In other words, Samsung and the app providers want me to buy a new TV when my TV is not broken. How can I throw away or upgrade a TV that isn’t broken?

Now you might be thinking it’s not necessarily a deep concern to hold. But this has happened to me before. My tablet, yup, another Samsung product, works perfectly well. It does what I want it to do. I bought it in 2020. I have no need, reason or desire to upgrade or buy another tablet. I was absolutely fine. That is until earlier this year, when Samsung rolled out a software update. My phone was updated automatically. The user interface changed, security is better and Gemini, Google’s version of ChatGPT, has been integrated into my search engine. The update was so transformative, that I questioned why my tablet also hadn’t updated automatically. I kept refreshing the updates screen, hoping it would come through, but nothing happened. So, as any self-respecting millennial would, I googled it.

What did I find? Samsung is no longer providing updates for my tablet. It is five years old, how does that even make sense? Again, I find myself with a working product, no scratches, no malfunctions, no problems whatsoever. A product I love but I am again being forced to eventually ‘throw it’ because Samsung have stopped providing software updates for it.

In sharp contrast to Samsung's sudden obsolescence in my life, I was left delighted after, yet another tech fail instead led to a positive outcome. Last month, the screen on my Fitbit suddenly stopped working. My steps and sleep were still being captured and recorded in the app, I just couldn’t see anything, including tell the time. As you would expect, I thought, ‘Here we go again, another Big Tech company forcing me to buy another product’. I had determined I wasn’t buying a new Fitbit. Instead, I decided I would contact Google. In the Fitbit app, you can get Google to call you back. So, I did and immediately, I found myself speaking to a lovely gentleman in San Francisco. Within five minutes, we concluded that there was a genuine fault. I sent my broken Fitbit off and two days later I received a refurbished replacement. After this experience, I felt okay again about Big Tech. I was in a good place, no need to write this article. Until today.

This afternoon, as I opened Microsoft Word. There was an announcement. From 14th October 2025, Microsoft will no longer support Office 2019. I am actually shaking my head in disappointment as I type this. Why is this a big deal? When I bought my PC in 2020, I made a deliberate choice to buy the packaged version of Microsoft Office and make a one-off payment. I did not want to entertain or engage in Microsoft’s attempt to turn a packaged good product, Office, into a subscription product Microsoft 365, to extract more money from me in the long run. But here I am again, being forced to do away with a perfectly good, working product by another Big Tech company all in the name of profit.

These things annoy me because I am being coerced into making choices that go against my value system. I would not describe myself as overtly climate conscious, but I am against waste. I do not subscribe to the idea of a culture that creates and fosters a society driven by consumerism at the behest of profit. Whilst Microsoft, isn’t asking me to throw away a physical product, its actions are causing me to think it is okay to do away with a perfectly decent product for no good reason. The only reason why Samsung and Microsoft are forcing me to change my working products, products that I am happy with is, so that they make more money. I am loyal to them. I have nowhere else to go. They provide a good service we have all encountered, the gradual, then sudden decline of our phone batteries around about the 18-month mark. Another example of unnecessary waste.

It all feels a little disheartening. We can no longer take these brands’ values at face value. Excellence and quality no longer mean superiority and long lasting. Instead, they mean ‘excellent until we release a new version next year when you ought to buy again or else we will stop supporting you’. No wonder we are all slightly suspicious of Big Tech, we don’t believe they represent what they say represent. We no longer trust that their ‘yes means yes and their no means no’.

Sadly, in politics the climate discussion has been reduced to a debate around the viability of achieving net-zero in x many years. But what would happen if we broadened out the conversation, and we looked a little bit deeper into the areas of genuine waste. Areas where our consumerist profit driven approach is forcing us to waste rather than steward the world’s limited resources. What would it look like if governments held corporations accountable for practices that force consumers to buy more than they need? Not to stifle innovation or growth but to stop waste. I don’t want to throw away my phone, tablet or TV but sadly Samsung is forcing me to. That just can’t be right.

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Politics

28 November 2024

4 min read

Here's why we need to keep democracy holy

It's much more than a utilitarian deal that benefits the most.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A sign reading 'polling station' stands by the entrance to a church.

Red Dot on Unsplash.

One of the more ludicrous constitutional contributions of late has been the parliamentary petition, with well past two million signatures when I last looked, demanding another general election be called, because the Labour government, elected in July, has “gone back on the promises they laid out in the lead-up to the last election.”

Prime minister Sir Keir Starmer has surprised precisely no one by saying that he won’t be calling one. And so we’ll move on. But, in passing, what is truly breathtaking is how little our democracy is understood and, apparently, how unseriously democracy in the west is now taken. If that sounds unduly censorious, I have a two-word response: Two million!

Little time need be spent on demolishing the premise of this spurious petition, other than to wonder how many of those signatories would have appeared on one calling for, say, a fresh mandate after the coalition government of David Cameron and Nick Clegg (where is he now? Ah yes) performed a massive reverse-ferret on a manifesto pledge not to raise university tuition fees.

Or how many of these same fearless electors believe the result of the Brexit referendum should be voided because of the lies of the Leave campaign, most notable the one painted on the side of Boris Johnson’s battle bus. But no – two million residual, self-righteous righties can only be mobilised against a Labour government.

This event none the less raises valid questions about what our democracy is (and is not) and why we should want to protect or even cherish it. These questions become the more critical because there’s a tangible feeling of slippage in western democracy, as if we’re growing a bit tired and even contemptuous of it.

There’s the ominous re-growth of nationalism across Europe. And not a few bien pensants – me included, to my shame – might admit to a feeling after Donald Trump’s re-election as US president that democracy is too important to be left to the people.

Slightly more seriously, we need to ask ourselves what the qualities of democracy are that we should seek to defend. The first of these is, quite obviously, the rule of law. Should a political actor seek to overthrow a democratically established electoral process, then that is a crime within the rule of law. Witness the horrors on Capitol Hill in Washington DC on January 6 2021.

That’s the Feast of the Epiphany as it happens, but nothing to do with the coming of wise men. With Trump at the centre of it. Draw your own democratic conclusions – and weep for the rule of law.

Natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence.

Again, why does this matter and what is it about democracy that we hold sacred, even holy? It can’t simply be that we hold dear a kind of hard utilitarian ideal that what we elect to do is for the benefit of most of the people, for most of the time, as decided by popular mandate among the demos.

If we believe in democracy, as I believe most of us do, we’re presented with a choice: We can look to secularism as a solution, universal Enlightenment principles built on citizenship and equality before the law. Or we can look to a multiculturist model, keeping the peace between essentially separate communities and the state.

Or we can shape something on Augustinian Christianity, that recognises the limits of political democracy, which would eschew undemocratic theocracy, but which would hold that no political order other than the Body of Christ (the Church) can claim divine authority.

We’re in classic Rowan Williams theological territory here: “[T]he Body of Christ is not a political order on the same level as others, competing for control, but a community that signifies, that points to a possible healed human world.”

Unsurprisingly, I buy that. Williams goes further to state this spiritual effect on the political environments in which we find ourselves is likely to be “sceptical and demystifying.” Which seems to be a reasonable manifesto in a democracy.

The principle of election can be a worrying one in theological terms. We don’t “elect” God, though some secularists would claim that the Godhead is our invention. Rather, it has sometimes been perceived to be the other way around historically.

Reformational Calvinism would hold, among many other things, the rather terrifying view that we’re elected by God. “The Elect” are those who will be saved, while the rest of us (I presume) can rot in hell. Little democracy there.

Less deterministically, a more modernist worldview would argue that the Christian faith, on which foundation western civilisation is built, offers a viable moral definition of the lawful state, with which politicians of all (democratic) persuasions can tackle issues of global justice.

One such issue of natural justice is to ensure that vexatious petitions don’t overthrow legally elected governments, either by lobby or violence. That’s an important aspect of Christian witness and will require true grit in in its application during the years ahead. That’s, if you will, our grit in the democratic oyster.