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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Economics

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26 November 2024

4 min read

Black Friday: don’t shop, try stewarding instead

We're so fallible to consumer culture. Here's how to counter it.

Rosie Phillips

Rosie studies theology in Oxford and is currently training to be a vicar.

A phone screen is held up, showing a shopping page, behind a window displays a Black Friday Sale banner.

CardMapr.nl on Unsplash.

Have you noticed how many times in the last 24 hours you’ve been targeted or tempted by a Black Friday marketing campaign?

It’s estimated that we can see anywhere from 50 to 400 adverts per day - on TV, billboards, online, and, more than ever, through social media. I’ve never felt more seen and known by the Instagram algorithm, and many of us have experienced items popping up on our feeds which we were talking about with friends only hours before. Is it possible to resist such incessant and elaborate marketing schemes?

In the lead up to Black Friday this year, I’ve been looking out for a new vacuum cleaner (the rock-and-roll life of a thirty-something year-old). Having done all the research, I’m now poised to cash in on the discounts, regularly refreshing my Argos and Amazon tabs for the latest prices.

But, as I’ve been comparing the relative pros and cons of cordless versus cylinder vacuums (and marvelling at the development of anti-hair wrap technology), it’s been difficult not to have my interest piqued by various other products being put under my nose by these websites, too.

And difficult not to feel like, if I don’t act quickly, I’m going to miss out on an offer that’ll not come around again. It’s almost as if these marketing executives know how my brain is going work - even before I go online. But are we humans really as transparent as that?

Netflix’s new documentary, Buy Now? The Shopping Conspiracy, says that we are. It profiles several ex-insiders from the world’s biggest brands, who expose the manipulative tricks used by these corporations to make us buy more, and the extent to which our desire for endless consumption has been cultivated and capitalised on by design.

It seems that we humans, evolved and intelligent as we like to believe ourselves, are still fallible to serve the things which were designed to serve us. And the consequences are far-reaching. Online shopping may have dehumanised the consumer experience, but we remain connected to people around the world by global supply chains, and it is individuals and communities whose livelihoods are most dependent on the availability and quality of natural resources, and who live closest to the land, who reap the harmful effects of our incessant buying habits.

Hazardous e-waste, for example (including discarded laptops, phones, and TVs), is rising by millions of tonnes annually. The UK is a particularly bad offender for illegally exporting toxic e-waste around the world, dumping it in landfills where it releases toxic substances such as mercury, zinc, and lead into local water and soil supplies.

Back here in the UK, we can feel like such small cogs in such a huge, capitalist machine, that a lot of this seems beyond the realms of our human agency.

There is certainly value in being savvy with our spending power as consumers. In doing the research to get the best Black Friday deals, as we tighten the purse strings and navigate what has become a protracted and painful cost of living crisis for many. It can be hard for Christmas not to feel like an unavoidably expensive time of year.

But, perhaps there is also an opportunity to take small, subversive acts of resistance against this dehumanising consumer culture. Actions which reclaim our humanity and human agency, and which recognise our global interconnectedness.

For example, maybe you could resist the urge to impulse buy something this weekend, by stepping away from the screen to make a cup of tea or go for a walk outside, before clicking ‘Pay Now’.

Perhaps we could get better at comparing companies’ supply chains and ethical brand ratings, using our spending power to support those which align best with our values.

And, when we’re making a purchase, let’s take a moment to be grateful for the things we already have, the items we’re buying, and the people who made them.

The Christian faith invites us to reframe how we see our money and belongings through the lens of stewardship. It’s an underrated principle in today’s context. Stewardship goes beyond just thinking about how we spend our income, to the inherent responsibility we have as humans to look after the world around us, recognising that the earth’s resources are not ones we are entitled to, but are gifts which sustain life.

The principle of stewardship makes it impossible to hide behind a screen and to ignore the impact which our spending decisions have on people and communities around the world, however far removed from our lives they seem. It invites us to use our money and resources to invest in things which will serve us - and others - well, and tells the world that it matters that we challenge systems which perpetuate economic and environmental injustice.

And, if I happen to miss out on that vacuum cleaner while I’m out for a walk this weekend, at least it’s less than a month until the Boxing Day sales hit our screens.