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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Justice

Redemption

15 May 2025

4 min read

The case of Peter Sullivan proves once and for all why we shouldn’t bring back the death penalty

It’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done - it’s all of us.

George Pitcher

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

A court sits, with judges raised above the others.

The Court of Appeal.

Judiciary.uk.

The quashing of the conviction this week of Peter Sullivan, who served 38 years in jail for a murder he did not commit – along with the release in 2023 of Andrew Malkinson, cleared of rape after 17 years inside – are deeply shameful. They are revolting stains not only on our judiciary, but on all those who politically invigilate it and on the rest of us who elect them. We should all be deeply ashamed.

As we peep through our fingers at these terrible travesties of justice and the lives that have needlessly been wrecked, it’s natural to ask what we do next. In the absence of time travel, we can hardly make it up to Messrs Sullivan and Malkinson.

But we can grapple with what they mean to us for the immediate future. Probably the first and easist thing to say is – if I may not so much mix a metaphor as summarily execute it – that they should hammer legislatively the final nail in the coffin of the death penalty.

Sullivan would doubtless have swung for the murder of florist Diane Sindall in 1986 that he did not commit, if execution by hanging (or by other means) had not been abolished in 1965. True, rape hasn’t been a capital offence since 1841, when the penalty became transportation (which was almost as irreversible as death).

But Malkinson’s case rather makes the point: The very fact that he was still incarcerated meant that he could be released. Let’s take a case in which no such remedy was available – Derek Bentley, say, who was hanged in 1953 for allegedly abetting the murder of a police officer and exonerated, a trifle late, in 1998.

The arguments of thornproof and white-knuckled proponents of the death penalty may be as swiftly dispatched as they would wish such innocent victims to be. They were probably “wrong ‘uns” anyway. Their sacrifice would have discouraged others from committing heinous crimes. The taxpayer shouldn’t have to pay for their decades in the slammer. Well, pah. Try telling any of that to the Sullivan family.

But these are not, to my mind, the biggest issues and, enormous as they are, that must make the biggest pretty gargantuan. I wish to address the business of redemption.

But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

Now, when I mention this word to those holding the pitchforks, prodding people they despise towards the scaffold, they usually assume I’ve come over all pious and priestly. And I suppose I have. But they invariably misunderstand what we mean by redemption.

The assumption is that the victim of the miscarriage of justice can be redeemed if they are still alive. Their life is in some way redeemed from suffering. That’s true, so far as it goes, but it’s not really what we should mean by redemption in these circumstances.

The Latin root of the word refers to the buying back, or the paying of the ransom, of a slave to enable his or her freedom. The ancient scriptural usage of the word relates often to the saving actions of the Hebrews’ God, in redeeming his people from slavery in Egypt, and to the Christian culmination of that redeeming work at the cross (totally uncoincidentally, both events are commemorated at the Jewish Passover, that first divine covenant being, in Christianity, fulfilled in the second).

The debate down the ages has substantially concentrated on to whom the ransom of that latter redemption was paid. For some, it was paid to a vengeful and wrathful God, for others to a somewhat gullible Satan, who took the bait of pay-off. Either way, a debt was paid which released humanity from bondage and slavery.

The theology of this can only be satisfactory to a proportion of people who read it, whether believers or not. The important matter is to whom the act of redemption is of value. A slave who died building a pyramid for a pharaoh doesn’t seem to have been redeemed in any more meaningful sense than the young Bentley being pardoned 45 years after he was hanged. Exoneration isn’t redemption.

In the Christian tradition, it’s significant that the compilers of the gospels and the books thereafter develop less the idea of ransom to explain the cross, than the idea of deliverance from bondage that was its result.

And there the answer, rather than the victims, hangs before us. We can’t redeem the injustice of the past, anymore than we can give Sullivan and Malkinson back their lost years. But we can ransom the present to redeem our future.

To those who claim that murderers and rapists “get off” because of “loopholes” in the law, we say there are no loopholes, only the law. And we’re all enriched when we get the law right. So, ultimately, it’s not the wrongly convicted who are redeemed when justice is done and they’re finally released. It’s all of us.