I took a tour of The Dump
Also: road tripping in a P2P rental car and the enshittification of streaming
Good day, fellow patriots. You haven’t fallen for the Helen Keller Scam, have you? Oh, you gullible snowflake.
First, just a little housekeeping. I’ve decided to make this an email-only newsletter, which means I’m unpublishing posts from the web after a few weeks. This also means I’m not going to link back to old posts. Ideally Substack would let posts be “unlisted,” but I guess the Nazi customers haven’t demanded that yet.
I’m doing this because I’m trying to keep Rangelife mostly unfiltered, but I’m also interviewing for jobs. While I’m not writing anything that should be objectionable to anyone I want to work with, I also have to think about the sensitivities of HR when they Google me. You get it.
Update from last week: My kid’s college admissions decisions are rolling in. She so far has racked up six decisions, with four accepts and two waitlists. (That’s a 4-0-2 record!) But the strength of schedule is about to increase for the last 10 schools, with five northeast-region toughies arriving tomorrow and Saturday. In the end, it’s not really about your final record, it’s about getting the one win you want most. (And then financial aid, my god this sucks.)
Since everyone who has a high school kid in their life has already seen surprising rejections or waitlists (“My sister’s friend’s kid got into Ivy A but waitlisted at State School B?”), everyone is already drawing conclusions based on anecdotal data points. Some of these conclusions are toxic. Everyone, please calm the f*** down.
This week:
Road trip in a P2P rental
A tour of the dump
The enshittification of streaming TV
Road Tripping in Someone’s Jeep
Well, I just got back from a 5-day solo Southern California road trip, with the priority purpose of visiting family I hadn’t seen since before pandemic (or “pandy,” as they call it in LA1).
It was my first solo road trip since I drove coast-to-coast from DC to Berkeley in 2000. That one went very poorly, as my car’s engine was destroyed in a flash flood in Merkel, Texas, which is a town so small that the people I met in nearby Abilene made fun of it. Try to appreciate the despair of getting towed to Abilene, and then the one guy in town who can fix a Volkswagen informs you that he thinks he can get a new engine in three or four weeks. So you live here now.
I assumed this 2024 road trip would be less eventful, but just to turn up the difficulty level, I rented a car from Getaround. This is an app that lets car owners rent out their vehicles when they’re not using them, which seems like a great idea because cars are parked, not driven, about 96% of the time. So Getaround is like Airbnb in that you’re driving some civilian’s regular car, and also like Airbnb because you’re throwing the dice each time.
Long story short, these dice came up craps. On day one, I had to reseal the windshield with duct tape, and on day two I learned that the ventilation system blew one temperature of air, hot. When I returned the vehicle, the owner complained that I hadn’t washed it. I complained that I had to drive 6 hours back from LA with the windows down.
But it was still a lovely, brief trip. On an impossibly beautiful morning in LA, I went for a mighty walk starting from Lincoln Heights, northeast of downtown. LA was famously built around its freeways, rather than vice versa. SNL did a whole recurring sketch concept in the ‘00s about how Angelenos constantly jabber about navigation tactics, a bit that landed perfectly for anyone who knew anyone from SoCal. I’d assumed Waze and Uber and the like had made that sketch a little less relevant, but that is not the case.
(Also, for those from outside California — yes, they called this sketch “The Californians,” but it’s deeply rooted in Southern California. The Bay Area version of that would be bragging about the strong cocktails from the bar on the Oakland Ferry.)
On that note, I actually used mass transit for the first time in LA, grabbing a bus back home from downtown. It was very convenient and comfortable! Ed Begley, I get it.
When you’re in SoCal, you’re also reminded that much of their traffic is fueled by local dinosaurs. Yes, California, the Clean Renewables State, also produces more than 120 million barrels of oil per year. It’s still striking to see roadside derricks and off-shore platforms looming not far from the beaches, stark reminders of the costs of this infrastructure we’re built for ourselves.
A Walk in the Dump
The truth is, most of us don’t really give a lot of thought to infrastructure. That’s good: it means it’s working. The year I first moved to California, players like Enron figured out how to game the state’s poorly-designed energy deregulation scheme, so chunks of the state lost electricity for hours at a time for no good reason. At the time, a relative of mine admitted that she didn’t know where electricity came from! (I tried to explain power plants and transmission without being a condescending dick. Never make fun of people when they have the courage to admit they don’t know something.)
A lot of our infrastructure is really just basic civic services. During the western megadrought, I started following our local water and sewage utility SF Water on socials, because they did a great job encouraging conservation, while being genuinely amusing and even funny.
And then one day they announced a public tour of one of SF’s two big sewage plants, so of course I took my whole family to see where our poop went. (Well, technically the poop from the eastern district, about 5 blocks away.) Everyone in my family seemed to learn a lot and have a good time, and then we chowed down at a BBQ stand in the Bayview.
But my kids are older and cooler now, and so nobody really wanted to join me on my tour of The Dump. (It’s not actually a dump — more on that later.) Once a month our local refuse processing company Recology does an open tour, and it sells out surprisingly quickly. About 20 fellow curious civilians and I got to see and smell what happens to the contents of our three bins (trash, recycling, compost), and also meet an artist who works out of the studio where they make stuff out of our trash.
Properly disposing of waste is a pillar of good citizenship, but it only became that way recently. Back when material goods were rare and expensive, people bought, owned, and disposed of less stuff. When something broke, they fixed it, and when they were through with it, they generally just dropped it wherever they liked. In America, it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that “litter” became an act to discourage, and it took decades for “don’t throw trash out your car window” to become a true social norm. (Season 1 of Mad Men, which takes place in 1962, includes an unsettling roadside family picnic that ends with Betty Draper unceremoniously scattering all their trash.)
San Francisco doesn’t even have a dump. It is a tiny peninsula where land is so valuable they actually dug up all the dead bodies and relocated them to the suburbs. So we have to ship all our trash to a landfill in a different metro area. To minimize that, our city’s contract with our waste management monopoly includes some of the most stringent recycling and composting requirements in the USA.
As a homeowner, my black trash bin is just large enough for one bag a week. It’s tiny! My green compost bin is twice the volume, and my blue recycling bin is another 2x the size. This system comes with a lot of rules. Food-stained paper goes in the compost, clean office paper in the recycling, but only if the paper is large enough. Hard plastics get recycled, soft plastics (like bags) get trashed, but you can recycle soft plastic if you bundle them up (like a bag of bags). Fabrics and textiles can be recycled, but only if bagged, but don’t bag your other recyclables. You can dispose of your batteries in a separate plastic bag on top of your trash can. Dog poop goes in the trash, not the compost. (I’d been doing that one wrong for years.) Paint cans, light bulbs, and other toxic waste items have to be brought to a disposal center.
This is a lot, and you’ll get it wrong sometimes. And so the coolest part on the tour is the system to separate waste types and remove contaminants. These subsystems include optical scanners, AI-driven robots, and dozens of human pickers. You can’t take photos in the recycling facility because they don’t want you to pull an “oops! dead influencer” and fall into the machines while you’re trying to get a selfie. But they do let you take photos where some of the other magic happens.
Seeing the waste stream in real time, and understanding the massive volume of waste that our consumption-driven civilization creates, gets one to thinking about what we own and why. Most of the environmental damage from the stuff you buy isn’t incorporated into the price you pay. The costs are borne by the people who use the land, air, and water, either somewhere in the world or maybe everywhere. A billion Betty Drapers scattering microplastics into all the world’s rivers.
It’s hard to understand that the nice sweater we ordered from H&M started as oil and agricultural products, but no matter how “sustainable” a product claims to be, it came from somwhere, probably lots of places. It behooves us to understand these industrial processes and infrastructure that support our society. After all, you can’t really throw anything away. It usually just goes somewhere else. There is no “away.”
Welcome to The Enshittocene
Last week, I also casually mentioned that TikTok is “enshittifying” into a bargain shopping platform, while just assuming that people knew this word and concept. It was clear from a few comments that not everyone does, which makes sense because it’s a word that’s only existed since 2022. (It was American Dialect Society’s 2023 Word of the Year.)
Briefly, “enshittification” is a term invented by the novelist Cory Doctorow to define the phenomenon of products becoming less and less useful as shareholders demand more revenue from them. Facebook was his prime example, as they’ve made a habit of reversing every product and privacy policy in pursuit of new revenue streams.
Most online companies aren’t Facebook, but almost all of them feel pressure to enshittify. First they introduce ads, then they introduce a premium tier, then they degrade the free experience, then they degrade everything. Eventually, they sell this hulking, shitty mess to a private equity firm that tasks its management team with doubling cash flow, who fire most of the employees and weigh it down with ever-more intrusive advertising and affiliate scams (a.k.a. “shit”). Then try to sell it off before it collapses entirely.
Enshittification also describes how companies break apart their services to try to sell them to you piecemeal. For example: you used to get a free hot meal on a long domestic flight, and now instead you can pay $12 for a box of snacks. “Choosing your seat” used to be a normal thing you did when you bought a fare, but now it’s a premium feature. This atomization of the service should benefit the consumer as well — if you’d rather pack your own sandwich or you don’t care where you sit, you should be able to pay less. But settling for less doesn’t ever actually reduce your cost, somehow. The airlines enshittify because they make more money per passenger-mile this way, not less.
If you’re an Amazon Prime Video subscriber, the app recently confronted you with a decision whether to pay an extra $2.99 a month, to not experience ad breaks during shows. It’s exactly the same service for an extra $36/year. If you don’t want to pay the extra $36, it’s more like old linear TV, with commercials you can’t skip. (At least on regular TV, you can flip channels for a couple minutes.)
Enshittification may even be invading your streaming through the content itself. Netflix is renowned for handing over creative decisions to “the algorithm.” They made tremendous advances in recommending what you the viewer should watch next, but in recent years they’ve also applied algorithms to what content they should produce, what they should renew, and how much they should budget for it. (HBO’s Barry brutally confronted this phenomenon in 2022.)
Netflix released a movie this week — a Lindsay Lohan vehicle called Irish Wish — that’s pulling 35% on Rotten Tomatoes. That score is actually surprisingly high, considering the savagery of some of the reviews, one of which suspects algo-fuckery: “Irish Wish Is a Crypto-Fascist, AI-Generated Harbinger of Doom.” You really should read Rachel Handler’s full review, but to summarize: this movie is so weirdly plotted and written that Handler suggests, convincingly, it was written by an LLM clumsily trained on Hallmark movies.
Enshittification is even coming for the hardware in your life. BMW recently lofted a (lead) trial balloon to “subscribe” to heated seats. Because your car is connected to the internet, literally everything can become premium if the manufacturer wants it to be. That means your wristwatch, your oven, your TV, your washing machine — all of these can have features enabled or disabled by their makers. Oh, you wanted to broil something? Subscribe to Samsung Oven+, free for 7 days, then $5.99/month or $49.99/year (BEST DEAL).
Doctorow calls this new economic epoch “the enshittocene,” as our products continue to degrade in durability (and then join the waste stream) but demand ever more MRR (monthly recurring revenue) to keep working. And we’ll pine for the days when our cars and dishwashers were simple machines, not tap-to-pay terminals.
Maybe it’s time for an appliance manufacturer called GOML (Get Off My Lawn). They’ll just make stuff like it was before WiFi, before enshittification. Quality manufacturing, high reliability, no optional features, no optional extended service contracts. It works for long enough to embarrass your grandkids that you’re still using it, and then the grandkids grow up and wish they could have had it so good.
Some Links for Dessert
Slorg is Sorry Slerf was Burnt: The ‘90s dotcom era made it okay for companies to have weird names like Yahoo!, and then they got weirder names like Flooz, and then after the dotcom winter they got weirder again like Github and Thoof. But the crypto world makes dotcom names look like a kindergarten phonics lesson: “An earlier version of this column incorrectly attributed these quotes to another panel participant who goes by the name Slorg, but who did not in fact burn Slerf. I apologize to Mr. Slorg.”
“I will not accept that this is a highly dangerous road.” You know exactly how this 1998 news clip from the UK will end, and yet it’s still so perfectly satisfying.
Zach Woods Old School Parenting: Just watch this. It has that funny guy from that show you like.
A good meta-explanation of the Shohei Ohtani gambling scandal.
probably not
Reddit well on its way to enshittification as well, which is dire news for anyone who wants to find any information on the internet. Since "Thing-I'm-looking-for +reddit" is one of the only possible ways to get decent search results that aren't just LLM generated SEO spam.