Enshittification

Today's episode includes a curse word that we are leaving unbleeped.

You'll understand why, as you're listening, using that word is kind of the point of the whole show. So you've been warned. Enjoy. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. And I'm here today with producer Chris Barube. Hey, Chris.

“Hey, Roman. So, Chris, what do you have for us today?”

Okay, today I want to talk to you about a subject that I think is going to make you really mad. Okay, well, I have a pretty high baseline of mad right now, but I'm going to let you go ahead. Yeah, I feel like right now most people I talk to have like a relatively high baseline of anger. So, where would you say you are today, though? I think I'm having a pretty good day. Let's put a set of four.

Okay, let's see how high we can get you by the end of this.

So this is my experiment today. I want to see how high we can get you on the anger scale from one to ten. Okay, that sounds like a plan. So, so what's the story that's going to make me so mad? Okay, so Roman, I want you to think about smart devices. Okay, okay, I think you're on the right track. Okay, to make me mad, go ahead. Yeah, so let's just start. Think about all the devices that you own that used to be mostly analog

“today. They are now digital in some way. So, can you think of some examples in your life?”

Well, I can think of one very obvious example that drives me crazy. I have a smart thermostat in my house. It came with the house. I did not install it. And I live in the Bay Area. So, I don't need heat a lot. But every time I need to turn it on, which is like a few times a year, the smart thermostat is like disconnected from the heater. And for some reason, unknown reason, I cannot make sense of it. And all I want is just an old-fashioned brass round,

Honeywell thermostat, old-fashioned analog thermostat that I can just turn on and set it to a temperature and turn it off when I don't need it. Instead of this other thing that drives me absolutely crazy. So, Roman, this is a pretty common complaint what you're saying, right? We all have these devices that have some kind of a smart component. They're supposed to make things convenient in our lives. But in fact, they are making things really frustrating. Like, why does my fridge need to be smart

and talk to me, right? Today, though, we're going to talk about how this phenomenon can be more than just annoying for a lot of people. Because there are times when the digitization of pretty much everything is actively making people's lives worse. And so to demonstrate this point, I want to talk to you about the design of tractors. Okay. Well, I mean, you strike me as a city kid Chris. So, like, what do you know about tractors? Very little. If I'm being honest,

I know there is a company called John Deer that makes tractors and they have green hats. I assume there was probably a guy named John Deer at some point in the past. You had to assume. Not too much else, but I learned quite a bit for this story. So, there's one thing that's been vexing farmers that really surprised me. And that is the software in their tractors. So, like a lot of things, modern tractors are now run by a computer operating system.

And one of the farmers who's not happy with the software in his tractor is a guy I spoke to for this story, a farmer in Missouri named Jared Wilson. On my lineage, I'm at least a seventh generation farmer on my father's side. So, we've been doing this for a while. So, Jared runs a family farm. You know, he's deep in the trenches of this world. And he told me something I did not really know about farming equipment, tractors, harvesters, spring machines. You know, all of these

vehicles that are critical to farming. Today, for the most part, they are run by computers.

You know, in the 90s, we didn't have a lot of electronic control units on these machines. Mechanical fuel pumps, everything was mechanical. So, you touch something and it has linkage and it's controlling something mechanical. And now in these machines, when you touch something, everything is electric over some system, electric over hydraulic, if you will, electric over engine controls. And that means that they're software that you are dealing with.

I am sure if you're a farmer, this is all incredibly obvious stuff. But, you know, this was a surprise to me. Like, it's the same thing with a lot of cars now, where functions that used to be mechanical, they are now all run by an operating system. And my car gives me a driving score, for example, which is very, very annoying. But, for the most part, Jared told me this digitization of the tractor, it's a really positive thing. Like, in lots of ways, these controls

“make his job a lot easier. One of the simplest things that comes to mind is a lot of steer, right?”

These tractors, we can create lines in the field and they'll drive themselves. And when you're on a machine for 20 hours and you don't have to steer it, you're in a lot better shape when you get off of it than you are hand driving the machine. Yeah, I mean, that sounds completely arduous to to be a driver for 20 hours in something, we have to pay attention every moment of those 20 hours. But, anticipating here that there are some negative aspects to this thing. Yes, there are some

drawbacks. So, Jared told me, if there's a problem with the tractor, sometimes the software will

emission system, if you have a sensor for instance that has failed or malfunctioned, it won't perform the necessary emissions operations to satisfy the system and it will do something called

a deraind of the machine. So, a deraiding, this is when the software basically makes the tractor

unusable. Like, it slows down the horsepower so much, you cannot use the tractor to do far. That sounds so incredibly annoying. But, I would assume that this software, you know, was doing this for some kind of good reason, like for a safety reason. Right, so there could be safety reasons for doing this or smaller issues like a sensor isn't working on the tractor and Jared gave me this example from his life where he had a problem with the tractor and the operating system slowed

it down, but it didn't tell him what was wrong. You know, the terminals inside of the machine might give you an error code, but very rarely does that error code actually tell you what's wrong.

“You have to have an external piece of software to plug into the machine to figure it out.”

So when this happened to Jared, he was faced with a choice, right? He can either spend a lot of

time trying to figure out the problem, you know, waste a day doing that or he could do them much easier thing, which was called out a technician. But according to Jared, that's also kind of a pain. So I was forced to call the dealership out. They came out and replaced, I think one of the delta pressure sensors and that didn't end up fixing the problem, but the logistics of that mean that the technician comes out, you may have to wait a day or two before there's a technician available.

And losing a couple of days during the growing season, that's a total disaster because Jared told me, losing a day can cost him a ton of money. The soybeans, we'd had a dry ear and you could stand in the field and you could hear the pods opening and the soybeans hitting the ground. So you can imagine how stick to your stomach that makes you. There's no way to reclaim those once they fall on the ground. They're just, that's just lost revenue that's just gone. And it's difficult to convey

how frustrating that is when you're sitting on your hands and your crop is literally falling on the ground. And you don't have the ability to do anything about it. Jared didn't have a guess about how much these kinds of delays have cost him. But in 2023, the public interest research group, so they're at this advocacy group. They estimated downtime for farmers caused by these repair delays cost them about $3 billion that year. And this is at a time when farmers are facing all sorts of

“challenges like unpredictable weather, terrorists. And then on top of that, you have to figure out”

these software problems. So the stakes are really, really high for somebody like Jared.

The reality is that the costs of these things have eliminated a lot of the margin potential

that comes from the savings because we're just passing it back out to the manufacturer. So Roman, with this in mind, where are you at on the anger scale? No, with six, this is how any more more like the plight of every modern consumer or user of modern devices, like it's really, really inferiority. Yeah, like if you own a car, if you own a cell phone, if you own a printer, right? You kind of have the same problems. And frankly, the software is making all of these things

if you will pardon my language, shitty or for us as consumers. Because basically with the software, often you cannot fix them unless you go back to the manufacturer. And I started getting interested in this whole subject because of one of my favorite writers. Hi, I'm Corey Doctoro. I'm a novelist and activist and a journalist. So listeners at the show, maybe aware of Corey's work. You know, he's a sci-fi writer. And hey, here is a fun fact about Corey Doctoro. We can reveal perhaps

that you and I are like all the best Americans Canadian. You had the squeeze it in there. Roman, we are everywhere. So anyway, lately, Corey's been out there popularizing this one big idea that he's had. So it's a word that he coined that seems to be capturing a lot of what's going wrong in modern

“society right now. And that word is in shidification. Roman, have you heard the word in shidification?”

I have. I'm also a big fan of Corey Doctoro. And what I know of it is that this is the idea that you kind of everything on the internet is getting worse. Yeah, so that's a part of it. And there's actually a little bit more to it than that. It's a way to talk about platform collapse platform decay. It describes this three stage process where you have platforms that start off being good to their end users. But are also finding way to lock those end users in. And then having lock them in, it makes things

worse for them in order to make things better for business customers. So let's just lay this out with an example. You're on Facebook. You are a part of a Facebook group that likes something very, very

Someone might have, right? I'm not saying that is me. Someone has this hobby, though. The first

step is Facebook sets up the infrastructure for you to meet lots of new people, right? So you're finding other fans of 80 spaceball cards. You're all becoming friends. You're building up this community.

“But then you cannot leave. Like, maybe the platform is buying up all the competition, right?”

So there's nowhere else to go. Or they make it hard to transport your group somewhere else. And maybe, like, people don't want to leave because you have years of throwing 80s baseball card conversation built up. And then you get stuck, right? So if you leave, you're going to lose all of these friends that you've built up. And you become locked in. And that's when the big companies will start to make things shidder. They inchitify. And instead of serving the users,

they will serve businesses, right? They'll make things worse for you. They will sell your private data. They will let the platform become filled with these kind of spammy annoying ads that you can't get rid of. The value is just to Hoover it up by the platform and given to it shareholders and it's executives, even as the platform just turns into a pile of shit. And I think a lot of us can recognize that pattern that description makes a love sense to me. So here's the other thing with

“Corey's argument. He says, in chitification, it is not exclusive to being online, you know,”

on Facebook, on Google, wherever. It can also affect things in the physical tactile world, such as all of our smart devices. Okay. So how does that work? Well, Corey says this same principle applies

to basically all of our smart devices, right, including our cars or smart fridges, our tractors,

stuff that just wasn't previously digital. Well, in Gibson, the science fiction writer coined the term cyberspace. He's quite a prophet. And in one of his books, he has this line, cyberspace is everting. So turning inside out. And what he means is that like reality is being infected with digital stuff. And digitization is becoming a feature of things that weren't digital before. Everything's just becoming a computer in a fancy case. Let's just talk about

how many of our devices today rely on computers and rely on the internet. So how many smart devices would you estimate you have in your home right now? Uh, 20. Possibly. That's pretty average if that's right. So according to this survey I found from 2023, the average American household has about 21 connected devices. So that means devices that are connected to the internet. Wow. Wow. That is way too high. I can already think of the ones that I wish I could eliminate

from my house right now. Oh, 100%. And the thing with all of these smart devices is that it

makes it a lot easier for a company that makes this device to lock you in, right? So the first

step in a notification, it's locking you in. Because if something is a smart device, the manufacturer has quite a bit of leeway. Let's go back to tractors where we started this whole episode. Cory Doctorus says they are a prime example of this. Since Roman times farmers have fixed their own gear

“because when the storm is coming and you need to get the crops in, you can't wait for someone”

else to come and fix your stuff. According to Jared, you know, back in the 90s, the tractor is mostly mechanical, right? And if you wanted to replace a part or fix something in the tractor, it was a pretty straightforward process. You would go down to your local John Deer dealership and, you know, that was owned by a guy who lived down the road. I remember as a kid going with my dad and if you had a complaint, you went to Leeland deems and he might take you back in the shop and ask

what was going on. You know, he wanted customer to be satisfied and he knew that if he didn't, you'd go down the road to the next dealership the next time you were buying a piece of equipment. You know, say you have a problem with a wire or you need a replacement part, yet go to Leeland deems, right? And if you're not happy with Leeland deems, you could go to another dealership or maybe you go to an independent repair person who somewhere

down the road, right? They'd hook you up and then you would go about your day. But in Jared's experience, a few times this has happened, he received the error code, didn't get a lot of information from the operating system, and without much to go on, he went straight to John Deer. And at that point, John Deer holds all the cards, right? Because to restart the tractor, Jared needed a technician who knows how to access the tractor's computer. And at that point, he had to pay that person

to come and check it out. The farmer still mostly fix their tractors. They get the part they put it in and so on. They're farmers. They don't want to fix their stuff. But it doesn't work. It doesn't work until you get a service call and pay 200 bucks for someone to show up and type the unlawed code into your tractor's keyboard. As a farmer, it's not as easy as you go to the repair shop down the road and they fix something for you. Because usually independent repair places,

they don't have the tools that John Deer corporate has. Because John Deer is not making that stuff

up and he said he didn't have the tools to do that because they cost $6,000. So because John Deer makes it expensive for independent repair shops to fix John Deer products, as a consumer, you're stuck paying whatever John Deer is charging. And this is a big way you get locked in. It's replacement parts. So if Jared buys a replacement part, he probably needs to buy it from John Deer because he doesn't have a lot of options for where else you can buy the thing.

I'm getting very angry Chris. This is very upsetting to me. Keep some room. Okay. Keep some room. We need a ceiling that we could achieve later on in the episode. You're going to get there. So Roman in the past, farmers could actually buy a generic replacement part, right? Like a part that was built by somebody who isn't John Deer. But today,

“with the software, John Deer does this trick called parts pairing. So if you want to replace”

a drill, something like that, certain parts are not going to work unless they are compatible with John Deer software. So that's parts pairing. And this is related to this really important concept called interoperability. I've definitely heard that term before. But what does it actually

mean here? Basically, interoperability is whether two things can work together, right? So

if you have shoes and shoe laces, if the laces are the right size, they fit inside the shoe, those two things are interoperable. And in a digital context, two things are interoperable if they can talk to each other. And parts pairing makes that difficult because with tractors, you know, you can buy some generic parts that is cheaper than what John Deer is selling, but it won't necessarily work because John Deer software might lock it out. So these two things are not interoperable.

And tractors are kind of the tip of the iceberg here, because this kind of thing can happen with all of our smart devices. And Cory brought up this example to me, which is printers. Your printer company says, uh, we don't like it when you use third party ink. And so we're going

to block third party ink installation. Once we do that, we're going to charge you more for the

ink that comes from HP or apps in or whatever. It's not that your printer can't run that program. It's that your printer has been designed to reject that program to say, no, it's now $10,000 a gallon. The most expensive fluid you can buy is a civilian without a special license. It costs more to print your grocery list than it would if you printed it with the seamen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion. This is way like Cory. He paints some more pictures. He puts a little

mustard on the fastball. And by the way, I did, I looked this up. This is a bit of an exaggeration, like the Kentucky Derby-winning seamen is very expensive. It's worth a lot of money. But printer is expensive too, right? It costs like thousands of dollars a gallon, which is so much money. I mean, shitty is the right word for it. I mean, it's awful. Yeah, it's really shitty. And it's also a big problem with power wheelchairs. You have smart fridges, you have ventilators. One more

example is about the device you are probably listening to this on right now. So let's say you have an iPhone. I'm sure you've experienced some version of this as someone who owns an iPhone.

“If you need to repair an iPhone, there's lots of cases where you cannot get a third-party replacement”

part. Like those will just not be interoperable with an Apple device. So Apple urges you to buy an Apple replacement part and then go to the Apple store or go to an Apple authorized repair person. Tim Cook in 2019 wrote a letter to his investors at the start of the year where he said our biggest risk is that our customers repair phones instead of buying new ones that they like their phones. They work fine. And so when they break, they don't just get a new one. Apple uniquely

among manufacturers when you trade a phone in, sends it to be shredded so that the parts can't be harvested to be used in a repair. So to recap, this is the insuitification of things, right? You buy something that has software in it. The software makes it hard to get the thing

prepared by some third-party. You have to go to the manufacturer and they will jack up the price,

right? And perhaps they don't let you use third-party parts. So they're just profiting off people because we're stuck, right? We have the stuckness going on. So this is a vicious cycle. So Roman, now that I have gone through the problem of insuitification with you,

“where would you say your anger level is at as of now?”

I mean, let's go for a nine. I'm a nine. Like I'm ready to just like go to the next room, yank that smart thermostat out of my wall and just put in an old-fashioned honeywell analog dial. Roman, I feel your pain and I have some good news. We are going to bring your anger level down a little bit. Oh, actually. Because there are people who are trying to make things better. There are people fighting back and trying to outlaw this form of insuitification. Excellent. Okay, let's talk

about that after the ring.

some of the people who are trying to fight back against these big companies. We're locking you in,

trying to profit off your bad experiences, right? And there are a couple of ways people are fighting this. So there's kind of the dodgy, questionable, maybe outside of the bounds of the law way. And then there's the law-biting citizen. I want to do everything by the bookway. So we're ready. I want to start with this. Well, I definitely want to start with the dodgy questionable outside of the law way. That sounds way more fun. So Cory Doctorus says, we're now seeing a lot of

black market or kind of gray market efforts to fix this problem, right? We're seeing people

“hacking software in an iPhone, for example, and making it work with third-party applications, right?”

When you do that with an Apple product, that is called jail-breaking. But people aren't just doing it with Apple products. They're doing it with all kinds of tech now. And if you're like a board grad student with an electron tunneling microscope, you can just like have at it, right? Lots and lots of these softwares have been broken into it. It's actually pretty easy for someone who has, you know, hacker skills and experience. And obviously this kind of solution hacking into the software like

it is not something the company wants you to do. I don't think I need to say that. Your user agreement usually says, I will not do something like this. But it is becoming more and more common. And our farmer Jared, he told me, he's actually seeing this kind of thing pretty often in his day-to-day life like being used by repair people. There've been a lot of black market things that have been released that independent providers are using the laptops from China that have cracked

“John Dears software on it. So I'm completely unbored with fixing this problem. However, you need to fix”

it. But I do think that there's probably a little room to be cautious if you do not know where the software hardware that you're using to fix the problem came from. Yeah, it does sound

sketchy. And Jared, on our call, he made clear to me, he has never used this kind of technology,

because, you know, he wants to follow the rules. And also, you don't actually know what you're putting on your computer when you are working with this kind of thing. So if something goes wrong, you know, you can't call John Dears because at this point you are doing something you're not supposed to be doing. Create some hesitation in using technology like that on your hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machines because you're out of any ecosystem that can help you because you're

operating outside of the margins. So on top of that, Corey Dr. is says that in a lot of cases, this kind of solution, this hackery solution, is probably illegal. Well, that just drives me crazy. So why is it illegal? Well, there's something called a digital lock that is on a lot of these things. And it's a very particular kind of software. Back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was concern about ripping DVDs and music piracy stuff like that. So back then, record companies and

movie studios, they added digital locks to their files. And in 1998, the US passed a law that made it illegal to break a digital lock. They passed a lock called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in section 1201. It says, it is a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence in a $500,000 fine to tamper with or expose weaknesses in or discuss weaknesses of a digital lock. And now, this law that was designed for MP3 sharing, it is now being applied to all of these

other devices that we use every day. Five years in prison. There should be a prison sentence

“for passing that law. Well, Roman, I think you may have to take that one up with both parties and”

Congress in 1998. Yeah. No, I know. There's everyone's in fall for that one. So as you can tell, the sketchy solution, you know, it has some problems. Obviously, they're not enforcing this law too often, but it's still a thing that exists that is out there. So they have that option to do that if they catch you with this kind of software. So this is kind of a hacker path, the solving and certification. But is there a more law about MP3? Okay. So in the past couple years,

there has been a movement to pass laws that would limit the power of these big companies, right? And to make sure that as a consumer, we have more ownership over our stuff. So this is part of a movement that is called the right to repair. So the right to repair movement, it basically says everybody should have the right to fix their own stuff. That's right. They're in the name. It is in the name. Good name. It's a good name. It's very descriptive. And one of the leaders of this movement

is a woman named Gay Gordon Burner. She has a lot of public speaking about this subject,

including a TED Talk that now has two and a half million views. I am a repair geek.

I grew up fixing things with my dad. It was what we did. We fixed our TV, we fixed our refrigerator, we fixed stuff that didn't need fixing. Gay Gordon Burn is the head of this group called the Repair

What's really got me irritated is that at this point, the vast majority of products on the market

“today cannot be repaired by any party without being totally dependent on the manufacturer.”

And the day the manufacturer decides they don't want you to fix it, it's over. This is a completely artificial problem. And this argument has picked up a lot of followers. There are people fighting for this in Europe, in South America, and actually one of the people out there advocating for it pretty loudly is our farmer, Jared Wilson. I've been to Washington a few times and spoken with the affirm senators and representatives. Not really trying to make anything political just sharing

my experiences with the people who are elected to pass laws to govern how things work in this country. Okay, well, I want to know. So has there been any success with this? Because this seems like

an uphill battle. Actually, it has been pretty successful the last couple of years. And it's been

pleasantly surprising to see this movement developing. Europe specifically, there has been a lot of movement on this. So in 2024, the European Union passed a directive saying every member state needed to have a right to repair law by the summer of 2026. So that is this coming summer. And that will require manufacturers to offer repairs for all household appliances, including washing machines, even smartphones. So pretty soon, we'll have a pretty good idea of how that's being implemented in

Europe. But in the United States, there's been some movement as well. So a few states have now passed right to repair laws. Colorado passed a law in 2023 saying that farmers need to have the right to repair. Oregon passed a law covering electronic and powered wheelchairs. We talked a little bit about wheelchair users. You know, they need access to repair tools because they're facing a pretty small market, pretty high rates for getting stuff fixed. And now quite a few states

have passed laws about fixing phones and laptops. And that includes states who are otherwise pretty friendly to business interests. We're getting somewhere with these state right to repair bills. So it's really going well, including taxes, including legislatures that have, you know, consider pretty friendly to big business are still passing repair laws. It's great. So the latest development in all of this is a national right to repair bill for cars

that is under consideration in the House of Representatives. That bill is by partisan by the way. It has been sponsored by Republicans and Democrats. It reflects something from Stein's law, which is a law of finance that says that anything that can't go on forever eventually stops.

“And I think that people are fed up. And so we're getting some repair bills. Very hard to be on the”

wrong side of repair. And so you shouldn't be allowed to fix your own stuff. So this all seems like good news. So there are some laws that might reverse in certification. It is good news. And actually in response to this push, we have already seen some companies who have started sending out these repair tools. So these are companies trying to get out preemptively ahead of these laws. I bet. And an example of this a couple of years ago,

a little company called John Deer perhaps you have heard of them from the multiple references in this story, a little company called John Deer have put out this software to their customers that's designed to make it possible for farmers to decode these error messages and troubleshoot lots of problems with their tractor. So to fix things themselves. And as of this year, John Deer told me, farmers can actually override a deraiding in some cases. So this is the problem we talked

about at the beginning of the show where the tractor shuts itself down. So this all sounds like good news. But there are still some caveats. Okay. So what is this caveat? Well, Jared says there are still flaws with the repair software. He's particularly concerned about the way it collects his data, his harvesting data. He says that's not ideal for him. He's actually been part of a class action lawsuit against John Deer saying they have an unfair monopoly on repair

tools. And the software is part of the complaints that they filed. And in a bigger sense, while there's been progress around right to repair, there's no guarantee that things like the federal law about car repairs is going to pass, right? Like there are some big lobbies pushing back against that. Some car companies have opposed more right to repair laws because they worry it could lead to their intellectual property being violated. They're intellectual property

about the information on my car. That is an absurd assertion. Yeah. I mean, when you put it that

“way, it sounds pretty silly. But these right to repair laws like they can make a big difference, right?”

But they aren't a magic bullet. Like many of these laws do not outlaw parts pairing, for example. So they don't solve the problem of interoperability. You know, you can't necessarily put

third-party parts on to repair something. So there's an argument that these laws could go further.

Yeah. So it can make the platform better, but you're still locked into the platform.

comprehensive. And Cory Doctora says, like, maybe we should start thinking beyond the laws. Like he has other approaches to this. He thinks we actually need to be doing something a lot more radical. Oh, okay. Tell me more. What does he have in mind? One thing Cory is pushing for is

countries outside the United States to basically break the digital locks, right? To allow third-party

manufacturers to make replacement parts, things like that. So Canada and Mexico are going to trade war with the U.S. right now. And Cory says, look, what if those countries made generic

“replacement parts that go around the locks and then export those generic parts all over the world?”

We could do the same for tractors and tractor parts and cars and car parts. We have all the car part factories in Ontario, right? If we can't ship those across the border anymore, we can just make generic car parts in Ontario, sell them all over the world along with the software to turn off the car part checking tool in the cars. We could have third-party manufacturing. And you know what

if we don't do it, someone else is going to do it. It is a very great doctor, a thing to turn

Canada into a flawless man of jail breaking. But I do love it. I don't see it ever really happening in that way, but I do love it. Yeah, that can feel like a long shot, right? But we do have to think about different ways to fix this problem. I totally agree. Roman, there's so much going on in the world right now, but this issue feels pretty urgent to me. Because if we don't act, you know, if we don't do something about these kind of everyday frustrations, this general shittiness of things,

but also this big cost for lots of people, it's just going to get worse. And on a much simpler level, Roman, I would like to live in a world where somebody like Jared can just fix his tractor. It doesn't benefit us, the citizen, to have stuff that we buy, that we can't fix when it breaks. It's not good economically, it's not good environmentally, allowing these companies to stymie competition is not in our best interest. And I really hope that people can take that

door. Well, amen to that. Thank you, Chris. Even in my incandescent anger, I'm having fun with this

“story. I appreciate it. Oh, good. Okay, so this was infuriating, but also entertaining. That's what”

I was going for today. Exactly, like good punk rock. That's the first time I've ever been compared to good punk rock. So thank you for that.

In April, 2026, as we were finishing this episode, John Deere agreed to pay $99 million to

settle the class action lawsuit about right to repair concerns. Jared Wilson, the farmer from our episode, was part of that lawsuit. We reached out to John Deere to discuss claims made in the story in response they sent us information about their consumer repair software. And John Deere told us that they estimate there are third party replacement parts for about 60% of all John Deere parts on the market today. We also reached out to Apple, a representative told us that Apple supports

“third party replacement parts except in cases where there are security concerns. Apple also told”

us they have recently expanded access to their repair tools for consumers and have a recycling take-back program in most countries that sell Apple products. 99% invisible was produced this week by Chris Perubi, edited by Emmett Fitzgerald, fact checking by Graham Hesha, mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Real, and George Lankford. Great October's latest book is called "Inshidification"

why everything suddenly got worse and what to do about it. It is super fun and infuriating but mostly fun, you could find it wherever you buy books. Special thanks this week to Nathan Proctor at the PIRG. Kathy 2 is our executive producer, Delaney Hall is a senior editor, Kurt Colstatt is the digital director. The rest of team includes Jason Delion, Chris Forjons, Vivienne Leigh, Lashma Dawn, Jacob Medineklyson, Kelly Prime, Joe Rosenberg,

talent and reinstradely, and me Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Series XM podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building, in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue Sky as well as our own Discord server. You can find a link to that as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99PI.org.