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| date | post_meta | tags | title | type | url | |||||
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| 2023-09-27T09:23:58.448114 |
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Crappy Printers and Crappy Content | posts | /posts/2023/09/27/crappy-printers-and-crappy-content1695806638 |
Fair warning: Some of the quotes in this post are a bit sweary.
I've been reflecting on a few articles that I've read over the last couple of days about consumer trends in devices and parallels with generated content. I'm sure everyone's sick of "yet another hot take on enshittification" - but what about an optimistic one?
Anyone who's had to interact with a printer in the last few years will have noticed how painful the experience was. FWIW I think this is the best printer review and actual printer. However, this post by foone on tumblr summarises the current state of the consumer-grade printing industry rather well:
there's a fundamental limit of how much you can optimize an inkjet printer, and we got near to it in like the late 90s. Every printer since then has just been a tad smaller, a tad faster, and added some gimmicks like printing from WIFI or bluetooth instead of needing to plug in a cable...
...that's the worst place to be in, for a computer component. The "I don't care how fancy it is, just give me one that works" zone....
...Printers fell into that zone long, long ago, when people stopped getting excited about "desktop publishing". So with printers shoved into the "make them as cheap as possible" zone, they have gotten exponentially shittier. Can you cut costs by 5$ a printer by making them jam more often? good. make them only last a couple years to save a buck or two per unit? absolutely. Can you make the printer cost 10$ less and make that back on the proprietary ink cartridges? oh, they've been doing that since Billy Clinton was in office
This post stuck in my head because I'm seeing some parallels here between printing and media. Social media companies sell ads and to get people to look at ads, they need cheap content. The content doesn't need to be a masterpiece or a classic or really have anything interesting going for it other than "keep the reader on the page for 10 seconds so that they look at this ad". Just as with printers, this "market-driven" need to make content "just good enough" is bad news. We already passed peak listicles and quizzes and now we have models that can churn out coherent-yet-bland long form "content". Search engine results are going down the pan and AI generated books are already wreaking havoc and giving people terrible advice.
So then should we just lie down, defeated and adopt a doom and gloom philosophy here? As Kyle Chayka recently wrote, there are parallels here with industrial automation and the Luddite movement and this quote in particular stands out to me (via Simon Willison):
The market was being flooded with cheaper, inferior goods such as “cut-ups,” stockings made from two pieces of cloth joined together, rather than knit as one continuous whole... At the time of the Luddites, many hoped the subpar products would prove unacceptable to consumers or to the government. Instead, social norms adjusted.
Do we think that social norms will adjust? Well that's interesting because the comparison between what was happening then and what is happening now isn't straight forward. Whilst the industrial revolution changed a lot and made many jobs redundant, it also meant things became cheaper for end consumers and made things more accessible for a large volume of people. In other words, it generated a quality-of-life improvement for everyday people.
On the other hand, most of the benefits of "generative" AI currently being touted by those in the tech industry relate to cost reduction on the supply side rather than providing increased quality of reduced price on the consumer side. Most people already have smartphones, social media accounts and social media accounts and access to huge libraries of content for the price of their attention or some nominal fee. As platforms enshittify, reducing the quality of their "product" and in the same breath increasing their fees, they are actually giving consumers worsening deals.
At the same time, we're seeing a huge resurgence in indie blogs and federated self-hosted social platforms where people own the content and produce hand-written articles and film videos because they're passionate about what they do. As much as the social media silos try to hide it, people are leaving in droves and corporate replacements are flopping.
People are sick of low-quality content and having ads rammed down their throat with increasing aggression and avarice.
The post on printers finishes with a dose of optimism:
So, in conclusion: Printers suck, but this is both an innate problem caused by them having to deal with so much fucking Real World, and a local minima of reliability that we're currently stuck in. Eventually we'll get out of this valley on the graph and printers will bother people a lot less.
In my, perhaps overly optimistic conclusion, we're likely in a local minimum of quality for arts and media but this is unlikely to last forever and society is already showing signs that we won't be accepting this norm like we did low-quality stockings. Maybe then we can get back to using AI and NLP for useful and interesting things like curing disease, helping people, tracking and highlighting interesting and useful trends in scientific research or making factories safer and consumer devices more reliable.