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eshittified in your brain
Sunday, April 13 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
I was up relatively early, getting a fire going, making myself coffee, and eating sheets of Streit Matzo (the best kind, according to Gretchen — and I concur). Later Gretchen came down and we played Spelling Bee separately until Anna came up from the basement some time later. As I noodled around on the MacBook Pro that I use as the living room laptop, I learned that there was now a seventh season of what might be my favorite television show, Black Mirror. So at some point I went upstairs and downloaded all six episodes using Bittorrent.
Then, while Gretchen was either walking dogs or driving into town, perhaps with Anna, to get a better vegan butter or the supplies to make vegan cottage cheese, I watched the first episode. It featured a product marketed as a fix for brain injuries that replaces part of the brain with an electronic implant that provides otherwise-missing brain function by streaming it via something like a cellular network from servers "in the cloud." This sounds a bit suspect initially; couldn't this function somehow be supplied locally, without the need for a service? But it's the service that provides the story with its dystopian hook. It turns out the surgery to install the implant is free, and the company makes all its money on subscriptions. Initially these are marketed as being only $300/month. But then the limitations of this base tier are revealed: the implantee loses consciousness when they lose access to nearby towers and they also periodically go unconscious while reciting advertisements, some of which might get you in trouble if you, like the main protagonist, are working as a teacher. The couple at the heart of the story have normal middle-class jobs and can barely afford the $300/month base tier. But when its enshittified nature proves untenable, the husband takes on extra shifts and starts debasing himself on a website that pays people to do so on camera. It's a great exposition of classic enshittification, made all the more concrete by taking place inside the head of an unfortunate customer.
Later this evening, Gretchen had me download some episodes of Dateline, a show Anna had been talking about. While they watched that, I watched most of the second episode of this new season of Black Mirror. It was clever, I suppose, but overly long and leaned a little more on humor than is normal for Black Mirror (the sendup of Castaway, for example).
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