#incumbency

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

EVs won't save the planet. Ultimately, the material bill for billions of individual vehicles and the unavoidable geometry of more cars-more traffic-more roads-greater distances-more cars dictate that the future of our cities and planet requires public transit – lots of it.

But no matter how much public transit we install, there's always going to be some personal vehicles on the road, and not just bikes, ebikes and scooters. Between deliveries, accessibility, and stubbornly low-density regions, there's going to be a lot of cars, vans and trucks on the road for the foreseeable future, and these should be electric.

Beyond that irreducible minimum of personal vehicles, there's the fact that individuals can't install their own public transit system; in places that lack the political will or means to create working transit, EVs are a way for people to significantly reduce their personal emissions.

In policy circles, EV adoption is treated as a logistical and financial issue, so governments have focused on making EVs affordable and increasing the density of charging stations. As an EV owner, I can affirm that affordability and logistics were important concerns when we were shopping for a car.

But there's a third EV problem that is almost entirely off policy radar: enshittification.

An EV is a rolling computer in a fancy case with a squishy person inside of it. While this can sound scary, there are lots of cool implications for this. For example, your EV could download your local power company's tariff schedule and preferentially charge itself when the rates are lowest; they could also coordinate with the utility to reduce charging when loads are peaking. You can start them with your phone. Your repair technician can run extensive remote diagnostics on them and help you solve many problems from the road. New features can be delivered over the air.

That's just for starters, but there's so much more in the future. After all, the signal virtue of a digital computer is its flexibility. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing complete, universal, Von Neumann machine, which can run every valid program. If a feature is computationally tractable – from automated parallel parking to advanced collision prevention – it can run on a car.

The problem is that this digital flexibility presents a moral hazard to EV manufacturers. EVs are designed to make any kind of unauthorized, owner-selected modification into an IP rights violation ("IP" in this case is "any law that lets me control the conduct of my customers or competitors"):

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

EVs are also designed so that the manufacturer can unilaterally exert control over them or alter their operation. EVs – even more than conventional vehicles – are designed to be remotely killswitched in order to help manufacturers and dealers pressure people into paying their car notes on time:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Manufacturers can reach into your car and change how much of your battery you can access:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

They can lock your car and have it send its location to a repo man, then greet him by blinking its lights, honking its horn, and pulling out of its parking space:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

And of course, they can detect when you've asked independent mechanic to service your car and then punish you by degrading its functionality:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2024/06/26/two-of-eight-claims-in-tesla-anti-trust-lawsuit-will-move-forward/

This is "twiddling" – unilaterally and irreversibly altering the functionality of a product or service, secure in the knowledge that IP law will prevent anyone from twiddling back by restoring the gadget to a preferred configuration:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The thing is, for an EV, twiddling is the best case scenario. As bad as it is for the company that made your EV to change how it works whenever they feel like picking your pocket, that's infinitely preferable to the manufacturer going bankrupt and bricking your car.

That's what just happened to owners of Fisker EVs, cars that cost $40-70k. Cars are long-term purchases. An EV should last 12-20 years, or even longer if you pay to swap the battery pack. Fisker was founded in 2016 and shipped its first Ocean SUV in 2023. The company is now bankrupt:

https://insideevs.com/news/723669/fisker-inc-bankruptcy-chapter-11-official/

Fisker called its vehicles "software-based cars" and they weren't kidding. Without continuous software updates and server access, those Fisker Ocean SUVs are turning into bricks. What's more, the company designed the car from the ground up to make any kind of independent service and support into a felony, by wrapping the whole thing in overlapping layers of IP. That means that no one can step in with a module that jailbreaks the Fisker and drops in an alternative firmware that will keep the fleet rolling.

This is the third EV risk – not just finance, not just charger infrastructure, but the possibility that any whizzy, cool new EV company will go bust and brick your $70k cleantech investment, irreversibly transforming your car into 5,500 lb worth of e-waste.

This confers a huge advantage onto the big automakers like VW, Kia, Ford, etc. Tesla gets a pass, too, because it achieved critical mass before people started to wise up to the risk of twiddling and bricking. If you're making a serious investment in a product you expect to use for 20 years, are you really gonna buy it from a two-year old startup with six months' capital in the bank?

The incumbency advantage here means that the big automakers won't have any reason to sink a lot of money into R&D, because they won't have to worry about hungry startups with cool new ideas eating their lunches. They can maintain the cozy cartel that has seen cars stagnate for decades, with the majority of "innovation" taking the form of shitty, extractive and ill-starred ideas like touchscreen controls and an accelerator pedal that you have to rent by the month:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

I was working on some new stuff for my dissertation recently, and made this little movie. From 1962 to 2014, we’ve been through five redistricting cycles. 

While some years have more variability than others, it’s looks to me (and seems to be consistent in the literature) that redistricting changes things up a little. 

In the movie, I’ve flagged each redistricting cycle in big black text. Also, the dots are colored according to incumbency, so red indicates that a republican incumbent is running for reelection, a blue indicates a democrat is running for reelection, and a white indicates no incumbent/two incumbents. 

Perhaps you noticed your Starbucks line getting a little longer last month. Or perhaps you didn't notice at all because you've just come to expect it. Odds are, though, that your wait was longer this September, just like it has been every other one.

The reason for this is simple: Starbucks' annual reports for its fiscal year are due in October, and the company, like so many other publicly traded companies, wants to boost its numbers by cutting costs. The costs easiest to cut, naturally, are labor costs. They are what is politely referred to as a "variable", as opposed to the "constants" of coffee beans, milk, and paper cups. Fewer employees working each shift equals greater profit margins for the company, which means bigger bonuses for everyone from the store manager to the district manager and all the way up the corporate chain to the C.E.O.

That your wait to order and receive your pumpkin spice latte was that much longer was the result. Hopefully, you didn't take your frustrations out on the understaffed, overworked baristas or your fellow customers. Again, it's possible that you have come to expect this, which is just fine for all those people receiving bonuses. It's actually what they're hoping for. Every year you get more used to it, the better a business strategy it becomes.

While you're thinking about that, think about your mobile phone, the one you're looking at while you're waiting in line. Think about Apple updating the operating system it just released, again. Think about your Samsung phone exploding in your pocket. Again. Over the past forty years, the standards for releasing consumer computer technology have changed, in no small part because of the increasingly central role it plays in our lives.

As the products have become more central, it has become necessary for the companies making them to get consumers to replace them to meet sales expectations so their annual reports look great. While Apple does have its own brick-and-mortar stores, which probably squeeze labors costs in the month leading up to its own annual report, the surest way to increase sales over the previous month/period/year is to get consumers hooked on the next big thing. The result, inevitably, is releasing the next big thing before it's ready to go.

Companies getting used to that idea has changed how they do business, and consumers getting used to beta-testing new products has changed how and when they buy them. We may now expect that our new iPhone won't work properly, but we care less and less so long as it has new features that are better than the competition, or will be once the bugs get worked out. That it may not work on release is no longer a problem (unless it explodes); that it will work at some point is now taken for granted, and that means we'll stick with a product and a brand that much longer. And, considering this isn't even Samsung's first battery explosion problem, maybe that won't hurt them that much after all?

So, while you're using your smartphone to preorder your pumpkin spice latte from your Uber, think about how you're paying for that. Or, better yet, think about the sign of an oncoming apocalypse that is the Wells Fargo bank account scandal. Odds are, you aren't paying for anything directly from your bank account, but you are paying your credit card bills or feeding your digital wallet from it.

What the good people at Wells Fargo have been doing isn't exactly new. The structure of the company is no different than other multinational corporate banks (or corporate retail chains, for that matter), which is why what was uncovered at Wells Fargo is so distressing, or should be.

Those at the bottom, the bank's equivalent of baristas, sign customers up for bank accounts, usual just the one. Those the next level up, the one where pay scales are incentivized through the carrot and stick of bonuses and firings, then turn those single accounts into multiple, secret accounts, to which profit-based products and services were attached. Unsuspecting customers then find themselves on the hook for those product and service costs - all payable to the bank - or worse, find that their credit ratings have been destroyed by fraudulent debts they can't rid themselves of because the bank is giving them the run around.

Those on the level above those sales associates face the same dual incentives of bonuses and firings, as do those above them, all the way up the corporate chain to executives who no longer fear getting fired because they have golden parachutes, and junior executives to take the blame. As long as each branch, district, region, department, division, company, and parent reach their monthly, quarterly, and annual expectations, everybody keeps their jobs and their bonuses.

Except, you know, the customers.

What isn't exactly new about this is that it is similar to a scam from about 15 years ago, one employed by these same banks on their unsuspecting credit card customers. Each billing cycle, customers would receive some glossy notice tucked in with their statement. Thinking it was just an ad for something they had to opt in to, they'd likely toss it without reading it. A month or two later, they'd notice a new fee on their statement, maybe $50 or $60, for the product or service the bank had opted them into and that they now had to opt out of. That is, they'd notice it if they carefully went through the bill, which most customers never do and which the banks surely understood.

Eventually enough customers caught on that the banks agreed to stop (as part of a federal class action settlement). They could now only offer “opt in” products and services. Of course, given time, they managed to need federal help understanding how to do that, too. 

Customers of Wells Fargo, and likely those same other banks, will probably see their situation resolved the same way. In the mean time, most if not all of the customers affected will probably keep their accounts at the bank that so eagerly too their money. They’ll keep their credit cards, too. For them, the bank is a known quantity, an island of certainty in a sea of confusing options.

Wells Fargo, or Chase or Citibank or Bank of America, has branches everywhere, is a familiar name, and, like Starbucks or Apple or Samsung, has a reputation based in no small part on being everywhere with a familiar name. Facing that, long lines, exploding batteries, and even naked theft can be rationalized away as temporary things, problems that will be fixed, eventually.

To reject these brands, for these reasons or countless others, would be to reject the certainty the brands offer. It would be to search for another place to get that special seasonal drink or proprietary software or free ATMs. It would mean adding something to our lives that brand loyalty happily removes. That’s the trade off, one companies, like political parties, understand all too well.

When we vote next month, the expectation will be that most of us will vote for the same party, top of the ticket to the bottom. It’s got Republicans worried, and it should. The Democrats haven’t exactly done much to earn votes. They’ve given us the political equivalent of long lines, not ready for release software, and products we don’t want but have to pay for, but they, like the Republicans, have a brand that sells. Odds are, more Americans will end up voting Democratic despite the disappointments, figuring that they’ll get it right eventually, or, at least, get it right before the competition does.

This particular kind of brand loyalty - incumbency - has served both parties well. The Democrats may well be the safe bet this year - safer in some states more than others - but it may do us some good to look around at the other options to see what they’re getting right or wrong before we get back on the end of that long line. Again.