Slave of Devices

Supposed to provide us with convenience and opportunities, but often ending up demanding a lot from us

Photo by Dave Weatherall on Unsplash

What would you do if you were a free person?

I mean, really free – without any obligations, just opportunities. If you could wake up in the morning and decide to sleep a bit longer, or get up and do something you liked to do.

Sometimes I feel that this is what a cat or other pet is doing. The cat is the symbol of freedom, as it always does what it wants. You cannot make a cat do anything. It is possible to tempt it into playing with a toy or to come and eat something now. But not always. If it doesn’t want to play or eat, it simply just doesn’t do it. If it wants to sleep, it just sleeps.

For people, that is often difficult to achieve. Of course, not all cats live such a luxury life either – only those who work as pets in a home where someone cares for them.

Other pets may be free to do what they want, but within limits – fishes in an aquarium, for instance, can swim a lot or a little, but they cannot swim away. The glass will stop them.

We people have arranged ourselves with some dependencies that limit us. Going to work, for instance, often requires us to get up at a certain time in the morning, transporting ourselves there, and doing things during the working day that we might not have done if we had not agreed to it, by contract. We are bound by some obligations, threatened by problems or punishment if we do not obey.

In family life, we are also obliged to do various things for each other, even though we often like to do most of that. Saying how beautiful your spouse is may be necessary for the good relation, but it also makes you happy to see how they enjoy hearing it. Doing the dishes may not be connected with the same amount of joy.

Most of our life is tied up, this way, and we are not very much free, when summing up all the duties.

So, it is understandable that we try to take back a little freedom, bitwise, here and there, when we can.

I don’t know if the TV, when invented, added any kind of freedom. I believe that people thought so, in that they could now see something like a theater play without having to go to the theater. Or see the news right away, with follow-ups and background details, without having to ask anyone who might have been there and saw it with their own eyes.

But when the remote control was invented, it was a promise of freedom. A tiny bit of it, but the freedom to change the channel or regulate the volume without going to the device was some seconds of time won each day.

A telephone helped to talk to others without going to them, and postal services, buses, trains, running water, and a lot of other things similarly helped save some time, freeing you from obligations, or in other ways making you feel a bit more free.

And then came the gadgets. All kinds of devices that were supposed to improve your life, but very often claiming a lot of time for you to spend on them. And you’ll spend some time on actually using them, but often, just as much time for repairing them or setting them up, as they seem to notoriously not work as they should.

You know, if you are not very young, such a wristwatch that keeps going too fast or too slow so you need to adjust the time on it very often. Or any other clock, actually, as these have a tendency to not work accurately for long.

Your car will probably have shown problems now and then, and in any case, you’ll have to spend some of that freedom the car gained you, on fueling it, washing it, or changing the windshield wipers, or taking it to the regular service. Such things. Plus the occasional car crash or hitting another car when parking, or many other problems. That all takes your time – and freedom.

But I think that it has escalated to the extreme with modern electronic equipment at home. Nothing seems to work as it should – sometimes from the start, at others times after a while, but these things will all require a lot of time and effort to work, even though they were meant to make your life easier. Let me give some examples:

Air filters are great for reducing the amount of pollen in the indoor air. They are not 100% effective, but they help. The flip side is that they need new cartridges now and then, and here the problems start:

First of all, you need to buy the cartridges somewhere. And that is not trivial! Most of the device manufacturers have not ensured that new cartridges are readily available in a controlled manner, such as it is the case with vacuum cleaner bags, for instance. The latter are available in many shops for many models of vacuum cleaners. The air filter cartridges are not. Sometimes, they are sold out everywhere for months, often across the spring, where you need them the most because the amounts of pollen are the largest at that time.

And then, they may break in such a way that the built-in chip in the cartridge, that should help you get noticed when it’s time to change the cartridge, doesn’t work correctly and all the time, or at arbitrary times, claim that the cartridge needs replacement.

Along with the huge price differences for the cartridges, when available, you can spend a lot of time searching for cartridges, deciding where to buy them when you have a choice, and replacing the cartridges. Perhaps you’ll spend time trying to change the setup of the device or contact customer support (which is utterly unhelpful in most cases).

What should have easened breath, and thereby offering you a degree of freedom, now becomes a burden that steals a lot of your energy, thought capacity, and time.

Another example: I have an AV receiver, as it’s called, which is basically a radio. It has built-in internet radio as well, and I bought the device to be able to hear internet radio and the music from my own CD collection, that I have ripped and keep on a hard drive. Actually, a NAS, which is a hard drive on the home network.

When getting that radio, it didn’t work with my NAS, and after trying many things, I ended up buying a different model of NAS, which worked. Sometimes, however, there were interruptions in the music, and it turned out that many people had that problem with this brand of radio, because of a faulty network feature. But the remedy was in all cases that they would get the device replaced to a similar one, with the same problem, or get a print cardboard sent, so that they could replace it themselves, again with the same problem remaining. Or, wait for software updates to appear.

I actually had two of these radios, slightly different models, because they should be able to play simultaneously the same music in two different rooms, and they both had the problem.

They had many software updates. These appeared suddenly and meant that I couldn’t use the radio for a while, until the update had finished. I still often couldn’t use the internet radio or the NAS, as this required the network to function. The software updates also required that, so when the problem got worse over time, and the network stopped working completely, then nothing worked, except from the normal inputs by cable. So I got a device, an external internet radio, that could do what the main devices should have done. And it worked! Sort of. That external device offered very limited functionality for selecting the music I wanted to hear, and it changed the order of the playlist all the time, etc. – in effect, it was causing so many frustrations that I stopped using it and bought a different one.

It belongs to the story to tell that I had a different radio, originally, with another such external device connected. But the manufacturer of that external device enshittified me and the other customers several times by making the product obsolete by software update, and by killing the mobile app used for operating the unit, and in the end I had to give up using that brand of products.

So, the radio with built-in internet radio had been an attempt to improve on that situation – and it didn’t work out well, as mentioned. The remedy, with the new external device, didn’t work well either, and now I was on my third brand of external device.

As it seemed to function, and as it could cooperate with other devices in other rooms, even from different brands, just by using a common communication method, supported by a separate piece of software that was running on a small computer, bought for the purpose – it looked like a both future proof and flexible way forward. I got more devices, they worked, and that’s where I am now.

I have music in several rooms, it can play together, it’s easy to use, and I am in general happy with it all (but not with the fact that I had to buy my way through several brands and products before it started working correctly).

Now, the thing is – it sometimes stops working, either completely or with “holes” in the music, or the music skipping to the next tune before finishing what I’m hearing. Then I have to restart all the devices, one by one, restart the network router, and then try again.

I have spent many hours searching for solutions, and nobody could help, basically because nobody cared. The standard advice is to buy something new.

But what I have found out is that it stops working because the external device, the first of the new round of them, sometimes goes into an unknown state where it doesn’t play as it should – and that stops the player software, the one running on its own computer, because it then cannot synchronize with the other devices. It also happens that the remaining external devices decide to upgrade themselves, thereby switching off the music for a while – and this leads to the same situation where the central software pauses.

In fact, there are several other situations that can lead to such stops in the music, and on some days, I cannot hear music at all – I start it, it jumps through the playlist very quickly, playing a second of music every now and then, and finally stops completely. Then I start it again, and the same happens once more.

Resetting, restarting, waiting for all to get up again, and then trying to hear music – and it can easily go wrong again after a short while.

And why do I have such a music system?

Because I wanted the freedom of being able to hear music easily, when I wanted.

That’s the promise that all of these devices were sold under, and that’s what none of them delivers.

In fact, it had often been easier and more convenient for me to just have a simple CD player and amplifier, and not try to take advantage of any modern gadgets.

What happens in such cases is that we become slaves of the devices. By getting the devices that were meant to make our lives easier, we suddenly become bound to doing a lot of different things, simply because the devices or those who produced them require it from us.

We become slaves of the devices, where it was meant to be the other way around.

As I have seen such a pattern with very many devices, and also dumber products, often not working as intented, thereby requiring time and energy not planned with, I am beginning to get to a conclusion that we all could have much easier lives, much more freedom from those burdens the devices bring with them, if we would simply skip them all.

That would finally set us us free and give us back our time and free will.