0.0 Context Setting

It’s Thursday, 16 April, 2026 and unseasonably cold in Portland, Oregon. Before that, it was unseasonably warm. This jackpot sucks.

Oh right, there’s also a podcast feed for, uh, some podcast episodes.

• Things That Caught My Attention (The Podcast) on LibSyn
• Things That Caught My Attention (The Podcast) on Apple Podcasts

Let’s just get on with the thing that caught my attention.

1.0 Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 It’s (not) the economy, stupid: we traded our agency for convenience

So here’s the thing. Economists say that the data says the economy (eh, “western” economies) is doing well. Low unemployment. Higher wages. Inflation isn’t as high. But at the same time if you ask people “how is the economy doing?” they’re super depressed. Something is up! Are the economists wrong? Are people wrong? One point of view is that the media keep telling people that the economy sucks and, well, leading the witness. Another point of view is that there was an inflation shock when Covid hit, and while inflation has slowed down, prices never really fell back to their typical rate of increase, so in absolute terms, things are still expensive. There’s yet another point of view that some things got cheaper (luxuries, I guess?), but other things (essentials, like housing, food, and childcare) got way more expensive. There’s anecdotal evidence for this everywhere (yeah, citation needed), and you know what people say about anecdata.

Well! I have an opinion! That is of course why you signed up for this newsletter in the first place.

rax ‘levon honkers’ king said:

I don’t think venues should be allowed to email me just because I went to a show there one time¹

to which I said:

I legit think some of the belief and experience that the economy sucks is also sheer exhaustion from shit like this and notification fatigue and every single shitty tech mediated interaction of which there are hundreds a day²

Now, I am not economist, although I have friends who are economists and political scientists, so remember: this is all reckons.

“How do you think the economy’s going?” is ultimately an abstraction/substitution of the question “how’s your life doing?”. The theory goes that if you have a bunch of money, then your life should be going easier. We use money as a proxy for measuring quality of life, right? And when someone asks you “how’s the economy doing?” I think what people really hear is “what’s it like to live these days?”

And I’m going to say that it sucks. You might absolutely have more money. You might absolutely be being paid more. But I bet:

• You feel like you have less free time
• You feel like you are inundated with bureaucracy
• You feel like perhaps even though you have more money you actually have less agency

I will blame “tech-mediated interactions” for this, and no, I’m not going to talk about enshittification. That’s a whole separate thing. Go read Cory’s book. And yes, “tech-mediated interactions” are the expression of the practice of doing business in the 2020s.

I think we were given or sold convenience of access in exchange for agency. Convenience is:

• streaming video/video demand
• advertising-funded digital services and platforms
• a smartphone that lets you do “anything” “anywhere”
• ordering and paying for pickup or delivery food
• buying tickets online

Agency is:

• you have to use this app and you have to agree to these terms and conditions, whether that’s your banking app or your peer-to-peer payments app or your utility’s app or your music streaming app, or whatever
• like rax king’s example above, if you just go to a gig, which means buying tickets online, then you automatically end up getting emails from that venue forever

(yes I know you can opt out from those emails, but the checkbox is automatically checked, and even though it might be one click to unsubscribe from the venue’s mailing list, that’s still a click -- and then also navigating through the screens to confirm that you actually want to unsubscribe, which is what you tapped on in the first place)

Yes things might be more convenient but they are also harder to manage. There is also much more bureaucracy. In the past, you could go to a gig and they wouldn’t email you forever! But now if you don’t want to receive that email then you’ve got to do the work. You didn’t have to do that work before. You’ve now got more things competing for your attention, and if you want to do anything about it, then you’ve got more bureaucracy to wade through.

Apps, the internet, digital transformation made businesses more agile [sic], which has honestly I think exposed the power imbalance between seller and buyer, and that’s without getting into anti-competition regulation and consumer protection regulation.

We don’t have choice. We have convenience of access. Yes, you can MyChart your doctor now. But you have less agency in terms of how you deal with your health insurance provider, which means you have more hoops to jump through. Pamela Herd and Don Moynihan wrote about something connected to this in their book Administrative Burden: Policymaking by Other Means, which essentially covered how bureaucratic frication (form filling! unnecessary rules!) can be intentionally (or unintentionally, I guess) to manage or restrict access to government services one might be entitled to. As, you know, a policy choice. Simplest high-level example would be means-testing benefits or social programs and then imposing for example work requirements.

That’s government bureaucracy. But one thing I’ve been going on about is that the whole deal with “being able to design forms” and “keeping data in computers” has been a horrific disaster in terms of service design because it’s super easy to just add more questions to a form! It’s easier to add than it is to subtract.

Look, I acknowledge that not everything can be simple. Complex things are still complex and require time to work through and understand. But I’d say that capitalism-encouraged complexity has exploded all over the place because the cost of implementing it is relatively cheap and there are overwhelming incentives for doing so because, uh, barely-regulated capitalism I guess.

Some of this “life feels harder even though I might in absolute have more money” might be attributed to decision fatigue. On the one hand I’m sure there are those who see decision fatigue as a minor downside to an explosion of consumer choice, which is great! But the thing is, fatigue is still fatigue.

I’m sure there are also some who will just say that anyone complaining about this is a petulant child crybaby, with a position like “oh no diddums you’re upset because you have to jump through hoops to cancel your NYT subscription well in my day all you had to do is call them up to cancel and you can still do that, you just don’t want to call and speak to people on the phone because from the millennial generation onwards you’re all weird shut-in robots”. And sure, I’m sympathetic to that a bit. But again, that’s the convenience->agency trade-off. It should be easier to cancel through an app, but now I have to do it your way.

A bunch of this is marketing. Communication is cheap. There are CRMs all over the place. Your phone number gets out there and you get texted forever. The economy could be doing great, but you know what? It’s exhausting (sure, an exaggeration, but this is cumulative) getting all those texts from political campaigns begging for money. Unless you invest the time -- which you don’t have! -- in managing all those relationships then you’re continually bombarded. I really do wish someone would do something like a time-and-motion study to see how many marketing-related communications over all channels people receive per day. Or even hour.

You get the convenience of booking an appointment that will work for you. You want to get a reminder of that appointment, sure, we’ll email you. We’ll also email you about sales. And promotions.

This is going to sound like it’s just marketing, but really, it’s not. I really do think things are harder than they used to be. Make fun of writing checks or whatever, but instead of one way to pay bills (which was a stupid way in the U.S. and is dealt with far more elegantly in the U.K. and Europe), every single thing that bills you is going to do it a different way.

Every person is their own sysadmin now. Every service you use -- which is essentially an app -- is its own interface with its own terms and conditions and its own email every few months letting you know that they’ve changed their terms and conditions which just reminds me your choices are “use the thing and agree to the terms and conditions” or “not use the thing”.

So I honestly think that although we are surrounded by a cornucopia of services those services are exhausting. You want to listen to music you pay for whatever streaming service and the thing is, it doesn’t really deliver on its promise of “just listen to the music you want to” because maybe it’s not there? And it might not be there for entirely understandable reasons like “the artists are Massive Attack and don’t want to, or can afford to, not get fucked over by Spotify”. Or you might want to make a playlist and you know what? The playlist making interface is fucking stupid, which hasn’t been fixed because Daniel Ek wants to “own the relationship with your ears” and now the music service is also the podcast service so I guess you’re paying for podcasts as well now too?

Convenience for agency. I use Apple Maps because it’s honestly good-enough and cleaner than Google Maps. But this September with the next release of iOS, Apple are going to be introducing ads in Apple Maps and you won’t be able to opt out. I mean sure maps are expensive? And yes we’re in this hole because “giving things away for free” turned out to be a really great way to build a moat [sic] if you could afford the billions of dollars to dig one in the first place.

A bunch of this stuff is, I think, fundamental infrastructure for surviving in the (west) 21st century. It’s also honestly difficult to decide whether or not to opt out of communications. We used Hipcamp FOUR YEARS AGO when we went camping and we still get emails from them at least twice a month that we haven’t unsubscribed to “just in case there’s a good deal”.

I’m going to repeat that this is separate from the whole enshittification thing. The enshittification thing is enclosure as a result of intentionally limp and captured consumer protection regulation. Get the punters in and then ratchet up revenue by reducing scope and increasing price. Got it.

This is distinct because it’s about the, I don’t know, cognitive overhead of the malleability of business services. If we’re going to say that a smartphone is basically an essential now then we’re also saying that your entire life is technologically mediated and the cost of implementing business and policy and terms and conditions is so much lower than it ever was. You don’t have to print out all the forms again!

So that’s what I think is happening. Lately, at least. Asking people how they feel the economy is doing is a proxy for asking them how easy it is to live, of which “how much things cost” is just a slice. Yes I don’t need to carry cash around and that’s convenient but also my cafe has terms and conditions now, and they’re not even really my cafe’s terms and conditions!

The introduction of technology into service delivery is the exact thing that allows the chipping away of agency. It allows for management and restrictions as much as it allows for expansion of access. For media, my choices are things like “subscribe to Disney Plus” or “buy the media” of which I can buy a license to the media, or buy the media on a physical format. Digital rights management is one of the clearest expressions of trading, well, rights, for convenience of access to the extent that the State of California finally had it and now requires service to providers to explicitly say that you’re not buying the thing, you’re buying access to the thing, which means the thing you thought you possessed you didn’t actually own and that possession can be revoked at any time.

Our kids don’t go to a Chromebook school but from what I’ve heard from parents whose kids do go to a Chromebook school, suddenly you kind of also have to do sysadminning of the Chromebooks? If you want to be involved in, say, setting screentime limits and (sure, be judgy) actively parenting then you’ve got to manage multiple OS-level screentime/parental controls.

Back to media: sure, you’ve got access to “a bunch of Disney stuff”. But here’s a post I saw on r/parenting recently: “hey, can I restrict just one show on Disney Plus?” and the answer is: no, you cannot. Your choice is either “all the stuff according to the rating system level you choose” or “nothing”. Hell, even the podcast thing: our kids had access to Spotify which was great and all and then Spotify started doing video podcasts which ended up being pirated TikToks which, you know, we made an active choice as not being appropriate for our kids. Did we have agency in terms of restricting those? No! Now I have a janky set of firewall rules in Ubiquiti targeted at Spotify’s video CDN. YouTube just arbitrarily turned on Shorts and maybe you can turn them off now?

And yes, the argument is “well there’s a bunch of good stuff on YouTube” and that’s true, there is! But again, the trade that we made was gaining access in exchange for agency.

You want to “read something” now? Sure, get hit by a gate first to give Substack your email address.

Digitally delivered services can just change faster. The latest example is shoving AI into everything. You don’t get a choice about whether what you’re using suddenly has a sparkle button in it, whether you’re paying for it or not. It’s just there. And then suddenly for a service you’re paying for it does have sparkles in it and you have to pay more and you don’t have the choice of paying less for the no-sparkles version. You don’t get a choice. We talk about apps and services iterating fast to find product-market fit which I guess sure fine at the beginning but that also in a way delivers a discipline of shipping product changes regularly and frequently. Like, you’re paying a bill one month and next month the way you pay your bill has changed? And I get it, every time a UX change is made nobody likes it and everyone complains even if it really is for the best and better but also, sometimes they’re not! Sometimes they’re really shitty business decisions. But again, you don’t have a choice because I guess Marketplace is the thing. You don’t have a choice because it’s iOS or Android.

I suppose a lot of this is also based on the perspective of someone who’s 46 years old and has gone from paying for things with cheques in the post all the way through to booping phones. But I also protest that this isn’t Old Man Yells At Modern Business Cloud because I don’t think things are, or ever will be, as stable as they were. Things just change now because they can. I would like to believe that the quality of interaction would improve, but without, like a sort of HIG for living (which is I guess kind of what modern consumer protection regulation and enforcement might look like) then it’s just an ever changing melange of how-to-do-stuff.

I might have more money. I might have more choice and access than ever before. I also just plainly have more work and admin to do.

It’s been a while, I know. A lot’s been going on.

How have you been?

Best,

Dan