Once upon a time, when things broke, you fixed them. A radio hissed? Swap the tubes. A clock slowed down? Adjust the gears. A password didn’t work? Try the one you always use for everything, and voilà.
Now we live in the age of the Unfixable.
Take my internet-synced clock. It’s marvelously precise, always in step with the global atomic time network—except it’s three hours and eight minutes behind. Not three hours, not three hours and ten, but three-oh-eight. You could use it to time a soufflé, if you don’t mind eating it for breakfast the following day.
Or consider my car radio. It underwent a “firmware upgrade” that—judging by its results—was designed by a graduate student in Zen studies. It now intermittently shuts off the sound altogether. The screen glows, the station number twinkles, but the music is lost in the void. Perhaps this is meant as a reminder that silence, too, is golden.
Then there’s my computer software that “won’t work.” No diagnostic codes, no rational error message, just an existential shrug from the screen. And video programs that politely disable the camera forever, as if to say: “Enough selfies already.” Online subscriptions reject my confirmed username and password like a maître d’ who has decided my shoes are wrong for the restaurant.
If you dare consult the online forums, you find yourself adrift in a sea of responses from people with tenth-degree black belts in arcane computer lore. They promise salvation through rituals involving registry edits, terminal windows, and hex codes—but for mere mortals, it’s like being handed a recipe for the philosopher’s stone. The holy grail of a fixed clock, radio, or computer lies just beyond reach, obscured by a fog of jargon.
What unites all these experiences is not inconvenience, but permanence. They are not broken in a way that can be repaired; they are broken in a way that is meant to endure. Each comes with a faint aroma of inevitability, as if the designers wanted to remind us of our human limits: You are not in control. Please stop pressing that button.
In earlier times, there was a ritual of tinkering. You could open the back of the radio, replace the fuse, clean the contacts, phone the company and talk to someone who might actually know. Now the service rep cheerfully advises a “full factory reset,” which is like suggesting a full lobotomy for a minor headache.
So here we are, navigating daily life in the Church of the Unfixable. Perhaps Corey Doctorow will deliver a sermon on ‘enshittification’. Aspects should include the objects and entry points common to modern daily life: Clocks that always know the wrong time, radios that deliver only silence, passwords that never open doors. We pretend this is progress. But sometimes, as I stare at my perfectly accurate yet permanently inaccurate clock, I suspect the machines are no longer here to serve us—they’re here to remind us to lower our expectations.
In the meantime, I recommend buying a cheap wind-up alarm clock. At least when it stops, you can just wind it again.