Blog – Page 4 – The Renegade Coder

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how annoyed I am with the tech field. As someone who teaches new software developers, I'm having a hard time justifying what we do because so much of tech is getting worse. At the same time, I'm noticing that the worsening of tech (i.e., it's enshittification) is accelerating at the hands of generative AI. Needless to say, I had a lot to unpack in this article. Everything Is Getting Shittier Broadly, the term "enshittification" refers to the tendency of digital products and services to get worse over time. Rather than trying to describe this idea in detail, I think it's much easier just to show it. To do that, I'm going to list off all the different pieces of tech that I can think of that have gotten noticeably worse in my lifetime. However, before I do that, I want to quickly share a variety of articles I've written on this site over the years that show me complaining about tech, just so it doesn't seem like I'm jumping on the enshittification bandwagon: AT&T Is Just Bad (2018) What It’s Like Being an AT&T Customer (2019) AT&T Is a Disaster: The Offer That Never Came to Be (2019) Google Isn’t Even Trying to Rank Decent Computer Science Content (2020) Windows 10 Network Drivers and Their Massive Memory Leak (2020) Master Chief Collection’s Halo 2 Co-op Campaign Is Unplayable: Here Are Some Tips (2022) Google Threatens to Ruin Search as We Know It (2024) Checking Up on Google Search in 2024: It’s Worse Somehow (2024) What Is Going On With Cloud Storage for Photos? (2024) Why I Left Twitter (2025) Canvas Is Not Built With Educators in Mind (2025) Hopefully, those articles keep you busy. If not, the rest of this article is well over 5,000 words and is estimated to take 30 minutes to read, so you better get started! Google Maps I want to kick off this list with a piece of technology that I've used extensively over the past decade+ to get around various US cities like Columbus, OH and Atlanta, GA as well as countries like the UK and Japan. As you can probably tell already from the heading, I'm talking about Google Maps. As someone in their 30s, I grew up without a smartphone until I was in college. Prior to having access to the internet at my fingertips, I either had to print out directions, follow a physical map (though, I've never done that), or use a specialized piece of GPS hardware with some goofy name like TomTom. Eventually, when I got my first iPhone in 2012, I began making use of apps like Apple Maps and Google Maps. At the time, Apple Maps was garbage, and you would get ridiculed for using it. Yet, as of 2025, that relationship has begun to flip. Now, I can't claim to know which app is better. In fact, I still reluctantly use Google Maps (and perhaps I can explain why elsewhere in this article), but I can tell you one thing: Google Maps is worse than it used to be. Recommended Routes That Do Not Exist Recently, I was driving through town, and I needed to pull out some cash for a graduation party. Naturally, I had Google Maps route me to the nearest ATM, which happened to be in a gas station. As I got closer, I could see the gas station, but Google Maps wanted me to turn a little bit early. Trusting the apps judgment, I followed its recommendation blindly. After all, I've tried to outsmart the pathing many times, only to be bitten by construction or a wreck. However, this time, the map took me to a turn that led nowhere. I mean that literally. Had I chosen to take the turn, I would have driven right into a concrete barrier. Presumably, there was a turn there at some point, but the road that used to be there had been gone for quite some time. As a result, I had to convert my turn into a U-turn, and try again. I've also been bitten by this once in another part of town featuring newer roundabouts. For the past several months, when I get off the highway to go to Costco, Google Maps tells me to get in the rightmost lane. The thing is: the rightmost lane takes me right back onto the highway I just left. If I want to get where I'm going, I have to go to the middle lane. Now, you might be like: why are you using Google Maps to go to a grocery store you visit regularly? And honestly, that's a good question, of which I really only have two answers. First, in a major city, it's nice to have peace of mind when routing travel. There have been so many times where I've been late to work because of backed up traffic due to a crash or some other daily occurrence. If I had just loaded up my route on Google Maps, I probably would have made it on time. Second, dependence on these kinds of navigation apps might actually reduce your spatial memory. I can attest to that personally. It's probably like five turns from my house to Costco, but I can never remember the exact route. I find that latter point particularly damning because it gives Google leeway to make their app shittier—and shittier it has gotten. After all, I'm dependent on it, so it's not like I'm going to suddenly stop using it. Of course, any time I decide to protest, it's only a matter of days before I'm bit by traffic again. No Time to Make Exits Anyway, beyond both the left turn and Costco examples, there are tons of ways I've found Google Maps frustrating to use. In Columbus specifically, Google Maps does this thing where it recommends back-to-back turns/exits without there being enough time to make them. This happened to me recently as I was driving back from Pittsburgh. Google Maps told me to transfer off of one highway onto another. In this case, the new highway had me merge on the left side. Google Maps then wanted me to cross three lanes of traffic in maybe 100 feet. By the time I read the second half of what I was meant to do, I had already missed my turn, and I angrily watched as my 3 hour and 28 minute drive became a 3 hour and 32 minute drive. Why would it even suggest doing something so dangerous? Sure, you could argue that roads are designed poorly in Columbus, but I'd prefer to arrive alive. Impossible to Match Estimates The next thing I'll mention in terms of frustration is Google's time estimate. As someone who does a lot of long distance travel by car, I rely on the estimate to get a good feel for when I'm going to get somewhere (obviously). I don't know if they changed how they calculate that estimate, but it's almost impossible to meet it. As I said before, I did a quick one-day drive from Columbus to Pittsburgh (or rather, Butler). The estimate was 3 hours and 24 minutes on the way in. To get there at 8:00 AM, I left at 4:30 AM. Any guess at when I got there? Yeah, it was 8:20 AM with a quick stop for gas. Now, you might argue that the reason I was late was because I stopped for gas. You would be wrong. The reason I was late was because I was following the speed limit on I79 in Pennsylvania. There is a stretch of I79 from south of Pittsburgh to Butler that is 55 MPH, not only in terms of signage but also in what Google Maps displays. As I'm riding down that road at a crisp 58 MPH, I'm watching the time estimate climb. At first, you might think that maybe there's a crash or something. Nope. Keep in mind that it's like 7:00 AM on a Sunday, and basically no one is on the road. Of the people on the road, the average speed was probably closer to 70 MPH as I watched cars fly by me. So, I am stuck wondering. Is the estimate based off of actually safe travel speeds or is it based off other Google Maps users trying to beat their estimate? Naturally, on the way home, I tried to test this theory. For about the first 90 minutes of the trip, I dangerously sped my way home. For that stretch of the trip, I was probably averaging 80 MPH. Despite driving well over the speed limit, I didn't see a single minute drop off the estimate. Then, when I ran into a rainy patch and everyone slowed down due to low visibility, I watched the estimate climb. Impractical Walking Routes Finally, I need to talk about using Google Maps in Japan. Just about everyone told me that navigation apps were amazing in Japan because they include up-to-date information related to train and bus times. While I was only there for 15 days, I found Google Maps unhelpful at best. Often times, I would just follow the signs instead. For example, when it routes you to a train, it doesn't actually walk with you. You have to use it like a literal map. One time where this was particularly frustrating was when our colleagues at the university told us to meet them at a different spot than usual. Google Maps recommended that we take the "left loop" instead of our usual "right loop." In the change of directions, it routed us out of the "A4" exit instead of our usual "A3" exit. At this point, you can probably guess the punchline here: both the left loop and the right loop leave from the same exact spot. So, I guided our group out of a different exit (which didn't have an escalator) and walked us the long way around to our usual spot. While this wasn't a big deal to me (after all, I see everything as a learning opportunity), so many people were whining about it. Overall, for an app whose only job is to provide you a route from point A to B, follow you on that route, and tell you how long it will take, it's pretty shit. Sure, it has all these cool features now like night mode when the sun goes down, speed limits, and speed traps. But, the core product is shit. Just take a peek at its subreddit. Here's an internet archive link to the homepage from yesterday (2025-06-08), though today is probably more representative of my complaints with titles like: Google mislabeled my ranch as a park and we constantly have people on our property. How do I fix this? Won't find directions anymore? google maps gets dumber daily (conveniently even a poster used the word enshittification here) Internet of Things There is sort of a broad category of tech products and services called Internet of Things (IoT), and they're all shit. Lately, I haven't really heard much about IoT, but it was a really big deal around the time I left college in 2016. Every company was trying to develop some "smart" device that they could network together to provide some holistic experience in the home. The reason I point to IoT as an example of enshittification is because all of the products that exist in this realm take something that already exists and makes it shittier. Robot Vacuums To start, let's talk about robot vacuums. While I can't say that robot vacuums have gotten worse, I can say that they're objectively shittier than just taking 20 minutes to vacuum your house yourself. For context, I've owned two different robot vacuums in my lifetime, both by the same brand, iHome. While these vacuums were always gifts, I often felt like they caused way more trouble than they were worth. Now surely, that could just be a brand issue, but I am so turned off by them at this point that I don't think I'll ever buy a nicer one myself (if such a thing even exists). My main problem with robot vacuums stems from them being way more work than a traditional vacuum. For example, I used to have a "dumb" robot vacuum that worked by bumping into surfaces to find its way around. This type of vacuum was pretty annoying because it would just get stuck everywhere as it tried to navigate the space. As a result, I would spend tons of time going, "hey, has anyone seen the vacuum? it's not by its dock." As much as I love hide and seek, playing it daily with a vacuum that never quite finishes its job is annoying. Eventually, the person who gifted us the vacuum saw it in action and felt bad, so they bought us the upgraded model with LIDAR. As you might know, LIDAR uses lasers to map a space. You'll often see LIDAR on top of self-driving cars like the recently destroyed Waymo in LA. And if it's good enough for Waymo, it must be good enough for a vacuum. But, it sucks. Sure, it can now map our home. It can even be programmed to only vacuum certain areas of the home. Sounds nice, doesn't it? The problem is that none of these features really work. The maps are regularly thrown out and regenerated if you so much as move a chair. The scheduling feature eventually gives up and stops running the vacuum when you want it to. The vacuum itself still gets stuck despite having a LIDAR sensor to map the space, and the "cliff sensors" trigger on just about anything resembling a cliff. That last point was of particular frustration to me because we have a variety of floor vents for our HVAC system. Every single time the vacuum would drive over a vent, it will stop running and trigger an error. To solve this, we would do silly things like make the space too small for the vacuum to drive over the vent or place objects over the vent (e.g., what we affectionately called our "vent soup," which was just a can of soup that we placed over the vent). Talk about a conversation starter when we had guests over. Of course, it doesn't help that both robot vacuums were very loud and weren't nearly as good as a regular vacuum. Sure, they could get under tables and beds, but I often felt like they were just pushing dirt around rather than sucking it up. To make matter worse (and this is a brand specific problem), I couldn't figure out how to purchase replacement dust bags for the dock. You can supposedly buy them directly from the iHome site, but they don't differentiate between models. This is a big problem because I'm not certain the docks are all the same. Even if so, the bags in the photo are junk. The dock has the bag vent centered, but the bags in the photo have the cardboard piece to the side. Because I don't necessarily trust iHome's site, nor do I necessarily want to pay proprietary bag prices, I turned to Amazon. On Amazon, you can get twice as many knockoff bags for a few bucks less. Unfortunately, the knockoff bags are just slightly too narrow to "seal" the dock, so you'll get a warning that the bag isn't installed correctly. I fixed this problem by wedging an extra piece of cardboard alongside the main carboard piece, but I find it somewhat frustrating that the tolerancing on the dock is so tight that a fix like this is even needed. I bet some of the OEM bags have the same problem. Needless to say, I spent so much time playing hide & seek, reprogramming, and repairing these vacuums that I could do without one for a while. Lightbulbs & Alexa Another piece of goofy IoT tech is the lightbulb. In terms of tech that already works but could possibly be made better through IoT, lightbulbs seem to be at the top of the list. And I even still somewhat hold that sentiment to this day, but they're not without their quirks. I first bought a smart bulb probably back in 2016/17. At the time, I was working at General Electric, and we were on a little excursion to one of the other GE branches. In this case, the branch was lighting (while it still existed). At the time, GE Lighting was experimenting with more consumer-grade lighting options. After all, some of their competitors, like Philips, were having some success with consumer light fixtures and bulbs (especially smart ones). Of course, if you know anything about GE, you know that they don't really do software. So, when they dabbled in smart bulbs, they did a shit job. With that said, I didn't know that at the time, and I sort of fell for their marketing. When I saw a couple of LED bulbs that could be controlled with a smart phone, I was hooked, so I bought a pair. At that point, I was locked into the GE smart home ecosystem, so I bought more. As of today, I have eight of their smart bulbs, one of their light strips, one of their smart switches, and one of their smart plugs. In general, I like the bulbs. I like being able to control their color. I like being able to group them by room and control them with smart switches. I like having them hooked up to Alexa, so I can verbally turn on and off any lights in the house. Hell, I like being able to turn lights on and off while I'm away from my house. With that said, the smart bulbs are not without their problems. Unlike normal bulbs, they're not tied to a switch unless you get a physical smart switch and mount it to your wall. Otherwise, your only mechanism of controlling them is to use an app. This can be a bit annoying and counterintuitive as you literally have to bust out your smartphone to turn lights on and off. Now, for my family and I, we've gotten used to using Amazon's Alexa to turn the lights on and off with our voice. There are, of course, challenges with this. First, while the Alexa app has gotten a lot better, there are often connectivity issues where Alexa just can't access the bulb. In those cases, we're forced to go back to the app to turn the lights off/on manually. Again, this might be one of the few cases in this article where things have gotten better, not worse, but I distinctly remember just not being able to control my lights regularly because Alexa couldn't find the bulbs, and I couldn't log into the app to do anything about it. Perhaps things got better because I bought more of them to improve the mesh network, as one Redditor suggests. Second, you have to know what you call every bulb. If you're smart enough to group the bulbs, you can simplify this task a bit by naming the room/group for Alexa. That said, here's a typical daily interaction for me at this point: Me: Alexa, can you turn on the basement lights? Alexa: OKMe: Alexa, can you turn off the light strip?Alexa: OK When I setup my basement, I had this genius idea to put the light strip behind my desk. Well, whenever it turns on, it puts a huge glare on my monitor. Surely, I could move the light strip or remove the light strip from the basement group, but the inconvenience is so minor that I haven't worked up the energy to solve the problem. As you can probably imagine, there are dozens of these tiny inconveniences throughout the house now because of how painful it is to setup and change the smart home system. After all, whatever groups you set up in the GE Lighting app (which is now actually the Cync app) do not propagate to Alexa. Instead, you have to setup up rooms with Alexa separately. In other words, whatever you define as "basement" in the Cync app could be totally different than what you define as "basement" for Alexa. Because I've moved so many times in the last decade, I've generally spent like a day at each place just setting up lights. Then, I never touch them again. As a result, here's the setup of our current home in both Alexa and the Cync app, which I am never changing until we move: Basement Light Strip PC Light Treadmill Light Bedroom Jeremy's Light Morgan's Light Dining Room Dining Room Light Smart Plug (to remotely turn on a wax warmer) Living Room Left Couch Light Right Couch Light Smart Switch (to turn both lights on/off) Nursery Nursery Light At the moment, the nursery light can't even be controlled because it's plugged into a lamp that is connected to a normal switch. As a result, we just use that lamp like a normal light. Everything else works more or less as intended. With that said, I should mention that the bulb's themselves have to be maintained. You need to periodically go into the Cync app and update them, which is just not something I ever expected to have to do with a light bulb. Likewise, the bulbs are buggy, so they'll sometimes just turn on by themselves—even in the middle of the night when you're sleeping. Overall, while the smart bulbs probably don't classify as enshittification directly, they don't exactly make your life better. It's more of the same, just different. The Internet Perhaps the biggest offender of enshittification is the internet. This one is interesting to discuss for a couple of reasons: 1) I am aware that there is a tendency to look at old technology through rose-colored glasses and the internet is no exception and 2) the internet isn't exclusively owned by one single entity like say Facebook or Google. On that first point, the early internet wasn't great. It was slow. It was hard to find things. It was inaccessible for people with disabilities. It was unfiltered and unmoderated. On the flip side, however, there was never this concern of going viral or getting canceled. There was never a feeling that you were talking to a bot. There was never this idea that all of your information was being bought and sold, and there were way less ads. There was never this desire to monetize every hobby, and not every aspect of your life became "content." Likewise, social media was a place of actual self-expression, and search engines actually worked. When I look at what the internet has become over the past 30 years, I can't really chalk up my critiques to nostalgia or being past the honeymoon stage. We're talking about a piece of technology that grew up beside me, except one of us used that time to better ourself while the other self-destructed. It's interesting because I don't know exactly when the internet started to get worse, but I have to imagine it was around the time social media took off. That would put us somewhere around the housing crisis, say between 2005 and 2010. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were all sites I joined around that time as a high schooler. I remember it being pretty cool to connect with my friends using a flip phone and the family desktop. All the terrible pictures and videos we took were all shared on these platforms without a care in the world. Now, I won't even share pictures of my daughter because I don't trust them not to be scraped and loaded into some demon's AI model and sold to creeps. I have to have a password manager because companies can't be trusted not to store my information in plain text. I have to use an adblocker because the internet is more ads than it is value. At this point, the internet is a dumping ground for slop. If it's not SEO optimized marketing slop filling out the search results, it's AI generated slop stolen from the SEO optimized slop. If it's not some grifter rage baiting or concern trolling on social media for engagement, it's a bot replicating the same behavior. All the worst parts of the way we coexist as humans are the bread and butter of the contemporary internet. We did this to ourselves. Video Games When I'm not writing, hanging out with my kiddo, or working, I like to play video games. That said, it's hard not to acknowledge the general enshittification of the whole medium. When I was growing up, a lot of video games were really bad, and I think that's to be expected of an immature medium. That said, there was a lot of charm to those old games, even the bad ones. I wrote about this when I got back into an old MMO called Phantasy Star Online. Today, aside from indie games, I don't really feel the same charm. Of course, part of that is the corporatization of the medium. Perhaps the earliest and most egregious example was Bethesda, who opened the door for unethical microtransactions with their inclusion of horse armor in Oblivion (a game that was recently remastered by the way). Since then, games have become shameless with microtransactions. These days, even the shittiest mobile game has a store where you can purchase things like cosmetics, loot boxes, or a battle pass. That's right! Microtransactions are no longer about getting extra content, like with a game expansion. They're all about different ways to make your character look cool. I think one of the truly egregious examples of the corporatization of gaming comes from the Counter-Strike space, where you can purchase in-game "loot boxes" that contain items like weapon skins that can be sold for real money. As a result, you now have children with gambling addictions from some video game loophole. Of course, this was inevitable as companies realized that step one of enshittification is growing their audience to some critical mass. To do that, a lot of games have gone down the free-to-play (F2P) route. If the game is decent enough, this can result in millions of people downloading the game to check it out. While I don't know which game was the first to do this successfully, basically every major shooter is F2P now Because so many major games are now F2P, their revenue models are almost entirely around cosmetics. After all, the pay-to-win model is just about the only model that gamers seem to resist—excluding the mobile, RPG, or Gacha scenes, of course. Now, the term "microtransaction" is a bit of a misnomer these days. The average cost of a skin in games like Overwatch 2, Marvel Rivals, Valorant, and even Helldivers 2 seems to be well into the double digits. At one point in Overwatch 2, base mythic skins costed 50 mythic shards (or $40 USD). When I last played, these skins could be upgraded multiple times for 10 mythic shards each, meaning a fully featured skin might run you closer to $80 for a single hero. That's robbery, brother. One cosmetic that has recently gotten a lot of attention is from a newly announced F2P game called Splitgate 2. Apparently, the game launched with a silver portal animation that you could purchase for a measly $34, and I'm sure people bought it. These companies are getting far too comfortable. What's next? Using generative AI to fill our games up with slop? Oh wait, they're pitching that as good thing. Needless to say, any form of self-expression or service to your fellow man, whether it be in engineering, blogging, or game design, has been bled dry by short-term profit seeking. Perhaps one day we'll stop seeing tech as a means of making a quick buck, but I'll tell you one thing: our current solution to the problem is not working. The Solution to Enshittification? Capitulate to Right Wingers, I Guess And it's interesting, right? After all, the narrative you're sold online is that the reason products and services are getting worse is because they're going "woke." Now, every video game, movie, TV show, and song is disgustingly "woke" because they would dare to include a Black person. Of course, companies hear this (or rather they want this to be the narrative), so what do they do? They further lean into enshittification. You can see this with the inclusion of "grok" on Twitter, an openly white supremacist AI model. You can also see this with Facebook, which has given up on moderating their site. Even universities are caving to this narrative and are cutting their DEI offices. The long term plan for tech companies (but also society at large) seems to be to make everything worse on purpose. After all, we're so bought into their ecosystems, we wouldn't dare leave. If a CEO openly leaned into Nazi symbolism, do you think that would cause people to jump ship? Well, maybe. At least, we're seeing some positive movement on that end with Twitter. But even then, I'm not sure that leaving these sites is really going to solve any problems—at least in the short term. For now, companies seem fine with keeping the bot accounts on their sites to fool their shareholders into thinking there's genuine engagement. In fact, they might even believe that bots make for a better user experience. After all, there is literally a company pitching a bot-only experience, presumably to the most narcissistic people you know. The internet is just a place for bots to interact with bots now, and shareholders love it. Generative AI Is the Enshittification Engine Given all this talk of bots, there's no way I wasn't going to address the elephant in the room: generative AI. As a technology, I have never seen something so rapidly destroy everything it touches. Do you like art? Here's a shittier version made by AI. Do you enjoy looking up information using a search engine? Here's a shittier answer to your query written by AI. Do you like crafting text messages to your friends and family? Here's a shittier sample response you can send them written by AI. Or, how about some truly horrendous examples. Do you want a partner? Here's a shittier version in the form of AI. Do you need therapy? Don't worry! Here's a shittier version in the form of AI. Hate talking to your kid? Here's a story that'll shut them up, courtesy of AI. Do you want to complete an assigned essay with zero effort? Sure, here's a shittier version of that essay written by AI. For the last few months, I've been on a massive crusade against generative AI because it's an anti-human technology. But even if you don't care about that, it's rapidly accelerating enshittification. Every single company is trying to get their grubby hands on it, so they can incorporate an OpenAI wrapper in their service, fire their workers, and profit. It really is that simple. Shame, Purity, and Ethical Consumption One thing that has been really challenging for me is trying not to shame others for their consumption choices. I really, really want others to feel bad for their usage of generative AI because we're already far too comfortable with it. No one seems to be bothered that these models are giant theft machines that accelerate climate change while regurgitating soulless slop. It truly boggles my mind. However, I don't believe in purity testing. What I mean by that is that I don't believe you're a bad person for what you choose to consume. Life is quite hard, and I find it getting harder as the wealth disparity gets worse. If you want your treats, you can have them. In my case, my desire to make people feel bad for their usage of generative AI will never hold up to scrutiny (and like with voting, I find shaming to be a counterproductive strategy). I could just as easily be called out for eating meat, even if veganism is the morally defensible position. If this sort of dilemma sounds familiar to you, it's because it's echoed in the phrase, "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism." You can interpret that last phrase as grace to do whatever you like, but I tend to interpret it as no one is absolved of the sins of capitalism. Let me illustrate it this way. I don't use Google Search. I use DuckDuckGo. Does that make me morally superior to someone who uses Google? Of course not. I also have deleted my Facebook and Twitter profiles. Am I a better person than others for that? Absolutely not. After all, I still use Duolingo despite the backlash. Or how about a timely one: I don't go to Starbucks, not because of a boycott (regardless of whether its on the BDS list or not), but because I don't care for it. Do I get to claim moral superiority here? No. Ultimately, I think you should try to do the right thing as often as you can, but I also don't think it makes sense to waste energy obsessing over the morally correct way to be a consumer. To some, being a "conscious consumer" is somewhat silly in that it does nothing to change reality while others say it's just about doing what's right. I don't really care one way or another as long as you're not trying to flex your ethical consumption as moral superiority. You will lose that purity test every time. As always, thanks for reading. When I was putting this article together, I was doing a lot of research about enshittification, and it turns out that everything seems to be getting worse. For instance, Jared Henderson has a wonderful video on how we don't actually own any digital goods anymore. Likewise, half of the articles I tried to read on enshittification were paywalled, which I found a bit ironic. I don't understand how stuff like that even gets ranked. I know mine doesn't. In addition, while I can't find the source anymore, I saw an article point to things I've bitched about in the past, like "smart" TVs and live sports. If you sit around for a minute and think about the tech you use, you'll start to see all the ways it's gotten shittier—I promise. If you're frustrated with tech like me, I encourage you to join me on this journey. You can do so by checking out my list of ways to grow the site. Otherwise, thanks again for reading!