Sunk Costs in the Sunken Place

On Monday morning, my laptop refused to accept my password. I typed it in a few times, each time more carefully than the last, making sure caps lock wasn't on and that I was typing it correctly. I used an external keyboard. I typed slowly. Each time I would hit the return key, and each time the system would pause before the box gave the telltale shake. The more I keyed in my password, the more convinced I became that I was going crazy or that I had entirely forgotten the password and was just making up a new one. After 20 minutes of that, I coaxed my brain into once again believing I was doing it right. The password was correct, I was not at fault, and something was wrong.

There is nothing quite like the feeling of incipient panic brought on by the realization that much of your life and certainly all of your work is either contained in or accessed through a small piece of metal and glass that cheerfully refuses to comply with you, its owner. Not just panic: Powerlessness. An absolute lack of control over an object that, as far as you know, has no sentience and is supposedly controlled by you. Yet there you are, three shallow breaths away from hurling your Mac Air into the sun, on the phone with Apple tech support who informs you that, yeah, he has seen this before with people who haven't upgraded and are still using this previous version of the operating system, which suddenly stops accepting the laptop's password. Whereupon you realize that you cannot find your recovery key because it's not in your password vault – maybe you never even saved it? – and it's at this point that the nice tech support guy informs you of your best option, which is to completely erase your hard drive and reinstall everything.

Do you remember when one of the big selling points of Apple products was that they "just worked"? How streaming services promised to free everyone from the tyranny and excessive costs of cable? The way we delighted in the ability to get even the smallest, most unnecessary object delivered to us overnight or maybe even that very same day? Beyond the fact that many of us now feel duped and aggravated on a regular basis, do you ever wonder how we ended up setting the bar so low? How we're all doing so much extra work to make sure our devices work and our apps our updated and our passwords are secure, to manage the increasing complexity of the technology that was going to simply our lives?

Readers who have not yet lost their minds in 2025 will remember that I wrote a little about this in April, from the inside-tech perspective, and focused on all the work that goes into maintaining and updating the products and tools we use on a regular basis. But I didn't write so much about all the work the rest of us do, just to be able to use those products, and to not have our entire lives falling apart in the process. Nor did I write about what I think that has enabled when it comes to the onslaught of AI products.

One of the interesting things about the tech industry is the way it took the idea of a product, a thing you could buy or own, and transformed it. Sure, you could still buy actual hardware, computers and phones and gadgets, but you could also buy things that were less tangible, like software, services, in-app add-ons, and so on. You entered into these transactions with the implicit understanding, at least as far as the company was concerned, that you were getting the product that was available and functional right now, which didn't always mean it was necessarily the best product the company could make. But that was okay, because the product would change and there would be improvements.

Then, over time, we'd begin to experience diminishing returns. Each change somehow worsened the product a little. Or reduced functionality. Or required us to switch to a new subscription model, even though we'd already paid for a license. But by that point, we're stuck. We like computers and phones. Or we hate them, but we don't know what we'd do without them. Sure, we might switch to another app or stop using a product altogether, but that can be a big ask. The energy and effort required to do that is sometimes more than the average human can spare. Not everyone researches password vaults, organizes files, and reinstalls operating systems for fun, you know? Some of us just want to be able to get our work done or to live our lives. Plus, with some of these products, not using them could mean not staying connected with others, or not engaging in culture, current events, or even the news. A lot of traditional infrastructure has shifted online, disappeared altogether, or been transformed in recent years, so what's the alternative?

Similarly, the industry transformed the relationship between the product producer and the product consumer. Even products that historically "just worked" often required repair, and many people throughout history have learned to do these repairs. The same thing is true of tech, but tech goes a step further: There's an almost symbiotic relationship between the end user and the tech product, albeit a sometimes parasitic one. Each successive wave of technology in recent years has accustomed the consumer with the ways in which technology can "learn" from the user to provide a better experience, all while constantly extracting from the user. Is the output (videos, music, influencer content) worth the price (personal data)? Even people who don't think it is worth the price – people I've spoken with directly during research sessions – recognize that existing in today's world means making tradeoffs. Plus, their data is already out there.

Products have not been a single purchase one-way street for a while now. Data has been harvested for years. Users are constantly asking for useful, sometimes vital features, and instead getting alerts that now they'll receive an in-app "award" for clicking the like button a certain number of times. Yet even with all this, people are not yet giving up on the vast array of products they know to be toxic or actively harmful.

Which is why, when I see people angry about how much money is being wasted on AI or how badly AI performs, I feel a little tired. Babe, where have you been? Some of us have been angry for years, not necessarily about AI but because this is a familiar blueprint for the industry. It's just bigger and faster and worse now, so we have to look at the bigger picture. Not that anyone is wrong to be angry! Anger is very reasonable here! There just has to be something beyond anger. There has to be some focus beyond these companies or even the technology itself. Because in some ways it doesn't matter how much money is wasted or how shitty the products are. There's always going to be colossal sums wasted and shitty products. The problem is that people have been trained to use products that aren't perfect, that need work, that regularly update, and that over time seem to require more and more from us while delivering less in return. Why shouldn't GenAI be the same? And what's the alternative?

I think people know that if companies figured out how to make money off the data we unwittingly provided before, they will certainly figure out how to make money off the data people are dumping in now. This is data I don't think even the evilest tech overlord could have dreamed they would get so easily. Many people I know, including smart and savvy people who have worked in tech, find themselves unable to stop talking to ChatGPT. They spend time training ChatGPT and asking ChatGPT to train them in return, learning how to refine their questions and prompts, learning how to get the most useful results. They ask ChatGPT questions that would make you blush.

So in a way, it doesn’t matter if GenAI isn’t profitable or even very functional right now. At this rate, I don't know if it will ever matter. Even if it never becomes functional, GenAI will follow in the grand tradition of crafting suboptimal solutions to problems their own technology created, and it will sell increasingly degraded versions of all of us back to ourselves.

What do we do? We can't stop the industry from working on GenAI. Even if we could, there are actual use cases that could possibly benefit us. GenAI and ChatGPT are here, and those genies will never return to their bottles. So maybe our attention should turn to the end user. How do we help other people start to disengage from these products? What can we do, whether in person or online, to provide alternatives? This feels like yet another intractable structural problem, one that will take a monumental shove to topple. But in the meantime – or if we succeed – then what next?

In the immediate future, I'll be continuing to set up my laptop that I erased. Until next Wednesday.

Lx

PSA: If you're still on Ventura and don't want to wake up to your password not working, consider upgrading even if you dislike the newer OS options. Or back your system up regularly.