We bullied HP into a minor act of disenshittification
Score one for the ink-stained wretches.
I’m on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel Picks and Shovels. Catch me in TORONTO TOMORROW (Feb 23) at Another Story, and in NYC on WEDNESDAY (Feb 26) with JOHN HODGMAN. More tour dates here.
Here in the darkest days of the enshittocene, enshittification is low quality and plentiful, but even in this target-rich environment, one company stands out as pioneering champions of enshittification: HP.
Every page in the enshittification playbook was printed in farcically expensive HP ink, and if you try to run a copy off for yourself, the printer will stop five times and force you to print a “calibration page” that is solid color from top to bottom, consuming about $10 worth of ink. Don’t like it? Die mad.
HP drips with contempt for its customers. They make printer-scanners that won’t scan unless all four ink cartridges are installed and haven’t reached their best-before dates. They make printers that won’t print black and white if your $50 magenta cartridge is low. They sell you printers with special half-full cartridges that need to be replaced pretty much as soon as the printer has run off its mandatory “calibration” pages. The full-serving ink you buy to replace those special demitasse cartridges is also booby-trapped — HP reports them as empty when they’re still 20% full.
HP tricks customers into signing up for irrevocable subscriptions where you have to pay every month, whether or not you print, and if you exceed your subscription cap, the printer refuses to work, no matter how much ink is left. Now, about those HP ink subscriptions. When the company launched them, they offered a pot-sweetener meant to tempt in the wary: a one-price “lifetime subscription” that would let you print 15 pages every month, for so long as you owned the printer. But a couple years later, all those “free ink for life” customers got an email telling them that they were being migrated to a monthly payment plan, and if they didn’t like it, they could eat shit and throw away their printers:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/06/horrible-products/#inkwars
HP pioneered the use of copyright law to prevent third parties from refilling ink cartridges or making their own compatible cartridges. Section 1201 of Bill Clinton’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to distribute a “circumvention device” to bypass access controls on a copyrighted work. By designing its cartridges do undertake a little cryptographic handshake with the printer to verify their “authenticity,” HP ensures that anyone who markets a bypass device to let you choose which ink you use in your own damn printer is a felon, liable to five years in prison and a $500 fine under DMCA 1201.
Of course, nature finds a way. Hardware hackers have come up with some insanely cool bypass devices for HP printer cartridges, like these paper-thin, flexible, adhesive-backed circuit boards that wrap around third party cartridges, intercepting communications between the printer and a salvaged HP security chip:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches
But HP fights back, and they fight dirty. For example, they periodically push out “security updates” for their printers that break compatibility with third party cartridges. To prevent HP customers from discovering and blocking these fake security updates, HP designs them to lie dormant for months after installation, until everyone has clicked “OK,” and then all those Manchurian Printers wake up and betray their owners by refusing to use their ink:
All of this has allowed HP to monotonically raise — and raise — and raise — the price of printer ink to the point where it is now the most expensive fluid a civilian can purchase without a permit. Printer ink now runs over $10,000/gallon, meaning that you print out your grocery lists with colored water that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner.
HP is truly the poster child for enshittification, and also, patient zero in the enshittification pandemic:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#hache-pe
HP’s enshittificatory impulses run wild. They hunt relentlessly for ways to make things worse for their customers in order to make things better for themselves. Last week, they came up with a humdinger, even by their own standards. They announced that people who called their customer service line would be subject to mandatory 15-minute waits, even if there was a rep who was free to talk with them:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/hp_deliberately_adds_15_minutes/
During this mandatory 15-minute wait, customers would be bombarded with a recorded voice demanding that they solve their problems by consulting HP’s website and its awful chatbots. In a competitive market, businesses can contain their customer service costs by making better products. In a monopolistic market like the printer racket, companies can deliberately introduce maddening antifeatures to their products, and then fob off the customers who reach such a peak of frustrated rage that they resort to calling a customer support number on chatbot that will use its spicy autocomplete to hallucinate nonexistent drivers and imaginary troubleshooting steps.
When I saw this, I thought, whelp, that’s HP all right. Shameless.
But they’re not entirely shameless. Within a day of Paul Kunert breaking the story in The Register, HP had reversed its policy, citing “feedback” (a corporate euphemism that means “fury”):
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/21/hp_ditches_15_minute_wait_time_call_centers/
This is a rare win for the forces of disenhittification and it deserves recognition. It turns out that in these Mangionean times, companies can actually be bullied into comporting themselves with marginally less sleaze and cruelty. It’s especially noteworthy that this took place in the UK, where Prime Minister Kier Starmer has invited tech companies to pick Britons’ pockets without fear of consequence, by firing the top competition regulator and replacing him with the former head of Amazon UK:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter
Even in these degraded times, we can get these fuckers. When Sonos enshittifies its smart speakers, we can get its CEO fired:
https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24342179/sonos-ceo-patrick-spence-resignation-reason-app
When Unity sticks its hand in the pockets of every game dev in the world, we can get its entire executive team shitcanned:
https://venturebeat.com/games/john-riccitiello-steps-down-as-ceo-of-unity-after-pricing-battle/
It doesn’t always work. Enshittifiers rack up some Ws, and make bank even as they immiserate 500 million users (looking at you, Steve Huffman — the people have long memories):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Reddit_API_controversy
But if we can bully the psychotic monsters who populate HP’s Executive Row out of their enshittificatory plans, then it’s worth trying it every time.
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/22/ink-spattered-pitchforks/#racehorse-semen
