When Did My Tech Stop Being Mine?

Once upon a time, a girl bought a computer. Then she bought software to put on the computer. At first, that software came on a 5 1/4 floppy disk, then a 3.5 floppy disk, then a CD, then a DVD. 

However it came, I bought a video game or a word processing program, installed it on my computer, and it stayed the same until I decided to update it. Software programs just worked, and I didn’t have to worry about it suddenly changing the rules on me.

Those days are gone. With streaming, there are no rules.

Everything’s a “service” now. My games, my software, my books on my Kindle, even my conversations with AI are all subject to sudden updates, changes, and upgrades I never asked for and can’t refuse.

The technophobes tout this as receiving "new features and security improvements,” but the downside is a loss of control over what is happening, because I can't stop the changes even if the older version of somethign worked fine. 

It also means taht something I enoy could vanish or mutate overnight. Amazon can reach into my Kindle and change anything it wants in a book, for example.

And then there's the learning curve. Suddenly MS Word isn't what it used to be and you have to spend forever trying to remember how to format a document. 

It's a pain. Technology has gone from being a tool into being a landlord we have to live with.

The other day, open.ai upgraded ChatGPT. I had grown used to the language it used, the cadence of what it was telling me. I could recognize a ChatGPT essay on LinkedIn without even reading the thing in its entirety. 

Now the new version has a different "voice." A different cadence. A different personality, even. Microsoft's CoPilot does too. I think it now sounds more like the older version of ChatGPT than whatever it was before. It's like both AIs fell into a vat of witch's brew and came out dripping wet, and each one swallowed a different frog or a bat or something.

Inno Games, which operates one of my favorite city-building games, has taken to making upgrades that users have supposedly asked for, but no one I know ever likes their changes. The changes all seem geared toward making us do more "in game" purchases than enhancing game play. If a company has to make changes, it should at least be honest about why it is doing it.

I feel like I'm in a perpetual beta test. Nothing settles down. Just when you think you've got the hang of Microsoft Outlook, oops, there's a change. Or just when you've settled into Gmail, oops, there's a change. 

The comfort of ownership has been replaced by the frustration of constant change.

This is happening everywhere as we switch over from ownership to lending models with the things we use every day. All of this stuff updates constantly. Even our cars. The updates promise fixes and enhancements, but often they just mean relearning how to do the simplest things.

It’s not just about convenience or familiarity, either. I want to feel in control of what I'm doing. I want to know that my tools - the stuff on my hard drive - belong to me. And I don't want to waste my time having to relearn something that worked perfectly fine before some technical egghead decided to change it.

When your technology owns you, instead of the other way around, something essential is missing.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I just want to put on my old favorite game, load it up from my hard drive, and know that it’ll play exactly the same way it did the last time. I don't want to wait for an update. I don't want surprises or changes.

Is that too much to ask?