I Hate Smart Tech and Enshittification – Here’s How I Fight It.

I was sat one morning procrastinating doing work when YouTube popped up a video from Jaiden Animations. I like Jaiden’s work, so I gave it a watch, and while I recommend you go watch it to really feel the weight of the terrible world we now live in, I couldn’t help but feel connected with her plight, and also thinking about my own life experiences and how I have a really low tolerance for the kind of BS that companies try and throw around now, and how I feel like I might have at least some answers to her totally valid questions. So, if you’ll permit me, I’d like to explain the problems, and then talk you through what I’ve done to make my life better. You’re welcome to do them too, but I present them here as a hopefully helpful suggestion, not an instruction.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, while I can’t help with the steady decline of corporate structures in favour of enshittification to attempt to maximise short term gains at the cost of long term stability, I can help with the tech problems. As Jaiden puts it, (2:31) “When was the last time you bought a new anything and had it completely set up and working within five minutes of unboxing it? At this point, if my WiFi goes out, every electronic in my house becomes a useless block of metal, because none of it works on its own anymore. Everything needs WiFi, an app, an account linked to my email, a subscription service, and on top of it all they sell all the information I hand over against my will to random other companies so they can send me stupid {beep} junk mail!” This sucks.

I am particularly against subscriptions, and basically refused to buy or interact with anything that requires one. There is only one subscription I pay for, and it’s really a begrudging transaction, and that’s Spotify, because I really like music and that is basically the only way to enjoy a lot of music easily anymore. Everything else? Nope. That means, for example, using home cameras that don’t need a subscription because they record locally. To be clear Ubiquiti did send me these a couple years ago, but I still happily use them. These cameras record to my Cloud Key – not to the cloud – so no one else gets this footage but me. No one can snoop on my footage – cough, Amazon, cough – and I don’t need to pay anything to keep these running. For some context, these cameras did come at a bit of a premium compared to the Ring’s of the world, but even with the extra tech needed, let’s pick a worst case example and say a couple of cameras, a PoE switch and a Cloud key were £500 more than a comparable Ring kit. Ring’s 24/7 (14 day) recording subscription is CURRENTLY (which is another thing I hate by the way) £15.99. That’s £192 a year, meaning you’d need to run these for two and a half years to break even on our worst case situation, and that’s with this set up. That’s nearly £200 in your pocket every year. There are plenty of cameras that aren’t this expensive, record to a micro SD card locally, and don’t need a subscription. The Reolink cameras I installed at a friend’s last year fit the bill – they are often cheaper than Ring cameras and doorbells, record to the camera, and don’t need a subscription. There are options out there, even if they are a little harder to find, and sometimes a little more techie or less polished. 

As for everything needs an app, I hate that too. I hate installing apps to do often basic stuff, and while Jaiden’s prime example of the cat litter box isn’t something I can help with directly, the idea that everything in your house needs WiFi and if you lose internet everything becomes a useless brick is. The basis for this ‘fix’ is really simple, it’s just using Home Assistant. Home Assistant is a free and open source home automation software that gives you a single, locally controlled, app to operate all of your smart home tech. Devices don’t need an internet connection to work, because it’s all run from a little computer in your house. That means everything from your smart lights, to your smart toaster – should you have one anyway – are all fully under your control, and all accessible from a single app. 

You can take things a little further though with specific design choices, namely what devices you buy, and how you set them up. Let me explain – see most ‘smart’ devices these days connect via WiFi. Even if it’s your local Home Assistant box they connect to, they are still dangerously close to the internet, and likely are still able to phone home (which is a privacy nightmare that I can’t stand), so the only smart devices I buy are ones that don’t use WiFi. You have three main options for these, Zigbee, Z-Wave, or Matter-over-Thread. Depending on where you are in the world will depend on which one of those makes the most sense for you – for example if you are in the USA Z-Wave might actually be a better choice, whereas here in the UK Zigbee is where it’s at. Matter-over-Thread is newer and more devices are becoming available for it, whereas generally Zigbee and Z-Wave are tailing off for new devices, but the key thing to understand about any of these is that they don’t connect over WiFi, and therefore can’t connect to the internet, be part of a botnet, or need to phone home to a Chinese server just to turn you damn lights on over a device-specific app. If you do use Zigbee, that’s the one I have the most experience with, you can actually connect devices to each other. For example my Philips Hue bulbs, and my Hue light controllers. If you bind these two together, this remote controls that bulb without any extra setup, and should even keep working if Home Assistant isn’t running for whatever reason. That’s pretty sweet! 

There are also more structural changes you might choose to make – for example my smart control of any built-in lights is designed to still work just fine even if Home Assistant is gone. I use these little Zigbee relays to take input from the regular wall switches, and either cut power to the smart bulb, or just tell Home Assistant to turn the bulb on. The key thing is if the relay can’t connect to the Zigbee network, it reverts to straight power control as if it’s a dumb relay. That means even when I move out, I can leave those here and the new owner would never know. Compare that to a WiFi smart bulb that needs a special app to control and… yeah this is way easier and more reliable! If you’re interested in setting up your own smart home tech like I have it, I’ve got a full playlist explaining everything you need to know – I’ll leave that in the cards above for you.

Now, if it’s alright with you, I’d like to make my own rant on this topic too, because I have some thoughts. The phrase often attributed to the steady decline of our day to day experience is “Enshittification”, where companies create platforms or services or products, with great promise or incredibly cheap pricing and then once they’ve captured enough market share they then realize, ‘oh we actually have to make money’, so they start to increase the cost or decrease the quality in order to extract the most value out of you the customer. To me this makes absolutely no sense, because it appears to prioritize short-term gains for long-term success and stability. Why would you prioritize making a few quid extra now at the cost of having fewer customers with less money later when you can build a stable foundation that customers want to keep coming back to, and to give you more of their money. I don’t understand this idea of requiring shareholder profits above everything else, like I understand at least in the US where there is some law that says the company’s must do what is best for shareholders but the argument that what is best for shareholders is short-term revenue over long-term stability seems like a flawed reading of that rule no matter how you look at it. As we’ve seen with a lot of the tech that we deal with on a daily basis, this idea of making everything harder to interact with, harder to cancel subscriptions, and the likes, pushes people away at a faster rate than they can get new customers. Retention is a much more important factor at least to me anyway than extracting every single cent possible. As an example I built a link sharing website called locally links – it is a paid website where you do pay essentially a subscription although it’s only two pounds a month plus the clicks that you use – and we made sure to make it so that if you do want to cancel you don’t need to call us, you don’t need to email us, you just click a couple buttons on the website that’s it. I hate that sort of ‘oh you must call customer service to cancel’ like no thanks. If I can sign up and you can take my money online without talking to someone, you can stop taking my money online without having to talk to someone. 

This also feeds into the idea of disruptors, people like Uber and Lyft who come into an industry, supposedly revolutionize it, and then enshittify their service. I would make the argument that disruptors are not disrupting their industry, they are monopolising it. Their sole purpose when entering an industry is not necessarily to improve the experience for the customer, it is to insert themselves in the industry using insane amounts of venture capital money to make their service or product the only one you want to use (by undercutting competitors on price and a whole lot of marketing), and then start turning the screws on everyone to claw back that VC money. Hell, someone like Spotify is actually a really great example of that. They took an industry that was fairly easy to interact with if you had an Apple device anyway, namely buying songs or albums through iTunes, and turned it into a subscription service which at first made a whole lot of sense. You get access to almost every song on the planet, unlimited listens, unlimited access, you can download them all, and all for a few quid a month, sounds great right? But now they’re basically the only service that you can get access to new music on, and they are now the industry standard, you basically have no choice but to pay them their ever increasing subscription fees. Disrupters don’t disrupt the industry, they just monopolize it. 

Then there are the insane levels of data collection and ads. My god the ads. I put a lot of effort into using as few services or products that collect data on me as possible, and even then it’s a losing battle. At least my smart home tech doesn’t phone home to anyone, and isn’t dependent on AWS or Cloudflare being up – oh yeah that’s another big reason to use Home Assistant, when the entire internet goes down, your lights and heating keeps working. Kind of a big deal. Anyway, despite only buying locally-controllable tech, self-hosting my own smart home hub, media library and ad blocker (Pi Hole, I highly recommend setting that up on your Home Assistant box by the way!) I still leak a horrendous amount of data to people like Google. These systems are so intrinsic to our way of life that there isn’t much in the way of choice really. The best we can hope for is legislative assistance, but even that feels like a pipe dream these days. Still, doing what you can to limit your exposure does help. Here’s another example – I don’t have a single internet-connected voice assistant in my house. No Alexa, no Siri, no Gemini, nothing. The only voice assistant I have is Home Assistance Voice, which runs everything locally. The voice detection, speech processing, command processing, and text to speech. All on my NAS. Highly recommend that too. Now that I think about it, privacy is one of the main reasons I’m so against using large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini. For specific tasks or questions, sure, I guess, but just think about how much information you’d be readily giving up to these companies that are actively looking for a way to make money from all of this… 

Anyway, that’s how I do things. I self-host wherever possible, pick local-only devices that are resistant to outages, and do my best to protect my privacy and personal data. I don’t think what I’ve done is exactly ‘extreme’ or all that much more effort than the prevailing options, but my life is measurably better for it. Hopefully hearing how I do it has given you some ideas for your own setup, and as I said if you want to dive in on exactly how I’ve set this all up, there will be videos in the cards above and on the end cards for you to check out. I hope this has been helpful, and of course I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments down below. How do you deal with the increasingly costly and painstaking world we live in? Let me know in the comments below!