Eventually it happens. Your perfectly functioning, twenty-year-old TV becomes obsolete. When it was born it was state-of-the-art. Great color. Big screen. A remote that had the channels, the volume control and the all-important mute button. There were other buttons but they were never pushed. No need. The game is on. Let’s make some popcorn. But that old SONY is not “smart.” It does not connect to the internets. Out with the old. In with the new. A rather large Smart TV is but $200 these days. A pleasant but rather laconic young gentleman at Best Buy will get you all set up. Bring in your old set. They will recycle it for free.
The new model is a Samsung. A very nice picture and when turned on greets you with an assortment of options for entertainment that would leave you with no time to bathe, sleep or go to work. YouTube. Netflix, Hulu, Disney, AppleTV – just for starters. Anything seems possible on this thing but as time goes by you realize that you begin to feel like Humphry Bogart in the African Queen, hacking your way with a machete out of the swamp, picking leaches off your back, regretting that Kathern Hepburn dumped out all that fine gin into the river. There is no way to easily control the menu items. No way to get rid of things you will never use. New things are marketed to you like you are in a Vegas casino. Go for broke. Roll the dice. Various shows you have no interest in automatically play while you try to figure out the search features. The voice activation only works with the proper remote (not included in the box). When you do click on a “platform” you get a spinning icon with a bunch of blue juggling balls. This can go on for a 10 to 40 seconds until things load. Evidently intelligence takes time. Could I have purchased the Moderately Smart TV? Did she graduate from Smart TV University? What were her grades by the way? And what is strange is that simply playing a slideshow of your Google Photos Album is next to impossible. Once you get it working, you realize that it only plays in portrait mode. No bueno.
After a few months, I began to reminisce about the old TVs. The ones with tubes, dials and knobs. As a user you were in complete control of these beasts. Finding your show was instantaneous and automatic. UHF, VHF. Two dials and you had your channels memorized. You could turn the dial and “bamm” you were there. If the picture got fuzzy or began to float up and down, usually a swift angry bang on the side of the box would fix the matter. Was is great? No. Did the technology work? Most of the time quite well. Was it smart? Seemingly more intelligent than many of the current models.
Recently Cory Doctorow came up with the term “enshittification” for the three-stage process whereby online platforms become progressively worse for users as companies prioritize profits. The companies lock customers in, often simply by controlling their personal connections and address book and then they begin selling more ads and littering your channel. To this observer, the new “Smart TVs” are really no different. Users get locked in, then they start selling subscriptions. In some ways this “enshittification” has been going on for a long time. I remember when cable TV first started, the big sell was no ads! That did not last long. Like cable TV your Amazon Prime subscription now lets you watch many movies with this same caveat: there are ads.
Many years ago, in the 1980s, out of pity, we were given a little fourteen inch black and white model. We watched Star Trek Next Generation on that thing. Jean Luc Picard took on the Borg and came out with his brain still intact. Joe Montana made amazing fourth quarter drives, winning games with seconds left on that box. Somehow that fourteen inch screen was larger than life. The old black and white movies, late at night on Channel 9, obviously looked authentic. And when you had had enough, all you had to do is get out of your chair and turn the knob that controlled the volume counter-clockwise all the way to the left. You heard a decisive click and the screen would flash for a second and disappear. No one new you had turned the dial. All was quiet. I miss knobs.