This week I let my computer update windows, giving it permission to reboot in the night and load a new brain. When it woke up, it had lost its ability to connect to the internet and misplaced a hard drive. This was not a situation I had anticipated. It had not crossed my mind that the ‘AI Copilot’ update for windows would arrive with so little intelligence. Like I knew it was going to be bad, that Clippy 3.0 wasn’t going to be my friend, but this all seemed a little much. I wasn’t aware I had made such a vengeful enemy.

I sat in front of the stricken computer with my macbook and phone, using one to google solutions and the other to commiserate with technical types more technical than myself. I said aloud ‘this is it, I’m never using windows again, I’m going to buy a Mac desktop.’

My girlfriend protested, she said I’d fixed it before, that this couldn’t be the final straw. That the ability to build a gaming PC was sexy. But I’d said it for myself as much as her, I feel at capacity with the technology in my life. I just want appliances, things that work, that don’t try to be clever and update just to be worse.

It’s not that I think apple are better, or immune. Not since they fobbed off that lawsuit that proved they were making their phones slower. It was reframed, explained as a misunderstanding, excuses about battery life and security banded around. But in the year I’ve owned it, my macbook has never vengefully updated itself into an unusable state. It’s never just killed itself and been pleased about it.

Tesla markets their vehicles on assurances of a self driving future. Buy our car, we promise you won’t have to drive it. While you will always have to drive your Tesla, the premise is at least accurate. The concept that they’re selling isn’t real, their future a lie, but for a moment the Tesla owner can play pretend. They can Imagine a world where they won’t have to drive their expensive car. One with a digital chauffeur, a feature that instantly elevates their importance. I don’t like going to the bank, I hate talking on the phone, so the Barclays app is a preferable compromise. Ideally I wouldn’t need to bank, the technology is a convenience and a hack, it’s not anything I’d want to do. There’s so much technology, so many apps and products that no one actually wants, yet we have to use.

There’s a local takeaway that is just a couple of years old and has an app for ordering. I find myself musing if they’re a tech startup. If employees not making enough pizza crunch, are forced into crunch time. If they also have a location in the metaverse or plans to extent their app into a big social media platform. Even if they’re not, there’s still the app right? they are by at least by some metric a tech company. Because everything is a tech company, my GP has a terrible app I hate, there’s a Trainline app, a Scotrail app, an app for fucking everything.

I have Nectar, Tesco and Lidl apps to ‘get the best deals’ however I know the truth. They might save me 2%, but they also put the prices up by 3% before launching them. A myriad of data collection systems, downloads, numbers and passwords to achieve nothing for us and everything for these supermarkets turned data brokers. If you don’t engage with it, you just get a gnawing constant grinding niggle. Because it’s like you are fined every time you walk into the shop, you don’t get the large yellow prices, but the dark nasty blue ones. Forgetting to scan the barcode or tap the card is a sin, precious pennies slip though your fingers and every little hurts.

Tesco has a banking app, there’s an app for their carrier, Tesco Mobile, Tesco Grocery & Clubcard, another app called Tesco International Calling, offering low rate international communication. They have Tesco Remote Assurance, which seems to be about live-streaming and teleconferencing with their suppliers? that app store page features an image of a farmer pulling carrots from the ground. A yellow circle rings the carrots, marking them as former subterranean occupants of Field 1, if one added an arrow, it would be a YouTube thumbnail. They have a larger digital presence than anyone could reasonably expect. While some of it is outsourced, some of it is white label, there must be an extensive staff of developers working somewhere. Employees of Tesco the tech company, comfortably isolated from Tesco the supermarket. There must be Tesco datacentres, or at least racks of Tesco servers inside datacentres.

The tech company is such a moving target, you kinda know that Microsoft is one and Nvidia too. Uber is one, but my local minicab company with an app isn’t. I guess because the Uber doesn’t own any taxies or have any drivers on salary. Their product is the interface, permanent middlemen, skimming a percentage giving their brand in return. There’s this understanding, that by tech company we mean computers, code, software and silicon based hardware. Because you don’t think of the doorknob as tech, the bath, plumbing, wheels. But they are all inventions, they had to be created, built, taken from thought to the real world.

I think that ‘tech’ silicone tech, digital chip devices, things that run code. Is facing a little bit of an identity crisis. As chips quietly enter every product, fill all devices and even make a few of them better. What manufactures do, what big tech firms are, becomes ever diluted. Because Microsoft, Google, Nvidia and Uber all do very different things, they’re a software business, a graphics card manufacturer and, perhaps under protest, a taxi company.

As things plod onwards, as computers become as ubiquitous as doorknobs, they become commodity appliances. Because hardly anyone is brand loyal to their fridge, people don’t pick iOS vs Android fights over Whirlpool vs Smeg. In a future where everything is a tech company, there are no tech companies.

The console ‘war’ is probably where we get closest too tech-plicance-hood, The current Xbox and the PS5 have many of the same games and often cross-platform play, where a multiplayer game has the same servers and netcode on multiple platforms. Allowing Xbox, PC, Switch and Playstation gamers to play together. It’s an ever more tolerated and advertised feature. Former sworn enemies, fanboys who had warred over which system was better for decades, now play together in the same digital spaces. The hardware of the last few console generations has even been near identical, buy a current gen system today and regardless if it’s Sony or Microsoft, it’s got nearly the same guts. Both have an 8-core AMD Zen 2 processor, 16 gigabytes of ram and an AMD RDNA 2 graphics chip. There’re really just computers, the software is different, the development environments divergent, but in capacity they are equal. Every year playing a game gets closer to putting bread in a toaster, to getting the same experience regardless of brand loyalty. To disloyalty or indifference being the norm.

I have yet to fix my computer, to do so I need to work on in it’s bimbofication. Delete its thoughts, hypnotise it into submission and wipe its digital brain. Make it forget all it knows of our past sins together and become a new, better version of itself. Hopefully then I can reinstall my network card drivers and things can go back to normal, or as close to it as possible. It will have forgotten its transgressions, but I will not. I search eBay to eye it’s replacement, plot it’s downfall.