The writer Cory Doctrow coined the term enshittification to describe the way that services decline in quality as their users become the product. He was talking about online services when he came up with the word, but the same is very much true when it comes to hardware. Items which once just worked now need apps and online services, with marginal benefit to the user if any. It’s one thing when it’s your soundbar or your washing machine, but thanks to Lemmy user [@win95] from the Netherlands we’ve seen a far more egregious example. People with disabilities are being provided with new powered wheelchairs through their medical insurance, but are then discovering that unaffordable in-app purchases are needed to use their features.
The chairs in question come from the German company Alber, and it seems their defence for the practice is that an Alber chair can be used without the paid-for software upgrades. Reading the many comments attached to the thread linked above it seems this is not a view shared by the people with disabilities who have the chairs, so we’d be extremely interested to know more from both the company and its customers. Either way, selling a very expensive mobility aid and then demanding hundreds more Euros for its features via the app seems to us if it’s as described, to be at least rather questionable. We hope therefore that it attracts some publicity, and the company is shamed into abandoning the practice.
It would be tempting here to exhort the hacker community to blow whatever protocols these chairs use wide open, and create a free and open source app which runs everything on an Alber chair. We certainly know enough people with the skills to do this, and we’re certain there are many more among our readers. But oddly here this isn’t the answer, and not because they might resort to legal measures such as the DMCA. A wheelchair is a vital mobility device for its users and superficially a straightforward enough machine, but it’s also a medical device which has to adhere to a bunch of standards to ensure that it doesn’t harm its user. For that reason perhaps it’s better to shame the manufacturer into ending the practice, and ensuring that people with Alber chairs can use them without resorting to hackery. After all, becoming an engineer saviour by accident is always something to be wary of.
Wanda Parisien is a computing expert who navigates the vast landscape of hardware and software. With a focus on computer technology, software development, and industry trends, Wanda delivers informative content, tutorials, and analyses to keep readers updated on the latest in the world of computing.
