SYSTEMS IN ACTION· Annoyance as Baseline, Subscriptions Everywhere
A new car that can’t be unplugged. A washing machine that texts. A snipping tool that won’t run until it “validates.” When core functions become clients of the cloud, annoyance becomes baseline, and reliability becomes a luxury.
I was overseas for six weeks. I had left my car parked safely in my locked garage. Yet it texted me daily: gas tank full, tire pressure for each of four tires, windows up, car locked, mileage at X.
Ping. It’s your car again. Your gas tank is full. Here’s your location. Tire pressures are these. Car is locked. Windows up. Mileage is this. Have a nice day.
At first it was almost funny, the way a machine could be so dutiful and so pointless. Then it became what it was: an intrusion that had been redesigned as a feature.
I called the dealership. “When I get home, how do I turn this annoying feature off?” I asked. “Can I just unplug a SIM card somewhere?”
“No,” they said. “Can’t be done. But you can turn off notifications.”
I didn’t want that. I made it clear I wanted the car to stop talking to the cloud, not for the cloud to stop talking to me. The difference matters. One is a boundary. The other is a gag order that still drains the battery.
They told me to call the manufacturer. I did. Engineers from Europe responded, saying this was now a built-in feature and could not be turned off. All cars talk to the cloud all day.
Later in the trip, I got a text: “Car battery low.” Yeah. Duh.
On return home, this new car needed a jump. My older car, sitting far longer, started right up.
I turned the new car in for a loss and traded it for an older 2019 model. I don’t think I will buy a car newer than 2020 again, at least not willingly.
Smart features, dumb results
This is what “smart” has come to mean in consumer systems. Not intelligence. Not discernment. Not help. A permanent network subsciption-based connection that cannot be severed, wrapped in a layer of alerts that implies care.
Annoyance has been normalized as baseline.
The new baseline is permission checks and pings.
The pattern is now everywhere. It shows up as washing machines that text when the load is done, as if a domestic rhythm needs a notification layer to be real. It shows up as “basic” software tools like snip-type screen captures that refuse to run until they can validate an account or a license state, even when the utility is already installed on the machine. It shows up as office suites and operating systems that have quietly shifted from “buy it once and it works” to “rent your own interface forever,” with periodic permission checks, popups, and upsells that interrupt the work.
All of these changes are framed as convenience, safety, and modernization. But the lived experience is the same: core functions become conditional on a service layer, and the service layer fails in ways that have nothing to do with the task at hand.
The old contract was simple. You bought a tool. You owned the tool. It sat quietly until you needed it. If it broke, it broke locally, and you could repair it or replace it.
The new contract is different. You buy a tool that is also a client. It has dependencies. It has an identity layer. It has an update cycle you didn’t ask for. It has a telemetry story that benefits someone else. It may even have a subscription attached to basic functionality, not because the function requires ongoing cost, but because recurring revenue is now the business model that governs product decisions.
This isn’t just annoying. It changes the trust relationship between people and their tools.
Subscription Forever, The Modern Leash
A tool that can’t be unplugged is not a tool. It is a leash.
And it creates a kind of fragility that no dashboard can see. Companies can measure engagement with features. They can measure monthly active users. They can measure subscriptions renewed. What they cannot easily measure is the slow accumulation of contempt, the quiet moment when a customer decides, “I will leave the moment a reasonable competitor exists.”
That willingness to defect is real. It is widespread. And it is not priced into the KPI regimes that justify the intrusions in the first place.
The irony is that these systems are built in the name of customer retention and value. But annoyance is not neutral. It is corrosive. It makes people less curious, less tolerant, less loyal. It turns “upgrade” into a threat and “smart” into a warning label. It pushes capable customers toward older devices, local control, and "dumb" tools that simply do what they are told. A planned defection from smart devices.
A reasonable alternative doesn’t have to be revolutionary to win this market. It only has to restore the old contract: pay once, own it, and let it work.
Because when annoyance is baseline, boring reliability becomes a luxury we all desire.
See more field tests → Systems in Action
Madonna Demir
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