A sexy, skinny defeat device for your HP ink cartridge
ALT
Animals keep evolving into crabs; it’s a process called “carcinisation” and it’s pretty weird. Crabs just turn out to be extremely evolutionarily fit for our current environment:
By the same token, all kinds of business keep evolving into something like a printer company. It turns out that in this enshittified, poorly regulated, rentier-friendly world, the parasitic, inkjet business model is
extremely adaptive. Printerinisation is everywhere.
All that stuff you hate about your car? Trapping you into using their mechanics, spying on you, planned obsolescence? All lifted from the inkjet printer business model:
That GE fridge that won’t make ice or dispense water unless you spend $50 for a proprietary charcoal filter instead of using a $10 generic? Pure printerism:
The software update to your Sonos speakers that makes them half as useful and takes away your right to play your stored music, forcing you to buy streaming music subscriptions? Straight out of the HP playbook:
But as printerinized as all these gadgets are, none can quite attain the level of high enshittification that the OG inkjet bastards attain on a daily basis. In the world championships of effortlessly authentic fuckery, no one can lay a glove on the sociopathic monsters of HP.
For example: when HP wanted to soften us all up for a new world of “subscription ink” (where you have to pre-pay every month for a certain number of pages’ worth of printing, which your printer enforces by spying on you and ratting you out to HP over the internet), they offered a “lifetime subscription” plan. With this “lifetime” plan, you paid just once and your HP printer would print out 15 pages a month for so long as you owned your printer, with HP shipping you new ink every time you ran low.
Well, eventually, HP got bored of not making you pay rent on your own fucking printer, so they just turned that plan off. Yeah, it was a lifetime plan, but the “lifetime” in question was the lifetime of HP’s patience for not fucking you over, and that patience has the longevity of a mayfly:
It would take many pages to list all of HP’s sins here. This is a company that ships printers with half-full ink cartridges and charges more than the printer cost to buy a replacement set. The company that won’t let you print a black-and-white page if you’re out of yellow ink. The company that won’t let you
scan or send a fax if you’re out of
any of your ink.
They make you “recalibrate” your printer or “clean your heads” by forcing you to print sheets of ink-dense paper. They also refuse to let you use your ink cartridges after they “expire.”
HP raised the price of ink to over
$10,000 per gallon, then went to war against third-party ink cartridge makers, cartridge remanufacturers, and cartridge refillers. They added “security chips” to their cartridges whose job was to watch the ink levels in your cartridge and, when they dip below a certain level (long before the cartridge is actually empty), declare the cartridge to be dry and permanently out of use.
Even if you refill that cartridge, it will still declare itself to be empty to your printer, which will therefore refuse to print.
ALT