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       The first rule of home printers: You don’t need one unless you absolutely need one. The second rule: Once you plug one in, it will either work perfectly for ten years, or it will immediately start breaking down more and more frequently, in new and sometimes spectacular ways, until it haunts your purchase like a ghost. Printers have such a long history of failure that by the dawn of the personal computer era, their shortcomings had become commonplace.
       After years of waiting, my family finally caved in and bought an inkjet printer designed specifically for the pandemic. (Like many, we shopped a lot online in 2020, which meant a lot of return labels.) I braced myself for paper jams, print queue management errors, and the dreaded “driver not found” error. What I didn’t expect, however, was for my printer to fleece me like a loan shark.
       The problems started with the label on the box. My printer wasn’t responding. Then I found an error message on my computer saying my HP OfficeJet Pro printer had been remotely disabled by the company. When I went to HP’s website, I learned the reason: The credit card I’d used to sign up for HP’s Instant Ink Refill program had expired, so HP had effectively disabled my device.
       For those who haven’t fallen for this “devil’s trick,” Instant Ink is a monthly subscription program designed to monitor your printer usage and ink levels, and automatically deliver new cartridges when they’re low. The name is misleading, as the monthly fee is calculated not by the amount of ink, but by the number of pages printed. (The recommended family plan is $5.99 per month for 100 pages.) Like others, I hastily signed up during printer setup, not knowing what I was buying. For someone spoiled by one-click e-commerce, having ink delivered whenever I want seems convenient. You pay a monthly fee whether you print or not, and the cartridges take up a certain amount of space in your possession. You own them, but you’re essentially renting them and your device while you’re in the program.
       Later, talking to friends and family, I can’t put into words the anger and stress that washed over me when this realization hit me. This was a machine I’d spent more than $200 on, with a fully refilled cartridge. My printer, which I’d used carefully, sat on my desk, and worked perfectly, had been broken by Hewlett-Packard (then a $28 billion tech company) because I hadn’t paid the monthly service fee that would have sent me a new cartridge I didn’t need. I made the angry, weird, upset noises I now know the Worzel family usually makes when it comes to printer problems, and confessed to everyone that my printer was cheating me.
       I was too embarrassed to voice my frustration out loud, for fear of seeming to abuse my venerable platform. I was a sane adult who understood the contract: I had brought this on myself. But holding my printer for ransom was just one example of how digital subscriptions had become so deeply embedded in the physical tech landscape that they had blurred the lines of ownership. Even if I had paid for it, could I still claim to own the printer if HP could disable it with the flick of a switch?
       “What HP is doing is incredibly bad and incredibly unfriendly,” Cory Doctorow, a writer and activist, recently told me. Doctorow has written extensively about digital rights management in printers of all brands. He believes that common printer problems like mine help people understand digital rights and how manufacturers build resistance to user modifications to their devices. “The battle for the soul of digital freedom is happening inside your printer,” he says. It’s not just about surveillance, he says, or exorbitant ink markups and attempts to prevent third parties from undermining the inkjet cartridge market. It’s about consumers losing control of the product they paid for.
       One of his favorite examples is when Google disabled a bunch of its sensors after shutting down an acquired service. Then there’s Tesla, which frequently pushes out software updates to car owners that sometimes dramatically change how their cars work. In 2017, as Hurricane Irma threatened Florida, the company pushed out an update that temporarily extended battery life for owners within the storm’s radius. Tesla was praised at the time, but some, like Doctorow, see it as a reflection of the power tech companies have over consumers: The carmaker had simply removed arbitrary software restrictions on physical batteries that could have been used to create two different price tiers for consumers. “App stores are great for supporting our devices, and subscription services are great when you have a benevolent dictator, but what happens if they decide to bully you or raise prices so much that your car stops working?” he asks. “Then you have no recourse.”
       I can tell you that every corner of the information superhighway is filled with people who are outraged by HP’s Instant Ink program. Our online complaints coalesce into a complex hum of indignation, a “Hallelujah Choir” of complaints. HP’s customer support site, Reddit threads, and Twitter threads are filled with these heartbreaking stories. A pending class action lawsuit in California alleges that the Instant Ink program has “serious pitfalls” that prevent consumers from printing frequently, either by failing to deliver new cartridges in a timely manner or by preventing registered users from using cartridges purchased outside the subscription service. “Instant Ink cartridges will continue to work until the end of the current billing period (unless the customer cancels their subscription),” HP spokesman Parker Truax told me. “If they continue to print after they cancel their Instant Ink subscription and the end of their billing period, they will be able to purchase and use genuine HP standard or XL cartridges.”
       The problem may extend beyond artificial limitations. Skip Weissman, who runs his own consulting firm in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., told me that HP Instant Ink was constantly sending him inkjet cartridges. Weissman, who had more than a year’s supply of cartridges, canceled his subscription. “It’s just called Instant Ink—nobody told me that if I canceled, all the cartridges would stop working,” he said. But they did. “It feels like a scam. It feels like this is our future—the ink in your printer is spying on you. It’s just awful.”
       While Instant Ink is often called a scam by disappointed customers, it’s not a scam per se. It’s just an aggressive, discriminatory business model. Doctorow believes that HP is following the example of casinos and razor makers, luring consumers with offers (free hotel rooms and cheap razors) and then making more profitable financial transactions once they’re inside the casino. Printer ink is expensive not just because it’s expensive, but because expensive cartridges help companies recoup losses from selling cheap equipment. “Think of the initial price of a printer as a down payment,” one printer expert told Consumer Reports in 2018. Companies have been selling printers at discounts for years, but programs like Instant Ink, which uses technology to monitor cartridges and disable devices, seem especially predatory.
       Even if you haven’t been trapped in Ink Hell, the plot of this story should sound unsettling and familiar. Almost everyone has experienced the limitations imposed by digital rights management. If you’ve ever had trouble accessing a movie, book, or song you bought from Apple or Amazon, you know the feeling. Or maybe you’re a gamer who’s long been frustrated by single-player games that require an internet connection. The problem isn’t just that people miss the days of CDs, DVDs, and static updates, but that for all the convenience that connected tools promise, the side effect is to rob us of a small portion of our autonomy and increase our dependence on companies chasing ever greater profits.
       Josh Krueger, a Philadelphia writer, is also deeply involved in his feud with Instant Ink. He calls the app proof that we “live on a shitty internet,” trapped in a subscription-driven world. Like me, Krueger is ashamed of his outrage, but he feels cheated by being given a printer that is essentially a rental. “It’s crazy that I paid for this machine, and this company keeps telling me what to do,” Krueger told me. “As a stupid American who owns this device, if I want to print, I should be able to do it with blueberry juice.”
       My own outburst of outrage at the printer—a tacky device that many people use for mundane tasks like printing passport forms or postage labels—is irritating enough. But it’s this secondary issue that people miss. Like me, they pay little attention to the registration process and, like Weissman and Krueger, continue to pay, feeling cheated because it’s easier than the alternative. This sense of naked exploitation is both a source of outrage and a source of complacency. Although the practice is modern, the feeling of powerlessness in the face of a giant corporation is a timeless experience, so much so that many of us simply accept it.
       ”My whole life, printers have broken all the time,” Krueger said. “So it makes sense that the first printer that didn’t break decided to take me hostage.”