Does AT&T's Stupidity Portend The End of America?

In an act of supreme automaton wankery, AT&T is kicking up a fuss about iPhone users hogging too much bandwidth, and trying to find ways to create incentives for them to use the network less. This comes as they face an ever increasing barrage from customers and competitors about the general crappiness of their coverage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's taken a satirist to point out how extremely depressing the situation really is.

Fakesteve.net is the "Secret Diary of Steve Jobs," a blog written from the voice of the Apple founder and CEO that says, well, all the things we imagine Steve is thinking. The most recent post is about the inanity of AT&T's desire to actually get people to use their network less.

His basic point is this: AT&T is sitting on a once-in-a-generation, change everything, reshape an industry product. Their job is to provide the plumbing that makes the thing work. The demand for that product is so extreme that it's causing stress on that network. Yet rather than seeing that as an excuse to sell MORE of that network and invest in making it even better, they're trying to find ways to get their customers to do less of what it is that they're in the business of enabling.

It's as if, Fake Steve Jobs points out, Capital Records, crushed by the demand of the explosively popular "Meet the Beatles" in the early 60s, sat back and said "You know what? This thing is so popular our record manufacturing capacity can't keep up. Let's think about how to reduce demand and try to get people to listen to it less!" Of course they didn't. Of course they went out and found or built additional plants to actually manufacture the thing.

If all of this is sad though, and reflective of a boring lack of imagination in corporate America, it's the last few paragraphs that are truly devastating. I've copied it in full at the bottom of the post because you really have to read it for yourself, but the point is basically that this isn't just a problem of AT&T.

Instead, FSJ suggests it's a problem engendered by the fact that corporate titans spend less time thinking about how to remain innovative and instead devote their energy to doing the minimum necessary to retain market share and leveraging relationships with bankers, government, or whoever else to preserve their position by sheer force of scale.

I think it's a devastatingly poignant and accurate picture of the state of things. While "scale" may be the goal of a capitalism dedicated primarily to maximizing profit, the access that scale creates gives some industries incentives to shift their focus from building great products that are constantly improving to bullying other people out of their space. That sort of "unnovation" (to use Umair Haque's term) is a huge part of what's driving the economy down.

Read the excerpt below and check out the rest of the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs for more.

(Potty mouth alert for sensitive readers..)

So let’s talk traffic. We’ve got people who love this goddamn phone so much that they’re living on it. Yes, that’s crushing your network. Yes, 3% of your users are taking up 40% of your bandwidth. You see this as a bad thing. It’s not. It’s a good thing. It’s a blessing. It’s an indication that people love what we’re doing, which means you now have a reason to go out and double or triple or quadruple your damn network capacity. Jesus! I can’t believe I’m explaining this to you. You’re in the business of selling bandwidth. That pipe is what you sell. Right now what the market is telling you is that you can sell even more! Lots more! Good Lord. The world is changing, and you’re right in the sweet spot.

While I’m ranting, let me ask you something, Randall. At the risk of sounding like Glenn Beck Jr. — what the fuck has gone wrong with our country? Used to be, we were innovators. We were leaders. We were builders. We were engineers. We were the best and brightest. We were the kind of guys who, if they were running the biggest mobile network in the U.S., would say it’s not enough to be the biggest, we also want to be the best, and once they got to be the best, they’d say, How can we get even better? What can we do to be the best in the whole fucking world? What can we do that would blow people’s fucking minds? They wouldn’t have sat around wondering about ways to fuck over people who loved their product. But then something happened. Guys like you took over the phone company and all you cared about was milking profit and paying off assholes in Congress to fuck over anyone who came along with a better idea, because even though it might be great for consumers it would  mean you and your lazy pals would have to get off your asses and start working again in order to keep up.

And not just you. Look at Big Three automakers. Same deal. Lazy, fat, slow, stupid, from the top to the bottom — everyone focused on just getting what they can in the short run and who cares what kind of piece of shit product we’re putting out. Then somehow along the way the evil motherfuckers on Wall Street got involved and became everyone’s enabler, devoting all their energy and brainpower to breaking things up and parceling them out and selling them off in pieces and then putting them back together again, and it was all about taking all this great shit that our predecessors had built and “unlocking value” which really meant finding ways to leech out whatever bit of money they could get in the short run and let the future be damned. It was all just one big swindle, and the only kind of engineering that matters anymore is financial engineering.

And now here we are. Right here in your own backyard, an American company creates a brilliant phone, and that company hands it to you, and gives you an exclusive deal to carry it — and all you guys can do is complain about how much people want to use it. You, Randall Stephenson, and your lazy stupid company — you are the problem. You are what’s wrong with this country.

I stopped, then. There was nothing on the line. Silence. I said, Randall? He goes, Yeah, I’m here. I said, Does any of that make sense? He says, Yeah, but we’re still not going to do it. See, when you run the numbers what you find is that we’re actually better off running a shitty network than making the investment to build a good one. It’s just numbers, Steve. You can’t charge enough to get a return on the investment.

Now there was silence again. This time I was the one not talking. There was this weird lump in my throat, this tightness in my chest. I had this vision of the future — a ruined empire, run by number crunchers, squalid and stupid and puffed up with phony patriotism, settling for a long slow decline.

“Okay,” I said. “Nice talking to you.” Then I hung up.

(Photo: acaben)