Google Made a Sad Boomer Mark Out of Me and There's Nothing I Can Do About It

I hate writing this so much

literally me

Hello,

My name is Freddie deBoer, and I really got the full Google experience today, in the worst way. Please don’t discard this email just because you see so much text. I think this story is worth listening to. If nothing else, you can laugh at my stumbling, worthless attempts to navigate the world made by you, the giant impersonal corporation who dominates our lives in ways both subtle and grand.

A couple of years ago I purchased five of your 2nd generation Google Nest Protect wired smart smoke detectors from the Google Store. My wife and I were struggling to have a baby, I had all of this sad anxious energy that came with that long, laborious, repetitively heartbreaking process, and I found myself channeling that energy into various attempts to make our house a little safer. They were shockingly expensive, but Wirecutter raved about them and made me feel like they might really make a difference. I was a little worried about the installation process, though; you never know with smarthome stuff. The product page said that I could find a licensed (or approved or whatever) Google installer by using your widget after purchase. Alrighty!, I thought. They’ve got a widget! They’ve got official (or whatever) Google techs! I won’t have to worry so much about finding an honest technician to do the installation. So I bought five of them, one for each of the smoke detectors we already had installed. They weren’t cheap - almost $800 as a matter of fact - but every expense feels justifiable when you’re doing it for your kid, even if your kid is still entirely theoretical. What can I say? I’m only human.

Then I put in my ZIP code in your widget… which told me that there were no techs in my area. This was strange because we live in suburban Connecticut, less than two hours from New York, not in the middle of Wyoming. I tried several times over months, but your service kept saying that there was no one in my area. I thought hard about doing it myself and found the appropriate YouTube videos. Unfortunately, I had a failed rotator cuff repair sometime ago and now my other rotator cuff is partially torn and over-the-head stuff is really hard for me, so installing five alarms just seemed physically unachievable. My wife, meanwhile, is a full foot shorter than I am and was otherwise not keen on doing amateur electronic work. OK. I set the problem aside for awhile.

Then we got pregnant and had the baby and I was distracted. Not a good idea, leaving $800 of smart smoke detectors in a box, but that’s what happens when you have a new baby. Everything else just leaves your awareness. I concede that this was dumb and my bad and if you’d like to abandon any sympathy towards me because of this, well… fine. But recently I finally took steps to get them installed; we’re getting a doorbell cam, a Nest one, and I thought, hey, good opportunity to kill two birds, you know? I found someone to install the doorbell through your widget. I called the number. That company, the ones who are gonna install the doorbell and camera, said they couldn’t do the smoke alarms but they’d find a licensed electrician to install the smoke detectors - at my own additional expense, of course. I said OK. The electrician showed up and told me the smoke detectors were discontinued. I looked it up and showed him that Google has guaranteed 10 years of service for the product anyway and that they could still be installed and used, according to Google itself. He said alright. Then, when he went to install them, he found a mount for a smoke detector in the basement that I was unaware of. That one had to get filled too, and it had to be with an alarm that could communicate with the rest, apparently by law or regulation or whatever. I needed a sixth alarm.

The only problem is that you discontinued the Nest Protect and don’t sell them anymore! Boy, you guys love pushing a product onto consumers only to abruptly stop doing so in a fickle and abrupt fashion, don’t you? Alright, well, I went looking on the secondary market for a sixth Nest Protect gen 2 wired smoke and CO detector. Surely eBay would have a few? Unfortunately, because the product is discontinued, the options are all dodgy used models or insanely expensive price gouging that I can’t afford. So I can’t install the five that I have unless I get a sixth but I can’t get a sixth without paying significantly more than face value, maybe, for a discontinued model. Not appealing!

OK, well, this was a real pickle. So I contacted your Google Store customer service to look for help. (What is the purpose of customer service other than to service the customer, right? …right?) I wanted help either finding a detector to fill the missing spot - surely you guys have some old stock, somewhere? I would happily pay full retail price - or some sort of refund, even if a partial one. I was connected to an online chat with “Emily.” Was Emily a real person? I have no idea. What I can tell you is that she was completely unhelpful; she just kept repeating my problem as a solution. “I’m trying to buy an additional smoke detector but that unit is discontinued.” Sorry, Fredrik, that unit is discontinued! Like that. Any hope for some sort of refund, given the discontinuation? Nope, no refund possible, not even a partial one. Instead “Emily” urged me to find one of the secondary market... which I had just told her only had wildly expensive options or dodgy options or both. I explained that this dilemma didn’t seem to be fully my fault because a) your own locator refused to find me someone to install them in the first place and b) you discontinued an item that was meant to last ten years. Nope. No help, none. Sorry. You, Google, told me that I was on my own.

So now I’m sitting on these very expensive smoke detectors I can’t use and can’t return and can’t find the extra one I need that isn’t super expensive. The shopping results are bewildering, the wired versions are particularly hard to find at all and (again) priced like they’re built out of Bitcoin, some are saying they’ll expire much sooner than others, a lot of them seem scammy…. Ah, well, maybe this is what LLMs are for! Maybe this is what all the hype is about. I needed to sift through a ton of digital information to find what I was looking for, a tedious search through large databass - isn’t that sort of thing what LLMs do best? So I asked Google Gemini for help finding me a non-extortionately priced Google Nest Protect second generation wired version. It helpfully gave me a link and urged me to buy. This, surely, is the solution to your problems, said Google’s own LLM. I clicked on the link and it gave me a Google Pay option and I clicked that.

And THEN I was led to a very fake, very scammy looking confirmation page. I realized that, in fact, your LLM had set me up with a scam! Awesome! Very cool, Google corporation. I quickly clicked out, locked my card, and reported a potential phishing scam. I will now have to get a new card issued to me from my bank and update a bunch of subscriptions; no doubt I will later discover that I have forgotten one only because something I need gets turned off after the card declined. Sweet! In the meantime, I’m watching my accounts like a hawk; my funds haven’t been drained, so that’s nice. But still, my debit card information was exposed to scammers thanks to a link provided by your LLM in an effort to buy a product you (used to) make and through your payment system within that LLM. And look, I’m embarrassed! Very embarrassed. I know this is a very Boomer trap to fall into, and I pride myself on spotting a scam. I hate having to share this information with you, Google, and please do me a favor and keep this all private, please? This wasn’t my finest moment.

Still, in my defense? The fact that the scam was being offered up to me through Gemini made it so much harder to avoid. It’s not that I have an excessive amount of trust in LLMs; just the opposite, or so I’d like to think. No, the trouble was that I didn’t have access to the usual clues I have long depended on to spot online fraud. The Gemini interface obscured the information that I ordinarily use to sniff out a scam and I didn’t have the right context clues. Why, a conspiracy theorist might suggest that the interfaces of consumer-facing LLMs - which, to be clear, you yourselves have been aggressively marketing as tools for making online shopping easier - are perfectly designed to make fraud harder to detect. I don’t think you’ve done that deliberately, of course. But I also don’t think that you care the slightest bit about how the design decisions baked into your AI technology enable abuse. You just need to win the race against OpenAI and Anthropic, right? Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And luckily for you, your immense and pricey legal team has absolutely draped your LLMs in waivers and qualifications and provisos and terms of service that ensure that I could never ever pursue you for compensation based on the failures of the product that you have forced into every app, service, and device you control. Nope. Wherever the buck stops, it does not stop with you, and we’re looking at a future where LLMs are used as an all-encompassing excuse for why massive corporations have literally zero accountability for anything that happens under their auspices. Fun!

And, for the record, there’s a chance that scammers used LLMs in the creation of this very fraudulent online storefront. After all, the world is facing an absolute deluge of new cons and fraud and grift thanks to the rise of ChatGPT and its competitors; it’s now trivially easy to set something like this up. People are absolutely deluged with scams now. It’s never been particularly hard to actually come up with the infrastructure for fraud. With LLMs? Trivially easy. Practically free. And the whole system is straining under the weight.

For example, as a writer of published books, I now receive a firehose of emails, calls, and text messages trying to pull me into one shady scheme or another related to my books. Some of this is just your basic “put in your credit card info” stuff like I’ve just been dealing with. A lot of it is “Hey please come give a talk at our Poor Orphans Who Love Books and Yearn Only to Be Read to By Their Favorite Authors of Longform Argumentative Nonfiction Jamboree” stuff where, it turns out, there’s only the small matter of paying the $400 appearance fee…. I’m happy to say that I’ve never been snookered in this way, but I’m correspondingly falling into Type II errors a lot - the unpaid work of sorting scam from real opportunity is so daunting I just delete everything and inevitably fail to see real opportunities to connect with other humans about my work. Just this month I was alerted to the fact that I had ignored someone who was only asking for something I’ve granted dozens of times before: an instructor whose class had read one of my pieces and was asking if maybe I would be kind enough to Zoom in with his students. That is, indeed, what I love to do, the only confirmation that any of this matters, something I love to do. And no doubt I’ve ignored many such requests because the work of telling real from fake has become so daunting. I only found out that that particularly request was legitimate because the instructor was persistent.

I asked Gemini, hey bro, this sure looks like a scam page you sent me to! What’s the deal? And Gemini was like, oh yeah, that’s a scam lol, don’t do it. Might want to shut down that card lol. I’m an LLM, what can I say? The entire world economy floats on the perception of my limitless powers, but also you can’t trust me for anything at all, and if you do you’re a mark, and if you complain about it the boys on Reddit and LessWrong will chortle about how you’re a fool to not know better. See, if you don’t think that LLMs are about to completely rewrite what it means to be human and will surely end death and send us to the stars, you’re a pathetic Luddite and Ezra Klein will personally come to your house to laugh at you, but if you actually trust them to do something vaguely important (even buying shit, one of their most celebrated capabilities) and they fuck up, hey, that’s on you, you rube, you mark, you patsy. Isn’t that nice? Of course this all leads to the inevitable LLM question: if Gemini is smart enough to recognize the scam in hindsight, why oh why didn’t it recognize said scam before it advised me to fall for it, within the proprietary interface that kept me from knowing it was a scam???

So, to review: you, Google, sold me very expensive smoke alarms, then discontinued them, part of your long lineage of abandoning products you’ve already sold to the public; then were of zero help finding me one that I needed to make the other ones function; then you laughed off the idea of any sort of refund; then your LLM sent me to a scam page and exposed my bank account to fraudsters; then when I pointed the scam out your LLM was like “whoops my bad you’re on your own lol,” and now I have to cancel my debit card and anxiously watch my account to make sure that I’m not defrauded like some sad 80 year old, and I’m still sitting on $800 of smoke detectors I can’t use. And now I’m emailing some sad legal helpline your LLM gave me because you’ve made your company as opaque and impenetrable as humanly possible in your never-ending quest to avoid accountability, and every employee that might be at the appropriate level to help is hidden behind the many layers of bureaucracy and communicative hurdles you establish between yourself and the public like a moat and your chat line has already proven to be utterly useless. It all feels pretty fucked up, I’m not gonna lie!

I have a couple friends who work for your company and they’re perpetually confused and hurt as to why the public has turned on Google. “Why did we become the bad guys?”, etc etc. And you know, I’m not unsympathetic. Not entirely. But this is why, this experience is why: because you’re a huge multinational corporation that has a massive impact on the lives of regular people and none of us are even in a position to pathetically supplicate before you as consumers, asking for a little help, let alone to regulate you in a meaningful way as a society. You have too much money and too much power and if I tried to kick up a fuss about this you’d probably tell the world what embarrassing porn I was searching for when I was a 22-year-old. I say all of this knowing that this email has about a 1% chance of ever appearing in front of your eyes and an even lower change of not being immediately deleted. Well, yeah. That’s why people hate you. Because we’re powerless. Totally powerless. We were promised that technology would make us more powerful, masters of our own lives, but instead you and your competitors have mostly given us only finer, more expensive instruments for managing our dependence. We carry supercomputers in our pockets that ensure we remain entirely helpless before the corporations that govern our work, our politics, our attention, and increasingly the terms on which we are permitted to exist. And then when people are mad at Silicon Valley your gurus go on Joe Rogan or Dwarkesh Patel or whoever and cry into hundred dollar bills about how mean we all are.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I now have to go tell my wife the embarrassing story of how I got almost scammed with my one-year-old sleeping on my chest and why I need to get a new debit card. Then, I suppose, maybe I’ll to try and figure out what the hell I’m going to do with these smoke detectors, up to and including using the search engines built by you or your competitors to figure out where I can safely dispose of obsolete electronics. Because we’ve built a world in which I have no other way to get information other than by begging for it from you, the architects of my humiliation. It doesn’t feel good.

Sincerely yours,

Freddie deBoer

[hits send]

Kill me. Please. I would prefer death.

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