0.0 Context setting

Friday, September 4 2026 in Portland, Oregon where I have realised that I have finally become a certain kind of person. I’m sitting in a cafe prepping this morning’s How People Work, Live! for upload, which means I’ve got one tab with Descript open, another with Libsyn open, and thoughts about how much of this is web apps these days. There’s actually something nice about how Descript works -- the fact that it can import video straight from Zoom without having to go through the rigmarole of logging into Zoom, downloading several gigabytes worth of video and then uploading it back to Descript. Technically Descript is also able to upload the edited video back out to YouTube but, well, I don’t trust it because I’ve got a bunch of complicated stuff going on. Or at least I think I’ve got complicated stuff going on. The thing is, being able to import data from one service to another service without having to roundtrip it through the pipe that goes to my laptop is how things should work, but of course, it’s a surprise when things work that well.

All of which is a long way of saying that I am doing this in a cafe surrounded by what I feel, as a 46-year old, are Young People who are doing Shiny Young Things on their own laptops and iPads but I am suddenly here now also as a Content Creator. I am expending energy trying to deny this fact and feeling uncomfortable about it, and yet here we are.

(It is clearly not Friday. It’s Wednesday 9 September now.)

0.1 How People Work, Live!

I had a great time with Sarah Vieira this morning in today’s episode, it’s up on the podcast and YouTube now; you can catch up on anywhere RSS works with your podcast app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

(124 subscribers on YouTube now! My kids will be super impressed. I will celebrate when I hit 200!)

Next up!

Friday 11 September at 9am PT: How People Work, Live! ... with Dana Chisnell

Dana Chisnell, a pioneering civic designer dedicated to improving government services through human-centered design. She was the first head of customer experience at the Department of Homeland Security. Dana co-founded the Center for Civic Design, where she led initiatives like the Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent, and designed the prototype that is the basis of nearly every digital ballot in the U.S. As a founding member of the U.S. Digital Service, Dana contributed to modernizing federal digital services. She has taught design in government at Harvard Kennedy School and co-authored the seminal Handbook of Usability Testing.

Friday 18 September at 9am PT: How People Work, Live! ... with Anna Pickard

Anna Pickard, a writer who does more talking about writing than writing. She mainly works as a consultant in Voice and Tone, helping companies sound human, and helping writing teams get their work done. After training in theatre, she worked in journalism, advertising and games, before stumbling into tech. From 2014, she was responsible for moulding, evolving and shaping the voice of Slack, and since leaving in 2020, has worked with Apple, Airbnb, Atlassian and a bunch of other companies that don’t begin with A.

Meanwhile, there’s the open How People Work... Does Happy Hour open clinic on Tuesdays at 1pm PT, where you get to bring what you’ve been thinking about and we chat about it as a small group.

1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Did you try the app?

Here’s something that caught my attention: in the U.S., Walmart is rolling out its own electrical vehicle charging network. Just like elsewhere, turns out that one of the most valuable things you can own (or have possession/a license to) is property or real estate.

EVs are a particularly interesting case because if there’s a real transition to them, which there appears to be in the rest of the world, then charging coverage is helpful! It’s even more interesting when you realize that Walmart could also blanket their property in solar and then the cost of providing charging drops to (handwaves) something negligible.

Of course, it’s not that easy. Charging an EV is complicated, but one of the reasons why it’s complicated is to make it save. Amongst other things, there’s a whole network connection between the EV and charging station to make sure the right voltage and amps are being supplied, never mind a bunch of handshaking to ensure that the charging port is locked/unlocked. Then you can add payment on to that, too.

Oh, right. Payment. Because there’s a load of computers involved and we can’t help ourselves, that means that if you want to use Walmart’s EV charging network, you have to use... you guessed it: Walmart’s app! Which is why it is hilarious (derogatory) and unsurprising (exhaustedly) that you get coverage like this:

My First Walmart EV Charging Experience Was A Disaster: The company's public fast-charging station left me baking in the sun for 40 minutes¹

I knew most Walmart stations didn’t have credit card readers yet, so I planned ahead. Before leaving, I downloaded the Walmart app, created an account, and added my credit card information so I could activate the charging session as soon as I arrived at the station. But activating a Walmart charger through its app was nothing like the experience at Tesla or, frankly, most other major charging networks.

Here’s a summary, at least from the article, about what went wrong:

• The app’s QR code scanner failed to detect the code displayed on the charger to activate the charger
• It wasn’t clear that you could select a charger without scanning a QR code
• “the app was glitchy”
• Instead of starting a charging session, they got a “something went wrong” error message
• The metal buttons on the charger itself “felt like touching a hot skillet from sitting under the summer sun all day”
• The app also threw another after scanning the QR code: “We’re having technical issues, try again in a moment”
• The author tried initiating charging with the vehicle off (didn’t work) and then with it on again (because they know about issues with handshaking)
• Calling customer service said the errors were “possibly due to connectivity problems” or “a Walmart app glitch”
• Cellular connectivity wasn’t particularly strong at the site, but the customer’s other apps were working just fine
• The customer was recommended to uninstall the app, reinstall the app, log back into the account (the same errors happened)... (the app is 451.7 MB on iOS)
• and happened on an adjacent charger...

The user just gave up after 40 minutes and then went ton an Ionna Rechargery, where they did this:

“I simply tapped my phone on the card reader, plugged in the cable, and the bZ Woodland started charging in less than a minute after I pulled up to the charger.”

They also noticed that there was nobody using the Walmart chargers, but that “the Ionna station, meanwhile, was bustling”.

I love this article because the writer has totally done their homework and noticed that “both stations use the exact same charging hardware: Alpitronic HYC400s”.

“At Ionna, I could simply tap my card on the reader and start charging.”

Anyway, Walmart says they’re going to add “swipe and dip-to-ship terminals “at most locations”², which makes everything OK.

This is the same Walmart that famously didn’t implement tap-to-pay at least, hasn’t implemented tap-to-pay until August this year³, preferring to push people towards using the Walmart App for tap-to-pay.

I mean, I’ll just say what I think is the obvious thing here: the digital strategy of having an app and, I don’t know a single touchpoint [sic] to provide a unified customer experience [sic] is fine until it becomes a load-bearing liability [sic] ⁴.

The whole point of a charging network and an EV charger is of course to charge a car. There’s a car charger at the Oregon Aquarium out on the coast that I occasionally use and it too needs an app for you to use it, only the thing is the app also requires network connectivity. And the network connectivity out in the carpark is shiiiiiit. So it always takes ages to get a connection and start charging. This is not ideal! It’s really kind of annoying!

It’s incredibly frustrating to imagine the kind of meetings and management and leadership decisions at Walmart that led up to this state of affairs. I get that someone somewhere has said it’s super great to own the relationship [sic] with a customer and get them to spend a bunch of time in the Walmart app. Sure, great. I get it. But, like, it’s got to be good? You only have a certain level of goodwill, and clearly there’s a choice of EV chargers what with in this instance a bunch of Ionna ones being nearby that actually work. It’s this attitude of a lack of agency: we don’t trust you to just pay with a card or tap to pay (which, to be clear! You could just associate the card with the account anyway! How do you think you keep getting receipts whenever you use a certain point of sale terminal!), no, you need to use our app. Which in this case is not better. It’s worse.

It’s also this drive for more and more and more data. Presumably someone out in Walmart corporate wants to know as much as possible about their customers. Forcing people to use their app to charge means, well, you have to use the app. Which means (let me just check the iOS details) it gets to track your location, your usage data, health and fitness, “sensitive info”, “identifiers” and so on.

Feels like a while ago people were either aware of this trade-off and didn’t care that much, but some sort of threshold has been tripped what with in the U.S. at least all these Flock cameras and decreasing autonomy and agency. You don’t get a choice anymore. You have to use the app, you can’t pay for it, and it’s like there’s a whole surveillance pressure. It is as if in some cases the whole “if you’re not paying, you’re the product” has seeped through into just general distrust. Plus the whole deal with all this digital transformation bullshit is that every company needs to actively expend energy to resist grabbing as much data about you as possible. It’s all just out there! Why not just track it! Why not just record it?

All you want to do is charge a car. All you want to do is watch TV without, you know, your TV using automated content recognition to report back what you’re watching. I mean, what the fuck? How is this OK? This is implicitly OK because, what, the TVs are cheap now and it’s in the terms of service? And then one of the responses to this is: well, you know, it’s not just LG TVs that are doing this, they all do this and they’ve been doing this for ages, so why are you freaking out about it now?

It is as if people have been marinating in some sort of internet miasma of personal information and as it’s been collected for, frankly, questionable benefit other than “free stuff”, the temperature has increased and increased until, I don’t know. People are snapping and driving around destroying surveillance cameras. (Weirdly -- or not, they’re only destroying some kinds of cameras because those ones have had slightly more successful and pointed marketing than the other ones that do exactly the same thing).

This isn’t about the technology, though. It is about and has always been about power. The technology is the way to acquire power, to protect power, to consolidate power, to exercise power.

All that guy wanted to do was charge his car.

That’s it!

How are you doing? I mean, everything’s going great, right? Right?

Best,

Dan