As I stared at my phone’s home screen, frustration washed over my face.
The neat grid of app icons I’d perused just hours earlier was now an imperceptible mess.
I had updated the phone’s operating system overnight. And the new OS seemed to have put all the app icons in dark mode.
The white space on each app tile was now a dark gray. And the app icons were now a faded array of colors. This made the apps for Ford, AT&T, Venmo, Garmin and The Weather Channel appear interchangeable.
This was a first world problem of the highest order. But it was still a problem.
Indeed, I felt as lost navigating the screen at 6 AM as I had at 1 AM, when I’d stumbled to the kitchen for a glass of water. I knew the general direction of where I was headed, but getting there required a lot of squinting and some tentative movements.
This had to stop.
I turned to the phone settings screen and tried to revert the darkened icons. But this turned off dark mode entirely — making all the apps on my phone blindingly bright and draining the phone’s battery in the process. I rolled back that change quickly.
I thought about complaining to Apple, who was behind this phone update. Hey, maybe don’t tether dark mode to the app icons, or at least let us opt out of that view.
But I knew better.
This was Apple, after all. The company which once had Think Differently as it’s tagline. The poster child of the closed ecosystem.
Apple wasn’t going to make it easy for me to file a consumer complaint. And even if I persisted, they weren’t likely to take that complaint into account.
The power dynamics were not in my favor.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Such were the musings of Henry Ford. While it’s uncertain if he said these words verbatim, there’s no doubt that he thought along these lines.
Ford came of age in the first era of capitalism. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations had been published in 1776, and it placed market dynamics front and center.
Without demand, Smith stated, there would be no impetus to create goods. And without those goods to sell, there would be no commerce.
Smith called the combination of these forces The Invisible Hand. And the term soon became ubiquitous.
The United States had also come to be in 1776. And as it established its economy, it deferred heavily to the power of consumer demand.
There was a heavy focus on producing items that the populace had expressed a need for. And on bringing those items to market at a fair price.
It was The Invisible Hand in action.
Innovation had trickled into the fold over the ensuing decades. But such efforts mostly focused on efficiency of production, or the quality of finished materials.
The machines in east coast textile mills helped turn more cotton, silk, or wool into clothing each day. The steel from Andrew Carnegie’s foundries helped build taller buildings and sturdier bridges.
The transportation needs of the people wearing that clothing and crossing those bridges to get from building to building? Those were accounted for by horses, steamships and railroads.
Those were the methods consumers used. As such, those would remain the areas of focus for businesses in the market.
Until Henry Ford turned the whole system on its head.
Ford had a grand vision for the automobile. The motorized wagon had cropped up in Europe, and it had recently found its way to America. Still, it was mostly a novelty for the rich, with no sign of widespread demand.
Ignoring these headwinds, Ford set out to create a reliable vehicle – the Model T. Then he rolled out new production techniques to assemble that vehicle at scale. He offered the vehicle at an appealing price point. All while unleashing messaging sure to spur interest.
Ford’s efforts ushered in the age of the automobile. Horse-drawn travel faded away. Suburbs became viable. The road trip became a thing.
And the second era of capitalism found its spark.
By succeeding with something the market hadn’t asked for, Henry Ford had usurped control.
No longer were consumers pulling the strings. Ford was the one who knew best what was needed. And he ran his company accordingly.
Consumers didn’t always like this, and some did voice their complaints. But as the automobile fast became ubiquitous, those complaints mostly fell on deaf ears.
The power dynamics was not in their favor.
Roughly a century after the Ford Model T hit the market, Steve Jobs took the stage at an Apple keynote. Partway through his presentation, he unveiled the iPhone.
Apple’s first smartphone didn’t come out of left field the way Ford’s automobile had. Consumers had already been using mobile phones for some time. And some of those phone models had email and text messaging capabilities.
But Jobs paid little attention to what consumers had expressed demand for. Instead, he spurred Apple to create something entirely novel.
The result was a pocket-sized supercomputer. One that embedded messaging and phone calls into the touchscreen. And one that allowed for additional functions through programs called phone apps.
Apple didn’t make the iPhone as affordable as Ford had made the Model T. And it took time for consumers to flock to the device.
But once they did, they ended up giving more than their money to the tech behemoth. They handed over leverage as well.
Indeed, the iPhone ended up transforming the way many went about their everyday lives, from accessing entertainment to paying bills to ordering food. Phone apps helped re-imagine these processes.
Many of these apps were built and managed by third parties. But Apple still controlled access to them through a proprietary App Store found on each iPhone.
Third party programs would have to confirm to Apple’s standards to remain in the App Store. Consumer demands carried little weight. What Apple wanted, Apple got.
The same held true for the iPhone’s underlying software. Apple could redesign it at will – by, say, making all app icons appear in dark mode – and then deploy the update to all phone users. The consumer had no say in the matter.
The power dynamics were not in their favor.
A day after the darkened phone icons wrecked my morning, I got a notification.
Check out the guide to your new operating system.
I scrolled through the tutorial, learning how to style text messages and customize my lock screen.
Suddenly, there it was. A tip for customizing my app icons on the phone’s home screen.
I followed the instructions. The process was anything but intuitive, but I got my icons to appear as before.
As I stared at my phone, I felt a mix of emotions.
I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to quint at my phone anymore to open the right app. But I was annoyed that it took a dose of fortune to get back something that never should have been taken from me.
I feel this way all too often in life. And I’m certain that many others do as well.
Our leverage has been taken from us in the name of innovation. And we’re forced to jump through hoops for the privilege of being strong-armed.
It’s a pernicious cycle. But it doesn’t have to be a self-fulfilling one.
We can demand more from those we buy from. We can buoy alternatives to send a message. And we can model behavior that shows more equitable power dynamics between buyer and seller.
None of this will be easy. And some of it might demand some sacrifice.
But it will prove worthwhile.
Power dynamics have gotten out of hand. It’s time to flip the script.