My Janky Business

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon in mid-March, I hear the telltale grumbles of a rooftop snow avalanche building momentum. Soon: a roar, a bit of house shake, a momentous thud, leaving a whole section of our metal roof cleansed of months of Northern Vermont snow accumulation.

Just as suddenly, we are off the grid.

You see, this particular section of roof, impressively, launched its avalanche right on top of our Starlink dish, now an array of shards fanning out across the snow.

For months I’d been making lame jokes about our connection to the outside world and entire livelihoods (my partner, Kharina, and I both work remotely from home) being entirely dependent on Elon Musk. We don’t have cell coverage at our house, not an uncommon fact of mountainous rural Vermont. There’s not another viable internet option: just DSL, whose main selling point is that you can experience the nostalgia of waiting for your emails to download like it’s 1999. But actually, we haven’t been able to get that company to call us back.

Plunged into sudden connective darkness and on deadline, Kharina grabs her laptop and flees to the nearest internet: a 150-year-old hardware store that is also a bar in the next town over. I take a beat to contemplate whether this is the universe handing me the ultimate productivity hack.

At the hardware store, fortified by alcohol and pizza, I learn that Starlink’s entire customer service apparatus is powered by Grok, the profane, Hitler-loving AI. Grok helps me understand that I cannot simply purchase a new dish, but that I must buy a whole new kit—including even the unscathed bits inside our house—for $349 + tax. It also advises me that the only way to purchase this kit is directly via Starlink itself, with a delivery estimate of 7-10 days. Shit.

It turns out that second part is not true; Grok lies to me. I can order one from Best Buy, for delivery by Friday1.

Here’s where things start to get batshit: I learn from Grok that our service plan, the monthly rent we pay to get internet beamed to the little dish, is connected to the smashed dish. The new dish requires its own new monthly service plan. I sign up for a new plan, cancel the old plan, and feel “lucky”: our calamity happened a few days before our bill date, so we’re only double paying for a few days. Grok is firm: there are no exceptions to the no refunds policy.

Yet, things get even weirder: It turns out, you can’t set up a Starlink dish without being connected to the Starlink app…which, yes, you can’t do unless you’re connected to the internet (the internet you don’t yet have) or a cell tower. Which is how I find myself standing on a hill, knee deep in snow, waving my phone over my head in an attempt to receive one measly text message verification code from Kharina, sitting in her car by the aforementioned hardware store.

Welcome to Janky Capitalism.

Janky Capitalism

Tech promises us a world of frictionless ease: slick efficiency, magical automations, agentic beings to save us from the mundane tasks of our daily life. Faster, in the service of (I think?) being able to spend more time on—depending on what corner of the internet the exhortation is coming from—“what you love” or “meaningful pursuits” or “higher value work.”

Meanwhile, when that digital slickness meets our actual material world, our human bodies, shit keeps getting jankier.

Janky Capitalism, a term coined by Daniel Felstead and Jenn Leung, describes the experience of daily breakdowns and friction as this slick digital world meets our physical world, where digital protocols and binaries beget improvisation and assemblage. In Janky Capitalism the friction is a byproduct and also by design, it’s “the obvious falling-apart weirdness of the world while capital spins off farther and farther away from it, leaving us behind”.

If Janky Capitalism describes the system, then Jankspace is where our physical bodies meet this tech world. Felstead and Leung’s video “Welcome to Jankspace, Babes” begins, “Do you sense that you are living in a world that literally makes no fucking sense?”

At the time of the dish smashing I imagined a Starlink boardroom full of men2 reacting to PowerPoint presentations for the service’s design and delivery. One suit standing up and saying, “if a customer needs a new dish, they’ll be able to order just that part, and it’ll plug seamlessly into their existing service plan.” This suit, silly man, is then shouted down by a collective of other suits yelling “That makes too much sense!! No, the customer must lose their mind!”

The truth of Janky Capitalism is that Starlink isn’t really thinking about the customer at all. The customer is an inconvenience to be designed around, a downstream problem to solve later, or an unaccounted for exigency. Thus, our actual experience of the world gets weirder, jankier, more patchy and duct taped as our inconvenient bodies meet an online world that wasn’t made for us.

Felstead and Leung’s proto-Janky Capitalism example is a Deliveroo or Uber Eats driver’s bike: a base frame with gloves duct-taped to the handlebars, an insulated box zip tied to the back, taped on battery packs, and four cracked cell phones strapped on, scanning for the next job via two different platforms, while navigating with multiple traffic apps. The seamless interface of on-demand food delivery meets the inconvenience of human bodies needed to actually deliver the food, resulting in a mutant contraption, which is also a death trap.

When that e-bike nearly clips you, standing in front of a parking meter that perpetually flashes red, but no longer accepts coins; instead a sticker tells you to download an app to pay for your 15 minutes of parking, requiring account verification via email, and a couple layers of security to confirm the Apple Pay payment; and then this parking payment is verified by a human who walks the sidewalk, checking via a handheld device to see if you paid by this same app, you’re in jankspace.

Or this week, I join my friend’s weekly pranayama practice—an hour of breathing practice via Zoom—opening my laptop to login to the Zoom class, only to realize that I have my focus blocker app on, and cannot access my email, containing the Zoom link, for the next four hours. I run downstairs to grab my phone, purposely left out of my grasp, because, again, focus. I enter my passcode, thumb through my settings to turn on email (yes, focus again). Search through the slime layer of accumulated marketing, to find the Zoom link; attempt to Airdrop the link back to my laptop, realizing that Bluetooth is turned off. Bluetooth resurrected, I finally join the Zoom, a mere three minutes late. All of this, just to breathe with some friends.

Yes, this amounts to a whole heap of friction theater. Roadblocks of my own devising to thwart external impositions in the name of security, evading surveillance, and ever more complicated attempts at wresting my attention back from the brink of collapse. But I’d argue my elaborate roadblocks are zip ties and duct tape too; when Apple has engineered a phone to hold the entire, attention-sucking online universe in a tiny package; when this tiny assemblage holds the primary connection to my best friends, my bank accounts, my upcoming travel plans; when the daily horrors of the world are a tap away, not to mention further explorations of any fleeting curiosity; when the ease, the slickness is engineered in exact opposition to my desires as a human (to spend less time on my phone), jankiness is the inevitable solution.

And yes, when I’m standing on a hill in the snow, attempting to pick up a bar of cell service to get a verification code to activate the new internet service, because the old one died with the shardified dish, I’m in jankspace.

Janky Business

I’m not supposed to tell you this, as it risks coming off as naive, out of touch, definitely a guaranteed death spiral for a business in 2026: we have been pretty much ignoring AI within Wanderwell’s accounting and bookkeeping practice.

Now, I can explain this bent as the natural stance arising from the politics and humanist orientations of our team. Also, the security risks are a nightmare; I’m watching finance folk who keep shredders next to their desks feed client financials into the ravenous maw of LLMs, and no one’s really talking about where it goes from there.

But a more honest reason for this resistance? AI is being injected into our accounting software and tools, without our consent, and so far the result is pure Janky Capitalism.

As a practice, we work with Intuit’s QuickBooks Online suite, mostly because it’s the dominant standard for non-enterprise (i.e. your business is not a multi-entity billion dollar behemoth) software; the competitors (e.g. Xero) are more or less indistinguishable, QBO just happens to be more common and widely used. In other words, it’s an arranged marriage of power and convenience, not love.

And like every software on the planet right now, Intuit has been rolling out “AI enhancements.”

When I say these AI features are doing nothing useful, I mean that they don’t make any part of the work more efficient, nor easier; we’re not smarter or more insightful because we have access to them. It’s not removing obstacles or mundane work enabling us to “focus on higher value work” or, in Intuit’s own parlance, “finally be successful.”

Accounting software’s core function is to facilitate an accounting process; a financial cycle, the end result of which is accurate records produced via a whole bunch of decisions, judgement, made on top of an underlying standard of rules and tax code. Clean books are the result of a cyclical process, facilitated by software, but entirely dependent on the knowledge and discernment of the person actually using the thing.

What’s weird about most of these “enhancements” (quotation marks assumed from here on out) is that they are obviously targeted to consumers with no accounting background, often a paying customer. But they pester us on the accountant dashboard side, landing in the laps of the bookkeepers and accountants who make up the backbone of users.

There’s one that wants to harass our clients’ customers with daily reminders about invoices due, the human-to-human connection reduced to pure transaction, no relationship.

The net effect so far? The software is remarkably slower and a couple deeper accounting functions appear to have gone up in smoke. They rolled out a new dashboard interface in the past year: a redesign of both the home screen and all the financial reports. I still have to hunt around for common functions.

It’s also more expensive, with the average subscription price jumping again this year by a magnitude over past years.

Get in loser, we’re going to jankspace

I’m hazy as to how we finally got the stupid Starlink set up, in the intensity of my frustration, I must have blacked out. In any case, we’ve had internet, life has gone on, at least until the end of next winter.
A cursory glance at recent /Starlink Reddit threads points to a worse fate awaiting us: Starlink is moving towards an “equipment rental model”, a monthly fee for the privilege of not-owning the necessary hardware. Of course it is.

Let’s call this trickle-down inevitability.

Theoretically competition, the benevolent hand of the market, is supposed to provide discipline in the sense that we can take our money elsewhere when the internet service or the accounting platform stops working for us. As I’ve already noted, the competition is indistinguishable, janky with the same sort of enhancements.

I told Kharina the other day that I didn’t know how much longer we’d be able to “ignore AI” in our accounting work. And that’s the thing that unsettles me most: the feeling of inevitability.

But it’s not quite accurate, that we’re ignoring. The engagement is happening, because these supposed enhancements are each their own form of friction: imagine handing your phone to a friend, who rearranges all of the apps on your home screen to their own liking, before handing it back to you. Once intuitive flicks: automatic movements we all make, checking our mail, our feed, etc… become encumbered with an extra layer of “oh shit, where’s Instagram?”

Now imagine your phone screen is rearranged every morning, driven by enhancements on enhancements, new features pushed at rapid pace. We think of tech as something that’s smooth, better, we’re told each update is an improvement on the last. And actually, you probably don’t have to imagine, I’m sure that somewhere in your tech stack, something got a so-called upgrade very recently.

In the jankspace of human experience, the constant updates just seem to make everything worse; to make our work harder, more annoying, less functional.

And to be clear: the software changing and AI injections are not materially degrading the quality of my team’s work, the output or accuracy (I feel compelled to defend). It just makes it all kind of annoying.

We could allocate time and attention, capacity, to testing new workflows, seeing if there’s something in there that might improve our work. Make a whole project of re-learning the tools that were working just fine.

But the truth is, we’re just not willing to trade away our own competence.

I worry about a future point where we no longer have that choice or control over our own knowledge, expertise, and competence. Where the trickle-down narrative of inevitability ensnares us all, as the software we rent access to decides that the humans are too troublesome and no longer required.

In a sense, the enhancements are already nudging us there: actually engaging with these features results in a flattened, worse business. Intuit tells us that to finally be successful we must ignore the particular dreams and hopes, strategies, goals and desires of our dear clients that we take so seriously within our service.