The styrofoam sun sat on the edge of the kitchen table and it was missing its yellow paint. It was a sphere the size of a grapefruit and it had a toothpick stuck through its center. Around it lay smaller spheres of various sizes and they were all white and they were all unpainted. This was the solar system project for a fourth-grade class and the deadline was tomorrow. Nadia looked at the sun and then she looked at the white envelope that had been sitting on the mail pile for eight days. The envelope was from her electricity provider and it had a red stamp that said Renewal Notice.
The kitchen smelled of stale coffee and the hum of the refrigerator was the only sound in the house. Nadia had a work deadline of her own and she had a laundry basket full of damp clothes that needed the dryer. She had set a reminder on her phone to compare electricity plans four times this week and she had snoozed it every time. The market was a wide ocean of choices but she was standing on the shore and she was too tired to swim. She picked up the white envelope and she felt the weight of the paper but she did not open it. She put it back on the pile and she picked up a paintbrush and she began to paint the sun a bright and aggressive yellow.
Texas Deregulation and the Sovereign Consumer
Texas deregulation was sold as a grand exercise in liberty and it was supposed to make the consumer the king. The theory said that if you give people a choice then the companies will compete and the prices will fall. It assumed a specific kind of human being. It assumed a person who wakes up with a spreadsheet in their mind and a hunger for marginal gains. It assumed we are all alert and we are all suspicious and we are all possessed of infinite time. But the market did not account for the styrofoam suns and the damp laundry and the way a Wednesday evening can swallow a person whole.
The business model of the modern utility market is built on the exhaustion of the customer. The companies offer a low rate to get you in the door and they call it a “teaser” but it is really a test of your future memory. They are betting that from now you will be tired. They are betting that you will be overwhelmed by the noise of your own life and you will let the contract expire.
When it expires the rate does not stay the same but it jumps to a “default” price that is sometimes double or triple what you were paying. They call this “inertia” in the boardrooms but in the kitchen it is just called being a parent or being a worker or being a human who needs to sleep.
Visualizing the “Inertia Tax”: A deliberate jump in pricing designed to profit from human fatigue.
Lessons from the Elevator Shaft
Zephyr R.-M. is an elevator inspector and he has seen the inside of more shafts than any man in the city. He once told me about the history of elevator safety. In the early days the operator had to be a master of the machine. The operator had to watch the floor levels and they had to pull the lever at exactly the right moment or the car would bounce or it would stall.
“The safety of the passengers was a tax on the operator’s attention. If the operator had a headache or if the operator was thinking about his rent the car became a cage.”
– Zephyr R.-M., Elevator Inspector
The industry eventually realized that you cannot build a mass transit system on the constant vigilance of a tired man. They invented automatic leveling and they invented the “dead man’s switch” and they moved the burden of safety from the human to the architecture.
Our electricity market has done the opposite. It has moved the burden of fairness from the regulator to the individual’s attention. It is a system that punishes you for having a busy week. If you do not spend reading the Electricity Facts Label (EFL) then you might sign up for a plan that charges you $231 extra because you used 999 kilowatt-hours instead of 1000. These are called “cliff” plans or “bill credit” traps and they are designed to look like a bargain to the casual observer. They are mathematical puzzles disguised as public utilities.
The July Knot
I spent a morning last July untangling a string of Christmas lights on the garage floor. It was ninety-five degrees outside and the lights were a knotted ball of green wire and glass. There was no holiday and there was no reason to do it other than the fact that the knot existed and it made me angry. I sat there for and I pulled the loops through the gaps until the string was straight.
I felt a small victory but I also felt the loss of the two hours. I could have been reading or I could have been talking to my wife. The electricity market is that knot of wires and the companies are the ones who tangled it. They know that most people will just throw the knot away and buy a new string at a higher price because their time is worth more than the frustration.
The cost of this system is not just the money on the bill. The cost is the “cognitive load” that we all carry. We are told to shop for our health insurance and our cell phone plans and our internet and our power. Each one of these choices is a small job. When you add them all up you have a second career that pays you in “not being cheated.”
If you are a high-earner with a quiet office you might have the energy to do the math. If you are working two jobs or if you are looking at a styrofoam sun that needs three coats of paint you simply pay the tax. The market transfers wealth from the distracted to the alert and in a world designed to distract us that is a very profitable arrangement.
Architecture for Humans
There are ways to fight back but they require admitting that we are not the “ideal consumers” the economists imagined. We need tools that don’t ask for our soul in exchange for a fair price. This is where the methodology of someone like
becomes a different kind of architecture.
The 100-Point System
Grading contract fairness and regulatory penalties so you don’t have to read the fine print.
They look at 25 different companies and they use a 100-point system to grade them on things like contract fairness and regulatory penalties. They do the work of reading the fine print so that the person in the kitchen doesn’t have to. It is an attempt to put the “automatic leveling” back into the elevator. It recognizes that a person should be able to keep their lights on without having to become a part-time energy analyst.
I used to think that letting a renewal date pass was a personal failure. I thought it was a sign that I was disorganized or lazy. I do not think that anymore. I think the system is designed to wait for us to stumble. It is a predatory patience.
The companies know that the human brain can only hold so many deadlines before one of them falls out. They profit from the falling. They have turned our natural human limits into a revenue stream.
The Cost of a Smile
Nadia finally painted the sun yellow. She used a small brush and she was careful around the toothpicks. She did not open the electricity envelope that night. She went to bed and she slept for six hours and she dreamt of white spheres floating in a black void. The next morning she took the solar system to the school and she watched her child carry it into the classroom with a look of immense pride.
The project was a success but the electricity rate on her house had quietly climbed by four cents per kilowatt-hour at midnight. She had saved the day but she had lost the market. That is the trade we are asked to make every single month. We are told that we have the power to choose but the choice is often between our time and our money. We choose the time because the time is the only thing we cannot earn back. We choose the styrofoam sun because it is the only thing that will smile back at us in the morning.
The styrofoam sun remains unpainted because the market demands the hours we intended for the glue.
I still have those Christmas lights from July. They are sitting in a plastic bin in the garage and they are perfectly straight. Every time I look at them I think about the two hours I will never have again. I think about the electricity plans that are currently renewing at rates I didn’t agree to. I think about Zephyr and his elevators and how nice it would be if the floor just met us where we stood.
We are not machines and we should stop trying to beat a machine at its own game. We should find the people who show their methods and we should use the tools that respect our fatigue. Until then the white envelopes will keep coming and the suns will keep needing their paint and the market will keep waiting for us to blink. It is a long game and the house always has more coffee than the player.