John Deere: The Tractor You Bought, That They Still Own
- Client
- Farmers / John Deere customers
- Role
- Right-to-repair lockout / repair DRM
- Stack
- John Deere tractors, embedded DRM, technician unlock codes
You bought the tractor. John Deere still owns the repair.
Here’s the part of the enshittification thesis that has nothing to do with ads. A farmer buys a half-million-dollar tractor – pays cash, takes on the debt, keeps it in the family for decades, the way farm equipment has always worked. Then it throws a code and needs a repair. And it won’t start until a John Deere technician drives out to the farm and types an unlock code into the keyboard.
That callout fee is roughly $200. Every time. Not for the parts. Not for the labor. For a technician to be present and type a number that unlocks software on a machine you already own.
This is not an ad-supported tractor. This is not a free service you’re the “product” of. You paid six large for the thing, and it is being held for ransom by the software in it.
The “you didn’t pay” story is a myth
The comforting explanation for why things got worse – “well, if you’re not paying, you’re the product” – collapses the moment you look at industries where people pay full price. The degradation isn’t a punishment for freeloading. It’s the business model. John Deere doesn’t degrade its tractors because farmers failed to pay enough. It degrades them because controlling the repair is where the ongoing money is.
They sold you the iron, then they charge you for the right to un-brick the software they own inside the iron you bought. It’s not a product. It’s a subscription to your own equipment disguised as a purchase.
Right to repair is the fix
Every state that has pushed right-to-repair legislation has run into the same wall: manufacturers who insist the software is a separate thing from the machine, and that repairing your own property is an intellectual-property violation. It isn’t. When you buy a tractor, you bought the whole tractor.
The fix is a policy environment where “you can’t fix it without our technician and our code” is treated as the anticompetitive abuse it is. Right-to-repair isn’t about hobbyists tinkering with phones. It’s about whether a working family can keep its single most expensive piece of capital equipment running without paying a monopoly a toll every time a sensor trips.
Read: Watch the full episode
Source: Excerpt from Better Offline – “Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron on Enshittification and the Rot Economy”