The Tesla Protocol, Boeing, and the regression to the minimum viable product

One of the most striking stories I’ve heard about Tesla vehicles had nothing to do with exploding cars, drowning shipping magnates, or spontaneous highway shutdowns. It was a simple tweet from a Tesla enthusiast and Elon Musk fan praising the third vehicle they’d been sent from the factory for having the “fewest defects so far,” and deciding to keep the car.

The context is that when you order a Tesla (at least back then), it shows up at your door a few months later and you have to decide whether to accept it or not. If you don’t accept it, you go back on the list and have to wait another few months for them to send you another one, when the process is repeated.

What made the tweet so memorable is the inversion of what I grew up considering the “normal” American shopping experience, and the mirroring of typical descriptions of the Soviet shopping experience. I’m a bit too young to have experienced Soviet shopping for myself, but the potted story handed down to students today is that goods in the Soviet Union were stamped with the date they were produced. Goods made at the beginning of the month could be expected to more or less meet the product standards, since at the beginning of the month factories had all the necessary materials and workers. As those ran out over the course of the month, factories relied more and more on improvised and makeshift replacements, so by the end of the month goods hardly worked and had to be put into working order by the customers themselves.

The minimum viable product

What our financier overlords call the “minimum viable product" is the earliest stage of a product that some consumer, somewhere, is willing to buy. The original iPhone is a classic example, in that it didn’t work very well for anything, but it turned on, you could check your e-mail if you were patient, browse text on the internet if you were very patient, and even make phone calls. The fact people were willing to pay money for such a tenuously-useful product gave Apple the information they needed to invest in the product line and give us the slightly-better-functioning smartphones we enjoy today.

The early Tesla models seemed to share this pattern: they turned on, they charged, they got you to work most days, and people were willing to pay money for them, giving Tesla the information they needed to raise more money and invest in additional electric vehicle lines.

The immiseration of the consumertariat

Marxist economics describes a process under capitalism known as the “tendency of the rate of profit to fall.” This is often confused with an empirical claim that the rate of profit is falling, but this is just a misunderstanding. The rate of profit can stay steady or rise under capitalism, as long as the tendency to fall is counteracted in some way.

One standard Marxist explanation for how the tendency is counteracted is through the intensification of labor. By intensifying the labor performed by workers (longer hours, lower wages, more erratic scheduling), more surplus value (value added by workers above and beyond that required for their own maintenance and reproduction) can be extracted per worker, which can offset or more than offset the underlying tendency.

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is experienced most viscerally by capitalists and workers, because it is their respective jobs to fight for and against the intensification of labor. But both capitalists and workers of course have another role in the economy, which is as consumers, and it is also experienced there in what I call the immiseration of the consumertariat.

The regression to the minimum viable product

Remember our story about the iPhone, where early adopters of an admittedly crappy product paved the way for the cheaper, slightly-less-crappy products that are in wide use today. But finance capital is indifferent to both product quality and popularity: instead of using early consumer interest to improve products and services over time, the consumer product or experience can just as easily be made worse, as long as the cost savings exceed the lost in revenue.

The result of this process is a tendency to regress to the minimum viable product. That minimum product is different in different industries, of course, and is highest not where consumers are pickiest but where regulation is strictest. Gasoline, for example, is a consumer product that is so strictly regulated no one thinks twice about buying it from an unfamiliar station in a location far from home, and consequently the measures taken to combat the tendency are primarily taken out against workers in the trucking and retail sides of the industry rather than against consumers themselves.

Boeing’s past decade of aviation disasters illustrates the horrifying consequence of misjudging where the minimum viable product is. The developed world had allowed itself to be convinced that aircraft were as tightly regulated as gasoline, when they turned out to be as tightly regulated as electric cars.

Workers have an obvious role to play in countering this tendency through labor militancy. A good illustration comes from right here in Washington, DC: the housekeepers union at the Washington Hilton fought to bring back a daily housekeeping policy. Note that the housekeepers do not claim to be “protecting consumers” or anything like that. They’re protecting their members’ income by ensuring that as many housekeepers are scheduled to work as necessary to clean every occupied room every day. But as a mechanical consequence of that, customers experience more frequent and more thorough cleanings.

Making housekeeping a dignified job is not and should not be free. The higher quality customer experience will come from some combination of lower profits for finance capital and shareholders and higher prices for customers.

The duty to complain

Customers also have a role to play here that I call the duty to complain. Customers have a lot of power not because they’re the source of businesses’ income, but because they can make it expensive to cut costs.

The cliche people joke about online is the self-checkout machines where all your produce can be turned into iceberg lettuce with the push of a button, but you don’t need to steal from grocery stores to fight the regression to the minimum.

There was an affiliate blogger who got a bad reputation for finding everything wrong with every plane he got on in order to get miles in compensation for his inconvenience, but for all I dislike about them, I find no fault in this behavior. By making it expensive (or at least not cost-free) to shirk routine maintenance, they were unwittingly doing their part to counter the tendency to employ as few mechanics as possible and let the state of the fleet deteriorate back to the minimum viable product.

The duty to complain should be distinguished from mere nostalgia. I’ve heard the story about the olives in the airline salad countless times, but if you like olives in your salad that much I’d suggest bringing some from home rather than complaining to your flight attendant. If your seat doesn’t recline, on the other hand, then alerting the flight attendant and having it recorded for repair is a duty: one-off maintenance is expensive, and the more of it airlines are forced to do, the less cost savings they’ll realize by cutting routine maintenance.

Conclusion

I also want to be careful to distinguish what I’m describing from the consumerist, neoliberal exhortation to “vote with your dollar.”

Most people do not have the luxury of choosing between multiple internet providers or going without internet, but the more people complain to Comcast the more expensive it is to offer unacceptable service.

Most people don’t have more than one or two airlines to choose from on most of their trips, but by insisting on the maximum compensation for delays, lost bags, and faulty equipment, they can make it as expensive as possible to badly run the airline they’re forced to fly.

And, obviously, there’s a difference between complaining and being rude. The point of complaining is to impose costs on the owners and managers of businesses for mismanagement, not to make miserable the workers doing trying to implement those policies.