“When batteries aged, we quietly slowed the whole phone rather than tell anyone a cheap replacement part would fix it. People concluded their device was simply old, and bought a new one. The slowdown was engineering; the silence was the design decision.”

This entry is part of the ledger’s canon, not Volume I. It establishes a named mechanism so that a confession has something to be measured against — read why the canon exists. Real confessions live in Volume I, and the voluntary contributions given alongside them fund scholarships at the School of Critical Design.