For centuries, Cambridge University has managed to muddle through without a single laundry app.
Now it has three.
College by college, a consensus has emerged that the analogue washing machine, once the mainstay of our laundry rooms, must be digitised.
The first to arrive…
Circuit Laundry
The registration process for this app is so laborious, and the payment mechanism so convoluted; it is easy to forget that you are supposed to wash your clothes physically (the app does come with a washing machine).
Only once your personal data has been surrendered – home address, gender, college allegiance, current location (so that the app can geolocate your nearest washing machine) – do the bountiful privileges of Circuit Citizenship become apparent.
Among them, Bluetooth activation at a 30m radius; and exclusive access to the Circuit Calendar (which allows students to book out machines up to two weeks in advance).
Then came…
Circuit Go.
This entirely separate app integrates you into the global Circuit network, enabling laundry to be washed on multiple continents.
Go also liberates you from the crushing boredom and loneliness that accompanies the traditional washing process.
For companionship in the laundry room, students have access to a 24/7 chatbot, and to keep up with the most pressing laundry issues of our time – an unlimited subscription to Circuit’s bespoke blogs.
Struggling academically? Make sure to check out Circuit’s ‘pro tips’ on how to get the most from your lectures.
Lacking social plans for the holidays? Read Circuit’s advice on how to enjoy your Easter break. If you’re particularly bored, indulge yourself in Circuit’s ‘festive puzzles’ or enter into their annual Christmas competition: 12 Days of Circuit.
You can also give your washing machine a follow on Instagram.
Circuit Laundry Plus
This app finally integrates man and machine.
Armed with a Unique Customer ID, the Circuit Citizen can now pre-load their laundry card using the PinMate, a slightly sinister machine that lurks in the laundry room like Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
You can embed yourself even further into the Circuit matrix by signing up for the weekly newsletter:
One particularly enlightening article celebrated the anniversary of Circuit’s 11-year conquest of the Sidney Sussex laundry rooms, illustrated with entirely fabricated student reviews that claim improved efficiency and ‘noticeably cleaner clothes’.
Perhaps Circuit should compete on the short-form media market as well; we’ve only got Reels, Shorts, and TikToks – why not Cycles?
Circuit’s more sinister function
Cut beneath the mindless slop, and you find that Circuit is merely one element in the global process to commodify everything.
Subsidiary-held by the global private equity Cinven, which has $44bn in assets under management, Circuit controls more than 90% of the UK’s student laundry market, and lavishes its directors with millions each year from profits.
Such is their monopolisation of the laundry market, that the government’s Competition and Markets Authority launched an investigation back in 2018, finding that JLA (Circuit’s intermediary subsidiary), faces ‘very little competition’, with many of its ‘competitors’ found to be owned by JLA itself.
Now this would be somewhat forgivable for many of us students if the company simply had an app problem.
But the fact is, that the washing machines themselves are shit.
One need only look at the reviews on the app store (average of 1.2/5), or browse the Reddit forums that demand the student-led boycott of Circuit, to realise the magnitude of the discontent with the state of student laundry.
Circuit is more concerned with profits and laundering your data, than it is about laundering your clothes.
The role of technology in broader life
Clearly, the digital bureaucratisation of Cambridge laundry has gone too far, but it’s much bigger than this. It’s about the increasing digital colonisation of the everyday.
Over the course of Lent, I have been discriminated against by a digital parking meter on Gresham Road. Become a fugitive of the digital menu. Out-QRr’d by more adept digital citizens. Even the term cards for many societies are only accessible through Instagram. It is not so hard to imagine a future where the bar at The Regal becomes obsolete once students entirely convert to the Wetherspoon’s app, or 24/7 college chatbots are the only support for students’ pastoral needs.
In Nolen Gertz’s book Nihilism and Technology, he describes such developments as the “leisure-as-liberation trend in technological design”.
We accept technology because it furnishes us with more leisure time, allowing us to engage in the ‘pleasurable activities’ that we need to be human. We see this at work when students shop online and use voice-activated assistants, when technologies drive for us or check the weather for us.
Technology saves enormous amounts of time that enable us to pursue an unparalleled quantity of leisure beyond historical comprehension.
But the worry is that as technology captures more and more tasks previously assigned to us, we lose sight of where it begins and ends. The role of the machine and the human swap places; rather than technology helping us to achieve our ends, our ends are mechanically determined for us.
Take the 2025 Cambridge student for instance:
Sat by the window of Waterstone’s cafe, they are casually checking the latest updates on Camfess, scrolling leisurely through their Instagram feed, with the the leisure to keep up to date with Trump’s latest tariffs and TikToks, all the while sporadically turning to the literature review for their latest essay. Behind them, an Architecture student is on one side of a split screen attending a virtual lecture series at his leisure, toggling the speed as he pleases; on the other side, they are reviewing the treasury budget for their college society.
Alongside these leisurely students, in their leisurely cafe, engaging in their leisurely rhythms, is a sleek, rectangular slab. At first sight, a mere object perched on the table whose function is not made clear. But its purpose is.
The device is what allows these students to be at such leisure. It punctuates the rhythm of the cafe at irregular intervals as it buzzes and brightens. It works so that we don’t have to. Without this device, our worldly liberty would be diminished. Camfess distills the feelings and opinions across Cambridge onto a singular forum, so that we don’t have to.
Moodle processes our lectures, so that we don’t have to attend them; instead we can organise our time according to the rhythms of Moodle itself. We buy these devices initially to service our needs, but once bought, we become so fascinated by them that we develop new needs, such as the need to keep them plugged in all the time, so that these devices can keep us fascinated.
In the end, technology is a way of organising the world so that we don’t have to experience it
Ruben Francis 