We are turning into subscription slaves (2023)

I&#x27;m very close to returning to the high seas for content... A personal recent anecdote. I wanted to watch Interstellar again a few days ago. Beginning of the previous month I saw it on Prime&#x2F;Netflix or both (can&#x27;t remember). A month later when I wanted to actually watch it it was gone from both services... I got really pissed off, but I rented it from Prime, because I wanted to watch it with my family &quot;now&quot;.<p>Your app that does random thing &quot;X&quot; does not need a subscription. Stop. Doing. This. This rent seeking behaviour doesn&#x27;t pose well for any of us.

After reading the first few paragraphs, my first thought of the future was a dystopian police state rather than concern for &quot;renting&quot; vision.<p>The federal law enforcement apparatus in America has a long history of pushing for more power and pushing the boundaries of its power. Warrantless data collection is at an all-time high. Most of us brush it off as no concern since we are law-abiding citizens.<p>I&#x27;m beginning to see it as a real threat after the last election. It made me feel less secure in the stability of our political system. It&#x27;s conceivable that someone could come to power and abuse law enforcement for political purposes on a large scale. I recognize that some people believe it&#x27;s already happening but I&#x27;m not one of them.

This post is a bit messy. The author starts talking about ads and algorithms manipulating us before quickly saying that subscriptions are similarly harmful, except that link is not really explained. It&#x27;s randomly shoehorned in.<p>The author likens John Deere and Netflix but quickly brushes aside the fact that digital media and physical tractors are very different things to own.<p>Finally, the author suggests that paid subscriptions are bad because they can restrict our access to material and steal our data. I concede the first point but not the later. Reading my news subscriptions is significantly better than reading &quot;Google News&quot; and other ad-driven media suggestions.<p>Overall I am disappointed in the quality of the argument. This person does actually have a PhD which makes me want to talk to this person in a long form conversation where they won&#x27;t feel constrained by this specific medium (pun intended).

It&#x27;s also becoming normal that these subscription services make you jump hoops to terminate the contract (tried to close your vpn subscription recently?). A few years ago I could just let my paypal run dry and that would stop the payment and end the contract. Nowadays I can no longer make paypal payments without linking my bank account, which means you have to jump the hoops to end the payments.

Ironic, because the first popup as I navigated to medium.com was an offer for me to subscribe.

The argument is often made you can get the ‘better’ product if you pay for a ‘product-as-a-service subscription. Even for simple hardware like say a washing machine. Sure you can get the cheap one, but I’ll break almost immediately after the warranty expires and it will use so much more water and energy… or you could get the efficient one that won’t break down, because the company selling those wont have to worry about their quarterly sales.

Interestingly, hearing aids are often rented due to their high out-of-the-box cost and have been for way longer than SaaS&#x27;s existence. Fortunately, none of what the author predicted here has happened because governments would probably not tolerate this.

We&#x27;re already heading that way with housing. Normal houses in places where jobs&#x2F;opportunities are available are trending into the million dollar range.

It will just get worse from here. If someone can find a way to monetize something, it will be monetized, and the money will be leaving your wallet for some quadrillionaire who simply <i>needs</i> a yacht and wants it built in a dry dock that will require destroying historic architecture to launch.

I don&#x27;t think &quot;slaves&quot; is the correct word here, but there is something going on that I can&#x27;t put into words. Capitalism++ where instead of businesses providing services in exchange for a fair amount of currency, everyone is just fighting to pull as much currency from others as they can, while everyone else tries to pull as much currency as possible out of them.<p>it has stopped being a symbiotic relationship and has started to become adversarial. extremely adversarial in some ways. it&#x27;s exhausting and I don&#x27;t see how it can continue.<p>in capitalism there is somehow this idea that future growth is uncapped, and that the line on the graph must always trend upwards and that is just not realistic. ..everything is finite. the lines simply can&#x27;t continue to trend upwards forever. but everyone is acting like there&#x27;s just infinite money, and all you have to do is ask people for it.<p>The number of times per day that I must say &quot;no&quot; to ads and subscriptions and offers and all of those things surely must be in the thousands.<p>Per day.<p>It&#x27;s wearing my soul down. There is no chance that I&#x27;m alone, here.

The irony of posting this on a site known for nagging for subscriptions…

I&#x27;m not sure talking about theoretical problems that don&#x27;t exist is very useful. Better to talk and question about the present subscription culture.

Tangentially related but copyright is broken and needs urgent reform. It does not serve its intended purpose anymore and this is just one symptom of it.