..subscription culture sucks
When did comfort start coming with a renewal date? Everything you touch wants a subscription, even your bed..
>From Ownership to Rentership
Before, things lasted, you bought a machine, a phone, a bed, and it stayed for decades. You owned it. Then products started breaking on purpose. Planned obsolescence. Once durability stopped paying, fragility became the business model. Ownership turned into a problem, and companies realized that renting the same thing forever was more profitable than selling it once.i
It’s always the same story. Look at OpenAI. You really thought they would let you use it for free forever?
That’s the bait and switch. They start solid, reliable, often free, then quietly turn it into a subscription. Everything becomes a subscription, EVEN YOUR BED (Eight Sleep). why am i paying every month for an ink-tablet….
The idea of paying often isn’t new, but it became invisible. Before, marketing played with numbers: 10 became 9.99, to make you feel like you were spending less. Now it plays with time. Instead of paying once, you pay forever, but in amounts too small to notice. A few dollars a month, quietly taken, no decision required.
It was sold as flexibility, “cancel anytime,” but that’s just a new disguise for commitment and auto renewal does the rest, removing the moment where you choose. And when prices go up, you stay. Your data, your setup, your history, all trapped inside convenience. You could leave, but you won’t.
>The Disappearance of Marketing
Advertising used to be loud. Billboards, TV spots, big fonts, big promises. You could ignore it, mock it, hate it, but at least you knew what it was. Now it’s invisible. It doesn’t sell, it belongs. Brands talk like people. They post memes, reply to jokes, pretend to be part of your world. They call it community, but it’s really proximity. Marketing stopped knocking, it moved in.
Modern marketing doesn’t look like ads anymore. It hides behind creators, ambassadors, brand families. It talks about identity, values, emotions. It pretends to care. It doesn’t want to convince you, it wants to be you. It builds intimacy, then feeds on it.
We use large language model everyday, owned by big closed compagnies, we are slowly allowing them to shape what we read, suggest what we think, decide what we like. They’ll market through us, not to us. And we won’t notice the line between opinion and influence disappearing. It already starts through social media algorithms and it already has consequences…
What’s funny is how the resistance disappeared too. The people who used to fight ads, punk kids and leftists who tore down billboards, now just want to be represented in them. :)
Personalization as Manipulation
After belonging came emotion. The system learned how to look back at you. Algorithms started showing what feels personal, music that matches your taste, clothes that fit your style, news that fits your mood. It feels intimate, almost caring. The machine understands you.
But that’s the point. Personalization isn’t made to only please you, it’s made to keep you or generate more money. Every choice, every click, every scroll helps it rebuild you in its own format. Either their having more control on you or they sell this control
Leaving feels wrong because it feels like leaving yourself. Your playlists, your data, your saved settings, all stored somewhere else. These systems remember you better than you do. You stay, not because you want to, but because leaving means starting over from nothing.
#NotAllofThem
Not every subscription is a scam. The model itself isn’t evil, it just got hijacked. Some subscriptions actually free people like when you support a small creator, a researcher, or a writer, you’re not feeding the system, you’re funding independence.
You’re helping someone stop depending on middlemen, sponsors, or corporations, and that’s not exploitation, that’s actually redistribution. A good subscription gives someone enough stability to earn back their time, or to share it, by helping others or supporting causes that matter.
But a bad one is when the money goes to people with influence who don’t create any real value and who use their reach to feed themselves, not to build anything, not to help anyone, not to create actual value. We give too much importance to these people (subscription or not).
Maybe it’s time to check your list of subscriptions and cancel a few. Anyway, you can still subscribe to mine on X
