Satanic Subscriptions

If you don’t own any of your things. The companies that provide them own you.

You pay $8 a month for Netflix. It’s dirt cheap! Seems like a pretty good deal, given the extensive library of media. It’s so easy to just watch content; no need to go to the store and buy a physical disk. There isn’t any point to buying a film and owning it in perpetuity. It’s on Netflix! Until it isn’t. 

Digital products are a relatively recent innovation. A lot of digital products are treated like physical ones. You can buy a copy, and it is yours; you could send it to your friend, copy it to other computers; the possibilities are endless. Owning something digitally is different from a physical product because it isn't something you take home in your shopping cart. Digital products still exist in the reach of their producer. They exist in a way that their producer can still hold onto it while you "bring it home in your shopping cart". You can "bring the item home," but it is not yours, since the producer's tendrils are still wrapped around it.

Subscriptions give you the feeling of ownership when really all they provide is access to a certain thing. When you subscribe, you aren't getting the thing; you're paying to access a platform that lets you use the companies' things. 

Companies are only letting you use their things; they can always decide what you're being given, even though you've paid for it. This has been taken advantage of many times.

For example, Adobe software needs to be used by professional creatives. There is no way around it. Adobe used to sell their digital products like physical products; they were purchased once. Buying and owning Adobe software is no longer an option. They changed their platform to a subscription service. All professional creatives are on the hook; there's no way around paying a very expensive monthly fee for eternity.

Companies can change their subscription policy at any moment. Netflix started a wave among streaming services of locking accounts to 1 household. You're now unable to send your friends a movie that you pay for. This subscription change brought in loads of revenue; it cost consumers their ability to share movies digitally. The consumer wasn't consulted. The companies business department decided for you that the new revenue outweighs the loss of subscribers. They know that you won't leave; most people won't.

In contrast, if policy changes like disallowing sharing with friends was implemented on items you truly owned, it would be wrong and illegal. When you own something, no one can take it away, change it, or charge you money to use it. 

It makes more money to keep consumers on the hook. It makes more money to sell controlled access to a product instead of selling the actual product. We have proven to companies we will still pay for this access. This practice feels to many to be the same as ownership. It is not.

Subscriptions or buying access to a platform without selling the product are not the same as buying a product. This model allows businesses to own you. Don't let it become more normalized. Leave a subscription service if they increase their prices or change the content, run your own server, support open source software, own what you use when its possible. The best mitigation to prevent being taken advantage of monetarily is to limit your interaction, buy the product outright...instead of making a deal with the devil.

Take a look at some documented instances of removal, pricing changes, and censorship that the modern subscription model enables: https://dervis.de/physical/

additional reading on this topic:
https://acr-journal.com/article/subscription-economy-and-the-transformation-of-ownership-a-review-of-value-perceptions-and-retention-strategies-1772/

https://www.ifixit.com/News/8176/copyright-and-the-end-of-ownership