It certainly appears that the subscription economy, which we had all been sucked into kicking and screaming (initially), is now actively (d)evolving into the subscription life.
This goes back to the whole “you’ll own nothing to be happy” idea. The economy, and indeed life as a whole, used to be based on the idea of ownership. You owned your things… and you owned yourself. You owned the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, as they used to say. But a few years ago things started trending toward renting everything instead of owning anything.
And now, life itself, your very ability to exist, is becoming subject to a rental agreement rather than being yours to do with as you see fit.
We rent information, we rent entertainment, we rent our homes and cars in the form of monthly payments. We even rent our health in the form of insurance premiums and the hope of access to care if needed. Truth be told, even our money is rented. The government borrows money from the Federal Reserve in exchange for interest payments on that loaned money.
Is there anything left that we can still call ours?
Even the things we supposedly own are becoming increasingly conditional. You buy a phone, but the company still controls the software. You buy a movie, but only so long as the platform continues to carry it. You buy a tractor, a printer, or a coffee machine, and somewhere deep inside the machine is a tiny corporate bureaucrat demanding permission before it’ll perform the task you purchased it to perform.
Apparently, ownership now means having possession of an object while someone else retains the authority to decide what you can do with it. Which sounds suspiciously like renting.
We used to buy things and then the transaction was over. Money changed hands. The seller went away. The object became ours. We could use it, repair it, lend it, sell it, paint it purple, or throw it off a bridge if that was what happiness looked like that afternoon.
Now the seller follows us home.
The company remains inside the product through software updates, service agreements, digital locks, user accounts, cloud connections, and the ever-present threat that some feature we already paid for may suddenly become a premium feature.
Congratulations. Your refrigerator now requires a subscription. Your car wants a monthly payment for heated seats. Your doorbell would like to store footage of everyone who visits you, and possibly sell the information to someone who is deeply interested in how often your neighbor borrows your lawnmower.
The object is in your house. The control is somewhere else. And somehow we’ve accepted this as progress. Perhaps because the rental arrangement rarely comes off as a rental arrangement. It simply seems like convenience. You don’t own the music, but you can listen to almost any song ever recorded. You don’t own the software, but it’s always updated. You don’t own the book, the film, the photographs, or sometimes even the words you’ve written, but they’re safely stored in “the cloud.” The cloud. Which is a wonderfully reassuring term for someone else’s computer.
We’ve placed our memories, our work, our conversations, our finances, our relationships, and much of our private lives into vast digital warehouses that we neither own nor understand. We access them through accounts that can be suspended, passwords that can be forgotten, and agreements that can be changed at any time without our consent.
We click “I agree” because there’s no realistic alternative. What exactly are we agreeing to? No one knows. Possibly the surrender of our firstborn child. Possibly permission to harvest our organs. Possibly a commitment to resolve all disputes through binding arbitration in a windowless office park in Delaware. But we agree. Because we would like to listen to a podcast.
And as this trend continues to (d)evolve, it would seem that at some point, we would even be renting our souls; and renting them out. Information has become nothing but a constant swirl of propaganda and branding campaigns; each vying for our attention. And we’re oh so willing to rent it to them in exchange for momentary access to their dopamine-driven distractions.
Our attention may be the last thing we actually possess, and we give it away all day long.
We give it to advertisers. We give it to politicians. We give it to algorithms whose only apparent purpose is to keep us irritated enough to continue scrolling. Every outrage becomes a payment. Every click becomes rent. Every moment spent staring into a glowing rectangle is another tiny portion of our lives transferred into someone else’s account.
Time is money, as they say. And we appear to be paying by the second.
The strange thing is that the subscription life doesn’t feel like imprisonment. It feels like access. We can access everything, everywhere, all the time. Except peace. Except privacy. Except the increasingly unfamiliar experience of being unreachable.
The system offers us unlimited content while gradually removing our ability to sit alone with our own thoughts. Silence has become dead air. Boredom has become a technical malfunction. Any unoccupied moment must immediately be filled with a notification, a video, an advertisement, a message, a warning, a special offer, or someone else’s carefully branded opinion.
We have access to the entire world. And the entire world now has access to us. All merely distractions from the reality that nothing is ours.
Not our things. Not our existence. Not our reality.
Terms and conditions apply.
