2000’s Ashley Tisdale had no fucks to give about her clothing
This was one of the most baffling things of my whole childhood.
(From the show The Big Comfy Couch!)
maybe this is just me Being Old but i really, really hate that the “pay a subscription fee to access content” model is replacing the “pay once for content you’ll actually use” model and it makes me not want to support these companies out of Spite
The shift from exchange to extraction.
A 2016 article by the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Councils predicted that by 2030, “all products will have become services.” One way [to do this] is by framing a lack of ownership as a new kind of freedom. This obviously benefits the companies selling those services. No longer expected to offer novelty in exchange for subscriptions, just access, they can effectively sell the same product over and over again […].
As the largest tech platforms consolidate their dominance of more and more areas of our lives, we don’t just use them, we actually inhabit them […]. Platforms are the new public space, and subscriptions are the tax we pay to occupy it.
This is almost enough to make one nostalgic for transactionality. As the economic relationships that govern our lives are less bounded in time and space, it becomes more appealing to slip through the cracks, to make purchases with no strings attached, to buy a pair of shoes or a desk lamp from someone who doesn’t know who we are and move along without leaving a data trail or entering into a permanent brand relationship. […]
Rather than doing something — making purchases and moving on — customers “become somebody” specific, like loyal Amazon Prime customers. […] By conferring preferred status, the Prime subscription reframes an otherwise transactional relationship as an identity […]. By marketing this attitude, Amazon implies that being its customer, not just buying its products, is how we must engage with the company, [… replacing] discrete retail purchases with a recurring merchandise stream.
Excerpts from the article “Loyalty Tests: Subscription services aren’t an escape from shopping, they’re a surrender to brands”
Edward Chen & Tseng Jing-hua by Yao Hung-i – Your Name Engraved Herein (Kuang-Hui Liu, 2020)