On the rise of subscriptions and downfall of possession
2023-07-08
Basically no one buys their music anymore, everyone streams it instead. Most don't buy a car these days, they lease it. Oh, you want to repair your smartphone? Good luck, because you won't get all the features back, unless you send it to the manufacturer. Things like these can be found in all areas of life and they aren't a coincidence, there is a strategy behind it. Let me explain...
The driving force behind this omnipresent trend is the concept of DRM , which stands for Digital Rights Management and basically is a digital system to ensure only trusted parties can copy, modify or interact at all with a product. This can be coffee maker, tractor, car, smartphone or digital media like CDs, DVDs or Blu-rays, where it originated from to stop the skyrocketing trend of pirating in the '90s. And honestly, I can understand why companies started to implement it, since it is terrible to lose half your revenue to some script kiddie that shares his music on Napster with millions for free. BUT since then, it has clearly gotten out of control and nowadays I believe these measures to be an existential thread to property as a whole.
You see, after establishing these technologies in some of their products, most companies realized how much continous revenue they can generate by forcing people to pay for a product over and over again, added this tech to more and more products including physical ones and ultimately shifted to the long-term strategy of eliminating the idea of actually owning things altogether. In their ideal world, we as the consumers just purchase the time-limited right to use something, giving us the hardware to do so is just an unfortunate roadblock along the way and we certainly shouldn't be able to make use of it on our own or even dare to mess around with it.
The real problem is that as long as the vast majority of the population doesn't care about these measures, this trend will continue. When you go out and buy a new smartphone, car or washing machine today, you will be very likely unable to replace it's screen, motor oil or filters without running into some software restriction that at least requires you to go to a certified repair shop, basically making it more affordable to just replace the device altogether, or will need a subscription to activate all of its features like backups, heated seats or remote control. You can imagine how this will look like in 30 or 50 years and that certainly isn't a world I want to live in!
Fortunately, there are quite big movements against these trends of adding more and more DRM, building hardware with planned obsolescence in mind and forcing overpriced subscriptions on users. They are called Right to repair , FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) as well as Open Hardware and are present all over the planet. By now, millions have decided that this trend is immoral and should be declared illegal, joint the movements and spread the word. So can you! Just talk with others about these issues, make in informed decision the next time you buy something electro-mechanical and maybe donate some money, if you are in the situation to afford it.
Thanks to these efforts, countless lawsuits against companies incorporating these practices have been won over the last years and more will come. John Deere had to allow repairs by consumers and independent repair shops and Google as well as Apple at least started self-repair programs (even though they are still is far from good). So be brave, fight for your true ownership of the products you purchased and let me know about your opinion in the comments down below...