March 22nd, Belgrade, Serbia. One bottle of really crappy wine deep.
I started this train of thought on subscriptions. I don’t care whatever else you may have read about on this topic or how similar ideas have been paraphrased times and times to the degree of cliches, here goes mine.
I’m a zoomer studying a cs-related major in North America hoping and actively preparing myself to craft a career out of writing quality code to solve problems that matter, like many of you. I pay for a lot of subscriptions — from YouTube Premium, Snapchat Plus, Twitter Verified to encrypted email, cloud storage and VPN services to three different LLM models plus a few API’s billed by usage for my side projects, excluding the adobe cloud suite that I used to pay for until I recently invested upfront for Affinity Photos and Designer. From a five minute scroll of startup/indie tech twitter, specifically the #build_in_public community, I was recommended at least 20 different indie devs trying to build some sort of tools for different markets, all subscription based, from 20 bucks a month to 50 bucks or potentially higher, all in contrast to many excellent high quality small utility tools that are not only open source but also free for regular users, quietly sitting to be discovered by more solely from word of mouth.
Man you can count on one hand the services/products that lets you pay upfront for a lifetime license — idc how much it costs but as long as it’s worth it plz just let me buy it once and for all — you can clearly see when the services let you pay one time upfront, they are marketing to this specific group of potential users.
Then I thought about consumer debts/loans, state taxes, land ownership and the patriarch’s obsession with women’s chastity — all a form of power and control in one way or another.
Earlier today there was something funny on Twitter — Doordash announced a deal with Klarna that allows users to pay for food deliveries in install payments
Clearly there seems to be a pretty huge accumulation of food delivery debts among some american consumers. Imagine not even owning your food lmao.
When no one owns anyone and no one owns anything beyond a few necessities that you paid off with your own cash/debit card to allow you to survive with dignity, they are not free.
Land of the free and home of the brave is only so for those operating within a specified realm unable to interfere those live outside of it. And whoever operate outside of it that define and enforce the walls, own and control those that live within it. And the irony is these walls that would contribute to the loss of ownership for those within it are more often than you think indirectly self imposed. Some of you just let it happen and call it a better future for all. Smh.
If you really go down the rabbit hole, it goes as far back as the transition into the neolithic and the start of the agriculture revolution, marking the start of the private ownership first time ever in history. But roughly you can say it really started when they took your land during the enclosure movements through laws and by force, forcing the less fortunate into densely populated compounds to sell their labour for a living. It wasn’t very nice. But then they put on a nicer face for the more gullible
Hey! It’s not 1950s anymore and women can vote, open their own bank accounts and earn their own money now and Dr Some-super-weird-name invented some magic pill so no worrying if you’d get pregnant plus how much nicer society would be if people regardless of color, gender and backgrounds are treated equally altogether? No need to worry who’s your daddy anymore. The problem is who’s NOT your daddy. Ha! Soon all couples will be required to genetic edit their babies and god knows when direct parenting of your biological children will be outlawed. No need to care about who is whose kid anymore.
Hey! Look we give you 500 bucks of sign up bonuses plus 3.5% cashbacks on groceries and gas with select partners and exclusive access to airport lounges to look down upon your fellow poor people who aren’t using the lounges plus no annual fees at only 19.99% APR, which only requires you to get a nine digit number by signing on some paper with some gibberish that basically says from now on we will be keeping an eye on you and your money and if there’s a single thing we see that we don’t like, which we will never tell you btw, you’re screwed! Congrats!
Hey! Free email service and 2GB of free storage in 2004! Why not? Look! Every one of your friends in college is signing up for this online photo books of your fellow schoolmates where you can shoot them a dm and hey maybe find your next love on it, and it’s free! Who would’ve thought someone was keeping an eye on the 2am drunk text you sent to your fwb on a random Thursday morning which would lead to a local therapist ad being shown to you two days later? And hey, 9.99 dollars a months for unlimited streaming of millions of songs? Bye bye to 0.99 a single that allows you to own it forever!
They think to themselves - you will own nothing and you will be happy.
It’s kinda funny when I was like 7 years old I thought that the concepts of loans and debts were so stupid and completely didn’t make any sense, as in, when you need money to buy something why don’t you just go make more money and come back to buy what you need?
With all that said, by this logic, private ownership caused basically all wars and civil unrest. Perhaps at this point both you and me have realized I might have just paraphrased our dear Carl Marx’ little manifesto. And we all know the rest of that story.
Or did it? Was it really private ownership the real culprit? Of everything? It seems problem only exists when ownership is taken from you. We were all pretty happy living on our little own lands, farming our own grains, veggies and livestocks, a wife from a town thirty five furlongs up the river whom you met from your local church during lent and a few perfectly healthy children playing in the rye fields, whose teeth were probably just a little too yellow by modern standards.
A lot of normal folks just simply don’t care, goes about their business and goes on complaining about shit and asks why shit don’t work and just moves on, if said shit doesn’t matter enough to them, until it does. I doubt they are even self aware at this point. A smaller part of the population who happens to be on the more neurotic, sensitive side often will end up going down one of these two paths. Once in a while you will come across some nihilist by which you can easily tell because of their choices of attire, accessories and social media profile. They tell you that we are all gonna die. All will turn to dust. And more often than not they often reek of marijuana. All that bullshit that makes you look at them and go like, damn no wonder they live like this. That was a little extreme. More often than you think these people are a bit self contradictory in the sense that they also participate in some causes they think are noble, not entirely self aware as well. Which leads to the second paths they tend to take. These are in my opinion the most wholesome people to spend time with.
They know all life end equally. They know people get frustrated searching and trying to give meaning to their existence yet people keep going. They’ve actually accepted it. You have to sort of discover them solely by chance because on the surface they are just the calmest, chillest and most normal dude who are just excellent and fast at making connections with new people.
So what?
Why is this important? It’s a call to action. Without a call to action it would make the title of this post too perfect. Ok, and what? lmao. I just thought it was such a funny name to a series of blogs
People of similar life experiences should be more cautious giving and taking advice. I never take advice from someone whose whole story I don’t know, someone who didn’t/ isn’t living the life I want or someone who isn’t the person I want to become. Neither should you. You don’t know my whole story obviously. The wisest people I know — you just hang out with them and you yap about your day and they tell you their stories. So this is me leaving you with a thought without actually telling you to do something.
You being cynical and all does no help but harm to your own mind. You are allowed to laugh the crazy clown shit and excuse yourself that happens in your life because it is kind of a clown world we are living in. No need to get mad at anyone. Just poke fun of it. And you will one day find yourself staring into the abyss and just giggle and laugh.
The more they tell you that you are free to do anything, the more you have to enforce your boundaries. How much time you will allow yourself for brainrot shitpost videos until you lock up the app for the rest of the day from a time management app. How much money you spend on useless shit which by the lack of it only costs you maybe 15-20 minutes of inconvenience and you will never use again. How much you are going to spend on takeouts because you don’t feel like cooking. How many disrespectful behaviors and acts from your girl that you will tolerate because she thinks she is being empowered by doing all this and somehow she is better than you because first she is a girl, and she is half decently pretty, plus some 49 year old gentleman who’s probably your friends dad asked for her number and said he liked her outfit today on her way to classes.
It’s only a matter of mediation between you are having fun and the fun is having you.
Be the owner, not the owned.
Ciao
Preston