I sometimes do these thought pieces, and I don’t tend to post them professionally, but it’s nice to think about these things. then put them into words to try and make some sense of the world we all live in.
One of the core things that I feel we see at the moment, and which is often very troubling for younger generations, is the question of why everything seems to be getting rotten.
We hear the term enshittification. We see billionaires, and we see that billionaires can never quite get enough. We try to go to “third places” to just be ourselves and enjoy a moment away from constant needs and delivery. Yet a lot of these spaces are now being turned into places where simply being there has to generate constant oppressive revenue.
I believe American bowling alleys are going through something like this. Historically, bowling was something you could budget for. I remember going bowling myself, where you’d expect to pay a reasonable amount, and that would be your Saturday night or your weekday evening.
Now, going to such places can feel like a constant battle over how much more money can be extracted from you. Sitting quietly and talking with friends starts to look, from the business’s point of view, like a wasted opportunity.
You see it all over the place.
Thankfully, people are fighting back. But activities where you would once spend a finite amount of money for a finite amount of enjoyment are being hunted endlessly for additional revenue.
And to what end?
We’ve seen it with things like Dungeons & Dragons. Traditionally, if you played it in a public place, you might pay for a few drinks and perhaps some shared crisps and stuff. The players would bring pens, paper, character sheets, and dice, and that would basically be the whole cost.
But that kind of model increasingly seems unacceptable. If people can continue enjoying something without paying again, somewhere there is a feeling that money has been left on the table.
We see the same thing with films and other media. Increasingly, ownership is replaced by access, and access is replaced by a recurring fee. You do not simply buy something and keep it. You rent permission to use it for a short period of time.
Why?
Where is this going?
I saw a great comedy video recently in which someone was asking:
What are the billionaires doing this for?
You’ve got a billion. You’ve won. Great.
Why are you still doing this?
Why must there always be more?
Where is the goal of contentment?
As someone now in their 50s, I love the internet. I love technology. I love life. But if I were coming into all of this as a much younger person, I would look at what we’ve done to it and be horrified.
We are walking ourselves towards a dystopian world in which more and more of ordinary life is licensed, metered, or rented. Every amusement needs an account. Every convenience has a recurring fee. More and more of what used to be simply yours becomes something you retain only while the payments continue.
I’m in a position to resist some of this.
I have a lot of local media, everything from books to hard drives full of backed-up films, music and other media. I also have the ability to enjoy those things in a home that I have a mortgage on and which, one day, will hopefully be completely mine.
But newer generations are looking at a world where they are increasingly merely renting their existence from incredibly powerful people.
And again, I repeat: why are these incredibly powerful people doing this?
What will they get when they win?
There is nothing they can’t already do. They are already billionaires. They can do practically anything. They can have practically anything.
It is something I genuinely can’t empathise with.
I do not understand the need for it.
And this is coming from somebody who works primarily in the finance industry. I have spent my working life getting financial systems to work with each other, meet goals and support growth. Having lived in the corporate world all my life, I can say that the majority of the corporate world isn’t like this.
There is something dirty somewhere, and it isn’t necessarily in your everyday corporation.
There will be growth goals, yes. There will be targets to meet, yes. There will even be large-scale changes imposed when, quite frankly, things have got out of control or become slack.
I see all of those.
But they are normally pieces of activity with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and there is usually a justification for doing them.
So much of this other stuff, this subscription-based life, and the pollution of everyone’s third places seems to have no end goal.
Other than, perhaps, the complete subjugation of absolutely everybody apart from a tiny number of people.
But even then, I know some rich people and when I talk to them, they’re not after this either.
So why are we doing it?
I once had a client where all the individual people were really nice people, but cumulatively they did terrible things to each other. Not even to their customers, just to each other. It was as if there was a never-ending grind to make everything worse and everything more painful.
Yet if you talked to any individual person, they would think you were mad.
“Of course we’re not doing that.”
And individually, they weren’t.
But cumulatively, somehow, they were.
That is what this increasingly feels like.
No single person necessarily sets out to turn life into an endless series of fees. But every organisation looks for one more revenue stream or opportunity to capture value. And when you add all of those reasonable-looking decisions together, you end up with something deeply poisonous.
It’s something I try to fight against and help people with as an individual, and I think we all have to do that.
I’ve reached the time of life where people can quite reasonably say, “Oh yes, you’re just talking about the good old days.”
But some parts of the good old days genuinely do need to be recovered.
A pub must be able to exist with overheads low enough that every moment one of its patrons isn’t throwing down a massively expensive drink and immediately ordering another isn’t treated as a financial failure.
It shouldn’t need to constantly squeeze people simply to cover its overheads.
It’s something that confuses me, and it’s something I watch.
As an individual, my only real action is to support the places, companies, and groups that pull back from this, even slightly.
If I see a third place where the model is simply that you can come in, do your thing, pay a reasonable fixed price, and leave, I will support it.
If I see a company selling a product where the model is simply that they make something, you purchase it, and you can then use it reasonably without an ongoing financial relationship, I will support that too.
We have to fight back against the idea that every part of life should become a recurring revenue stream.
And I think the best way most of us can do that is to look for the companies and places that are trying to do things differently.
Support them and fight against becoming merely a subscription.