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Tech and subscription services are getting worse and should we blame the consumer

Is the onus on the consumer? As much as I hate to say it I am pretty judgemental when it comes to people paying for subscriptions.

While its wholly negative to have this mind set in the modern world is it such a bad thing.

Like if we were all in a Lemmy community swimming pool and 80% of lemmys where pissing in that pool would I be unjust to be mad, my thought pattern here is by people supporting the subscription model will impacts everyone and it goes further than just more subscription only content, it impacts hardware where a lot of iot device and gaming device are less about serving the enjoyable media/useful features and more offering a portal to subscription services which impacts usabilities like rooting, custom ROMs, emulation, general tinkering, now every modern console, shady iot device has some kind of encrypted lock or circumventing that lock will also attract negative attention from corpos. At what point will consumer PCs start running locked down software with a locked bootloader.

Should we as consumers stop buying game pass, Disney plus, vibrating massarg rings, mill kits, cable TV. As to not incentives corporations.

I hope I’m not doom saying just general frustration and concern for what the future will hold. And I’d like to see what the general concus is on the subject

thebardingreen , (edited )
@thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz avatar

We should mostly blame enshitification. Which isn’t the consumer’s fault. The market has been engineered to encourage human animals to exhibit specific group behavior.

You can blame animals for doing what they do, but this just makes you angry, doesn’t solve problems and actually disengages you from lines of thought that might lead to constructive behavior. A human has a choice, but if you study groups of humans you’ll find that they always 100% throughout all of history exhibit herd behavior. The famous quote from Men in Black, “A person is smart, people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”

I think we can and should blame the system that encourages the behavior (from the perspective of both consumer behavior and corporate behavior), then target our ire at the people who most benefit from perpetuating and defending that system. Yes, they’re also exhibiting herd behavior (the predatory wealthy can always be counted on to focus on short-term profit, ignore long-term consequences and thus behaving predictable ways), but they’re a small enough group of people and human society is big enough to enforce changes on their behavior when enough of us get mad at us at them.

Sometimes this results in chaos, but sometimes it results in periods of good policy and relative prosperity.

EDIT:

I should add, the rich ALWAYS hate periods of good policy and relative prosperity and always work relentlessly to change the policies and enable themselves to accumulate more wealth, regardless of (wilfully ignorant to) the long term political, social and environmental consequences. They always feel like their opportunities for profit are being limited by the state and that they’re contributing more than their fair share to a society that they always feel aloof from and seek to insulate themselves from. ALWAYS. We have examples from ancient Egypt, examples from Medieval Europe and Medieval China., setting aside the history of the last two centuries where we can see this playing out in a bunch of obvious ways. Those are just examples I’m aware of, I’m sure an Historian could give us a dozen more examples.

The point is, if you get the opportunity to contribute to a radical economic transformation, try your damnedest to engineer it to be “rich, dumb, greedy asshole” proof. This is JUST like security engineering (think of ways to attack the system, then think of ways to patch the problems).

haui_lemmy ,

Your comment is like a handful of water while dying of thirst in the desert. I cant thank you enough for posting this. I cant understand why people blame each other for this obviously engineered situation and it scares me to death.

neidu2 ,

No

cali_ash ,

So … what is your question?

anarchost ,

OP forgot a question mark at the end of their post

“Should we blame the consumer?”

squid_slime OP ,
@squid_slime@lemmy.world avatar

Was actually wanting a discussion on the surge of subscription services and its effects on hardware, cultural and who’s to blame, a lot of people gave great long form answers already and is far from a binary discussion but even so even short yes no answers are insightful to the mood my post has caused

aberrate_junior_beatnik ,

No

mozz ,
@mozz@mbin.grits.dev avatar

People when paying for a newspaper, professional journalism being absolutely vital to the health of the republic: Pfft fuck that

People when paying for a streaming service serving hot garbage direct to their eyeballs: Yay more Star Wars

memfree ,
@memfree@lemmy.ml avatar
  1. People were fine buying actual-paper news even though it was filled with advertising.
  2. When cable TV started, several channels (but not all) were ad-free, and you paid a price for the cable bundle.
  3. Those ad-free channels quickly started airing ads because: why not? Also: there used to be a limit on how many ads could air on broadcast TV, but that regulation was lifted. Ads became inescapable.
  4. With the advent of the internet, people suddenly had to pay a provider to get to a web page that also had ads. This mirrored buying the (still available) newspapers. When speeds surpassed early dial-up, they briefly started coming in with sound, too. That was too far.

Already burned by cable-TV’s massive surge in advertising, there was no way you were going to get the average consumer to put up with ads AND pay for an internet provider AND pay extra for content. Now that we’re also getting tracked everywhere by every marketer, it is increasingly hard to ask consumers to pay for content when the real money is selling eyeballs to marketers.

Who to blame? I’m going to blame legislators for reducing the upper tax brackets. In the 40s and 50s, the upper brackets were over 90%. That meant you could get rich, but not extravagantly filthy rich. As a basic philosophy, one could figure it as: someone making a massive excess in funds was probably exploiting something the government was either already providing or was going to have to pay for later, so… let’s just collect that revenue now. Note that during the same period, businesses were only taxed about 30-50% for the higher brackets, so if you owned the company, you might leave funds there, invest in the company itself (a write-off), and take a smaller salary since it would otherwise get eaten by taxes.

Anyway, if you have progressive taxes with extremely high rates on the upper end, then people (and companies) can’t amass the same power. They are less able to bribe and corrupt everything. The government has more funds for roads, schools, and enforcement agents for things like food-safety and port-controls. This does, of course, presume people have some reliable new sources that are reporting which government individuals are crooks and liars, and who has which of them in their back-pockets. Now that we’ve burned that all down, I’m not sure who is willing to give us a readable summary of what bills are being written, shelved, and voted on by whom – but we need that information to get in the hands of an educated populace who will vote for flawed-but-generally-honest people that will act on behalf of their constituents first rather than a handful of rich funders.

HubertManne ,

100% agree here. There is so much fud about taxes but if you look at our history, especially since reagan. tax cuts result in a worse economy and raising them improves it a lot for the modest increases we had.

Vanth , (edited )
@Vanth@reddthat.com avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    squid_slime OP ,
    @squid_slime@lemmy.world avatar

    Thanks what you said was impactful I am also working on growing my own food, would love to go off grid but land is expensive here.

    Good luck to you!

    andrewta ,

    Can’t argue with you. We stop buying the shit and they stop producing it.

    knfrmity ,
    • Consumer picks one of the only three options they are legally allowed to have.
    • They’re all bad options.

    This guy:

    • It’s the consumers fault that they picked the bad option and that all the options are bad.
    GolfNovemberUniform ,
    @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

    Most of the consumers don’t care. Also, ethical and sustainable products are often more expensive and/or less convenient than evil ones (why would anyone buy an evil product if it’s not cheaper (or “cheaper”) anyways?). And I think there may be a similar trend to that “life constantly in debt” thing from the 19th century going on now (at least in my county). Both consumers and companies are guilty for the current situation but informing people is better than just blaming in my opinion. I’d also suggest you to do blaming/ranting in appropriate communities to get less hate in return

    squid_slime OP ,
    @squid_slime@lemmy.world avatar

    I agree and thank you for your response. I understand and should of prefaced with “there is nuance” but as a hole people really don’t care, apple have suicide nets around they’re factory’s yet its the most popular phone in western markets, I am sure my devices come from a similar place maybe worse. As to posting to a suitable community, I wasn’t entirely sure where to post I saw someone post about Nintendo and didn’t want to ramble on they’re post about my perceived state of the world but even so I am okay with hate, being humbled.

    all-knight-party ,
    @all-knight-party@kbin.run avatar

    I don't necessarily think people are incapable of caring about it, but that waking life, work, and our current state of the world are quite stressful and complex, and people are really only capable of caring about so many things at one time, and that usually gets eaten up by immediate problems that are specific from person to person.

    You won't get an otherwise good guy to care enough about this sort of thing to make a stand if he's too busy taking care of a sick, dependent family member, or if he's depressed and self medicating with alcohol. I think it's on the people for not caring enough, but it's also not on the people for having a biological limit to how much you can be engaged with and care about at a time.

    GolfNovemberUniform ,
    @GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml avatar

    It’s also on the governments, big companies, other significant influence entities for making everything more and more complicated so people can’t care about it (talking about privacy policies, contracts and that kind of stuff here)

    squid_slime OP ,
    @squid_slime@lemmy.world avatar

    Just as an aside, I am not entirely against subscription. I understand that there are business models that just don’t work without a subscription like internet, mobile data as well as enterprise services.

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