Welcome to Your Future in Subscription Hell | by Jared A. Brock | Jul, 2022 - Surviving Tomorrow

The great reset to serfdom starts with a monthly payment

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Imagine you buy a car.

A posh car.

A BMW.

The kind of car you'll glory in driving for a decade or longer.

You'd expect it to come with heated seats, right?

There's nothing like toasty buns on a frosty morning.

Now imagine one December morning you slip into your car and the heated seats suddenly don't work.

Nothing's technically wrong with the heated seats, of course — you just failed to pay BMW the vampiric $18 monthly fee that they're now charging their customers for the pleasure.

That's right: Over a ten-year period, BMW owners will have to fork out more than $2,000 just to turn on their own heated seats.

I know what you're thinking —"boohoo Beemer owners, you can afford to get robbed by technology monopolizers."

But subscription serfdom isn't just for luxury cars.

It's a rapidly expanding business model that will leave us all in poverty and slavery.

Rent-seeking

Despite contributing zero extra value to the lives of their customers, BMW is set to extract billions of dollars through a portfolio of thirteen new monthly fees.

Their goal is to milk the customers dry, charging $18/month for heated seats, $12/month for automatic high-beam headlights, and $42/month for adaptive cruise control.

All these features used to come "free" when you bought a BMW.

Moreover, all these features will still be in every BMW, they'll just be switched off until you pay the German mobster's vig.

In other words, now that BMW has the technology to hold cars hostage, they can wield it to rob customers despite the fact that said customers have already paid for the vehicle.

There's a word for this type of parasitism: Rent-seeking.

Wikipedia defines rent-seeking as:

"The effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline."

BMW isn't the only car company that's getting in the rent-seeker con:

• Lexus, Toyota, and Subaru are now forcing car owners to pay monthly fees for the ability to lock or start their cars remotely.
• Cadillacs and Chevies now require a $300/year fee for super cruise control.
• Volkswagen, Audi, and Porsche are all moving the subscription serfdom model.
• Tesla charges a whopping $199/month for their driver-assistance system.
• GM stole over $2 billion in rent-seeking payments last year, with plans to bilk $25 billion per year by 2030.

Just like SaaS companies like Netflix and Adobe— which are all illegal content monopolies — these car corporations are just monopolizing features in order to extract a rent-seeker's fee.

And this exploitative insanity is just getting started.

From ownership to rentership

For almost all of human history, people made one-time payments and then took possession of goods and services.

Not anymore.

Have you noticed that everyone is pushing you into a monthly payment?

• Your land-lorder or mortgage lender
• Your insurance company
• Your heating provider
• Your electricity board
• Your water company
• Your municipality for land taxes
• Your phone provider
• Your car salesman
• Your student loan gangster
• Your credit card company
• Your grocery delivery service
• Your razor maker
• And the fifty million apps you haven't used in two years but are too lazy to cancel ;)

Some of these monthly fees make sense — if I use a variable amount of electricity over the course of a year, my energy people deserve to get paid in full in a timely manner.

But now, pretty much every industry is trying to ram you into a monthly plan, whether you need or even want one: socks, tights, kid's toys, underwear, make-up, toothbrushes, meat-by-mail, veg boxes, snack boxes, pre-packaged meals, candy clubs, hot sauces, seafood, cheeses, olive oils, wine clubs, coffee blends, yoga outfits, candles, flowers, paper, art crates, even outrageously wasteful things like monthly potted plants.

One-time consumables like food and media aside, recurring revenue models aren't actually the best thing for consumers. It would be far better if our money retained its value long-term, and we could just save up and purchase buy-it-for-life-quality goods instead of having to re-rent inferior-quality items repeatedly until the day we die broke.

Death by fee

A quick recap of the past fifty history lesson:

1. First, the elite shareholder class impoverished the contributive masses via systemic inflation and purposeful wage stagnation.
2. Second, they got us hooked on monthly payment plans for the things we wanted and needed but couldn't afford to buy lump-sum anyway. (When was the last time most people paid cash for a house, car, major appliance, or even a piece of furniture?)
3. Now, corporate elites are working on a new scheme to steal our time, impoverish our lives, and ram us back into serfdom once and for all:

The total end of ownership and the introduction of the rent-seeking economy.

I've said it before and I'll keep saying it until the world bans for-profit corporations:

Banksters + investors + rent-seeking = Serfdom 2.0

We're currently in Act 1 of the great reset to feudalism, where the masses own nothing and have to waste their entire lives enriching the rich just to eke out a miserable existence.

The feudalism-making model will infiltrate every industry imaginable:

• Furniture that retails for $1,000 — be it a couch or table — will suddenly cost $6,000 over a five-year $99/month rental plan.
• TVs, fridges, and washing machines will go from $1,000 upfront to $9,000 over a six-year rental at $125/month.
• Boots and shoes that once cost $100 will cost $1,000 at "just" $29/month.

Subscription serfdom is a self-reinforcing system:

When people are paying $60,000 in rent for a bed, they aren't as able to save up for other purchases.

It means they can't afford to buy a new car, so they have to get on a payment plan instead, which means they'll waste nearly $500,000 on cars in their lifetime.

And $50,000+ for cell phones.
And $25,000+ for Adobe Creative Cloud that used to go for $500.
And $5,000+ for Bill Gates's wretched Word processor.

As investors prey on more and more industries, it creates a downward spiral of corporate dependency for consumers. They lose wealth and choice and, ultimately, freedom.

Do you see what's happening here?

Corporatism is evolving from owning the means of production to also owning the products themselves.

It's corporate enslavement, and no one sees it coming.

We should be screaming it from the rooftops.

Monopolizing human shelter

The biggest danger occurs when rent-seekers go after human necessities.

We can shrug at the idea of BMW monopolizing heated steering wheel technology for an extraction fee, but when it comes to things that housing, the results of rent-seeking have devastating effects on human wellbeing.

The financialization of real estate is already the costliest scam on the planet, costing consumers $326 trillion so far and rising rapidly. That's because investors know we desperately need shelter.

Rather than working and contributing like moral human beings, land-lorders monopolize the human necessity of shelter in order to flay a passive profit off the backs of active laborers.

(It's quite telling that after every revolution, it's the banksters and land-lorders who go to prison… or far worse.)

Now, multinational monopolies are hoovering up single-family homes by the tens of thousands, outbidding families and paying cash, just to turn around and rent it back to real humans at vastly inflated rental prices.

That's why the average house will cost $10 million within our lifetime, and everyone you know will struggle and suffer under rent serfdom.

There is only one way to stop the great reset to feudalism

It is an instant remedy that our idiotic generation will resist until it is far too late, but posterity will see it as so glaringly obvious that they will curse our bones for being so unfathomably stupid:

In the face of Serfdom 2.0, humanity will inevitably have to ban rent-seeking and corporate profit-making from all human necessities.

Capitalism pretends it is a game of "efficiency," but the notion is so laughable as to be absurd.

Efficient for who?

Certainly not for our dying planet.
Certainly not for the millions of child slaves and billions of adult laborers.
Certainly not for all eight billion consumers who will soon have to drop $60,000 over their lifetime for mattresses and $5,000,000+ for basic shelter.

Corporate profit is the ultimate inefficiency.

When all land and resources were free, a hard-working family could build a house of stone for less than 500 hours of work per person and it would last for centuries. Now, corporations are re-engineering the global economy for maximal economic dependence and profit-taking — just another form of slavery, albeit a tad less 12 Years a Slave and a little more Brave New World.

Subscription serfdom will destroy human freedom and widespread wellbeing.

A better day is coming

When we ban rent-seeking and profit-taking from all human necessities, consumer prices will fall drastically.

Affordable homeownership will be easily accessible to the vast majority of working folk.

The rich will be slightly less rich, and the working contributor class will retain far more of the wealth they solely create.

We'll actually own the clothes we wear and the homes and beds we sleep in, and we'll keep our buns toasty on frosty winter morning commutes.

But of course, it will never happen.

Because monopolists want to own everything.

They especially want to own you.

Jared A. Brock is an award-winning biographer, PBS documentarian, and the cell-free founder of the popular futurist blog Surviving Tomorrow, where he provides thoughtful people with contrarian perspectives on the corporatist anti-culture. His writing has appeared in Esquire, The Guardian, Smithsonian, and TIME Magazine, and he has traveled to more than forty countries including North Korea. Join 25,000+ people who follow him on Medium, Twitter, and Substack.

Welcome to Your Future in Subscription Hell | by Jared A. Brock | Jul, 2022 - Surviving Tomorrow

Welcome to Your Future in Subscription Hell | by Jared A. Brock | Jul, 2022 - Surviving Tomorrow