Homo Subscribens

Why Subscriptions Are Destroying the World

The notice arrived on Halloween.

Thank you for being a valued Microsoft 365 subscriber. To reflect the value we’ve added over the past decade, address rising costs, and enable us to continue delivering new innovations, we’re increasing the price of your subscription.

Effective February 14, 2025, the price for Microsoft 365 Family subscriptions will increase from USD 99.99^* per year to USD 129.99^* per year.

Let us set aside for now the more inspiring details, like this email going out on a holiday and the price increase going into effect on another holiday, and that the people at Microsoft deem themselves to have added 30% value to the work and perhaps lives of their subscribers “over the past decade.” My only response to these things is respect. In the words of The Wire’s stickup man Omar Little, “All in the game, yo. All in the game.”

No, I don’t exactly mind being robbed by having to pay movie-theater-level markup prices for a product, which is just the cost of doing business. What I do mind is the ever more frequent conversion of products into services.

I recently mused with a friend about where I thought this trend was headed: that in what feels like an inevitable future, we will find ourselves paying for a subscription to physical household appliances. It won’t be called a subscription, of course. More likely is that the cost of, say, a refrigerator will be set just high enough so as to be out of reach, and we will be offered a five-year usage plan that includes servicing and, for an additional premium, quarterly water filters, and before you know it, virtually no one will actually purchase a refrigerator. To own a refrigerator will either indicate great poverty— “They had to buy a used refrigerator”—or great wealth— “They were able to buy their refrigerator outright.” For everyone else, the physical object will no longer be exchanged for a definite price, but will instead be the sign of a larger, ongoing service relationship. And then one Good Friday, Whirlpool or Samsung will send you an email saying that, effective July 4, and to reflect the added value of keeping your beer cold, they will be increasing the price of your service plan.

It seems to me that the moral problems with this capitalist plot are obvious. While, indeed, people are free not to subscribe to Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat or cloud storage, the simple fact of that matter is that these subscriptions become a de facto tax extracted from people who wish to live and work in society. The subscription is the inverse and opposite tactic from “planned obsolescence,” which is the deliberate design of products to have a limited lifespan so that people will be forced to purchase replacements. If planned obsolescence is the real-world version of “enshittification,” then the conversion of saleable finished products into subscription services rests on the reality of perpetual need. When, after you’ve stored hundreds of gigabytes of photos and videos, are you really going to cancel that cloud storage subscription? And how about the added bonus, not just that you are selling personal data, but also committing to the ongoing sale of your personal data? This model slowly but effectively diminishes the freedom of free exchange between buyer and seller, and as a result corporations set up consumers as perpetual debtors.

Exactly!

One practical solution I’d like to see: legislation that compels companies to sell a finished product, digital or physical, access to which does not expire. And the law should make it impossible for manufacturers to coerce consumers into a lifetime of leasing refrigerators and ovens and microwaves.

Beyond the immediate moral and political challenge, the conversion of finished products into unending paid services represents a particular mode of existence. Hannah Arendt describes it with precision in her book The Human Condition. She describes “labor” as the activity of human life in our capacity as animals—it’s what we do as participants in the life process of birth, consumption, growth, eventual decay, and death. Think: making a sandwich, cleaning your body, cleaning your habitat. Things you must do over and over again as long as you’re alive. The first and necessary step towards a distinctive humanity and away from mere animality is to construct a world of relative permanence by producing durable objects; Arendt calls this latter activity “work.” Think: building a house, paving roads, installing plumbing. Each one represents a different “condition” of human life.

The distinction between a bread, whose “life expectancy” in the world is hardly more than a day, and a table, which may easily survive generations of men, is certainly much more obvious and decisive than the difference between a baker and a carpenter. […] Viewed as part of the world, the products of work—and not the products of labor—guarantee the permanence and durability without which a world would not be possible at all. It is within this world of durable things that we find the consumer goods through which life assures the means of its own survival. Needed by our bodies and produced by its laboring, but without stability of their own, these things for incessant consumption appear and disappear in an environment of things that are not consumed but used, and to which, as we use them, we become used and accustomed.

In the permanent world of human life, two other possibilities emerge for human existence: action and speech, which create the web of human relationships and shared life—specifically, creating the political sphere. This political sphere is where human freedom finally appears. Under the animal-like condition of labor, human life is bound by the necessities of the body; it is not truly free. And even under the condition of work, in which products may be bought and sold in an exchange market, human life is fenced in by the logic of “value,” in which things have no intrinsic worth, but only have value in relation to other things, until everything, including human life, is measured solely by its usefulness.

The highest possibility of human life, according to Arendt, is the establishment of freedom in the public by speech and action. And while Arendt was no Christian, here I believe the Christian must simply agree, adding that the primordial foundation of human existence was God’s speech to us, setting us among but above the other animals, and tasking us, not just with bodily survival like the other animals, but with naming the other creatures and tending to the world in which we would live. In other words, the human potential for speech and action is one way to describe what sets us apart as being made in the image of God. We are not simply the animal laborans, nor simply homo faber, but the imago Dei.

That today’s “labor” is largely digital does not change its impact as a form of life that conditions human existence into something inferior to the imago Dei. We are seeing it everywhere: those things that once were permanent increasingly become consumable garbage. In my own day-to-day life spent in the world of books, I see constantly that authors feel no choice but to throw themselves into the consumable garbage of social media to gain an audience, and must then somehow produce a permanent object—a book—that is worth reading, to be sold to consumers who are themselves being habituated into consuming shortform texts and videos, losing their capacity to sustain the attention needed to read. Even books are being swallowed by labor!

Today we are witnessing the realm of work being swallowed by the realm of labor, chipping away at the permanent world in which the potential for human life unfolds. The sale of objects becoming the sale of unending services is more than an exploitative tactic to satisfy capitalist greed: it is initiation into a mode of existence in which human speech and action become less and less possible, and by losing our grasp on that possibility, we lose also the possibility of our freedom. We beloved images of God are being invited to become homo subscribens, man the subscriber. Forget money: if we believe in our own humanity, we will resist.