Opinion: Subscription Culture Is Dismantling Ownership, One Monthly Payment At A Time

There’s a Black Mirror episode named ‘Common People’ that rattled me to the core like no other piece of fiction. It visualised my second-deepest fear, where subscription systems transcend software and take control over human life and dignity. The top spot is still reserved by my irrational fear of accidentally drifting away into space as an astronaut.

While I am fairly confident I will never qualify for astronaut training, the subscription demon feels closer than ever, slowly pulling everything and everyone into its clutches. Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether tech bros would one day sell subscriptions for fresh air after they are done destroying the planet. Maybe it is only my wild imagination; maybe it is not. (To capitalism: Please don’t take notes.)

The tech economy is already moving in a direction that feels eerily familiar—you don’t own anything, you just rent. From subscription-based printers in offices to rented water purifiers at home, and outsourced medical imaging in hospitals, services are steadily replacing possessions in every corner of life.

The troubling part isn’t renting itself—it’s when ownership disappears entirely.

For instance, you can no longer buy Adobe Premiere Suite but can subscribe to it for life. You can still choose to buy Microsoft Office (2024) instead of subscribing to Microsoft 365, but who knows how long it will last. The same dilemma goes for services like Filmora, Final Cut Pro, and many more to count.

Owning a music album or a movie feels like a thing of the distant past. Subscribing to a streaming service is the norm. Safekeeping your photos and videos in a physical storage device is no longer the trend. Cloud-based storage services are the go-to solution now.

Subscription-based cloud gaming services threaten the very existence of physical consoles and gaming PCs (Getty Images)

The gaming industry is also moving in the same direction as video game subscriptions like PlayStation Plus, Xbox Game Pass, Ubisoft+, and others come with a big "Netflix-style" library of games—designed to make game purchases obsolete. Meanwhile, subscription-based cloud gaming services threaten the very existence of physical consoles and gaming PCs—you just need a screen and a fast internet connection to play games.

In India, you can also subscribe to a cloud PC, similar to virtual desktops in the West, where the brain of the machine lives in the cloud. You can even rent a GPU by the hour to take care of intensive workloads. These arrangements may save you a ton of money when you require access only for a limited time.

Subscriptions undeniably lower the barrier to entry. They let people try premium services without long-term commitments or massive upfront costs. But in the long run, they often lose their economic edge. The real problem arises when perpetual licenses vanish, leaving consumers locked into SaaS (software as a service) models with no alternative.

For companies, a constant stream of revenue is much more valuable than one-off purchases. This is why subscriptions have started popping up everywhere, even in places where they arguably do not belong. Imagine buying a car with your money, only to be told you’ll need to pay a monthly fee just to switch on the heated seats. Actually, you don’t have to imagine—one company actually tried this. Although the backlash forced them to back down, some automakers still want to squeeze money from their customers by charging them for using the hardware they already bought.

This will fundamentally redefine ownership. And the shift is happening in more ways than one. Increasingly, buying a game today does not necessarily mean owning it. In many cases, you are merely purchasing a licence to access the game, and that access exists only as long as the company allows it.

In pursuit of lucrative recurring revenue, many apps and services have embraced “enshittification” — a term coined by author Cory Doctorow to describe how digital platforms gradually worsen the user experience for profits. Instead of adding meaningful value to paid tiers, companies often degrade the free experience to push users towards paid subscriptions. Some services now even stack multiple subscription tiers on top of one another, where each tier exists mainly to make the next one look reasonable— sometimes even plaguing the base tier with ads.

Instead of adding meaningful value to paid tiers, companies often degrade the free experience to push users towards paid subscriptions (Getty Images)

This brings me back to the Black Mirror episode I mentioned earlier. In it, a fictional technology company, “Rivermind”, saves the life of a woman by replacing her damaged brain tissue with synthetic material. While the treatment itself is free, the synthetic tissue remains under the company’s control and requires a recurring subscription to keep functioning. As the story progresses, the lower tiers deliberately worsen the user experience, restricting the woman’s movement through limited coverage, turning her into a walking advertisement with forced ad insertions into her speech, and even siphoning processing power from her synthetic brain tissue, forcing her to sleep longer.

“Common People” makes me worried because it does not feel like a dystopia. The inherent logic already exists in today’s consumer tech economy. Increasingly, products are no longer things we fully own, but services we access temporarily under terms dictated by corporations. The convenience is undeniable, but it also normalises dependency. One monthly payment turns into five, then ten, until entire parts of modern life quietly become impossible to access without a recurring fee.

As I said earlier, subscriptions are not inherently the problem. The real danger begins when renting becomes the only option. The moment ownership disappears, so does user control. And history shows that companies rarely surrender control once consumers become dependent on their ecosystems.