Ownership Going Forward : Subscription Fatigue, Intellectual Property and Common People

Netflix’s dystopian anthology Black Mirror recently released their seventh season - and while it has always been a harbinger of technological panic and prompted discussions about the reality of  a future that mirrors science-fictional dystopian scenarios, it is to be noted that this seventh seasons parallels our contemporary social landscape in an almost eerie manner. As an enthusiastic consumer of the show, mainly due to its limitless imagination and contorted storylines, the episode from the new season that etched the deepest mark on me was the first one, “Common People.” 

Written by Bisha K. Ali and showrunner Charlie Brooker, the episode follows the struggles of a middle-class couple, post-surgery of the wife, who is brought back to life through a new-age technology which is based on a monthly subscription service. The service operates on a digital consciousness server, and the tiers to the service are in direct  reflection to the amount of autonomy one has over their mind - subscribed to the most inexpensive tier due to lack of finances, Amanda is forced to be an occasional vehicle for advertisements in the middle of her regular life. 

Welder and Amanda find out that she is living on a tier-based subscription model (Common People, Season 7 Episode 1, Black Mirror, Netflix)

On Subscription Fatigue and its Effects

While such technology is most certainly theoretical in our times, the concept of tier-based subscription models is something that has plagued modern technology for a few years now, and is becoming a much more noticeable concern as of late. The most day-to-day example could be music streaming service, Spotify, which most users cite to be unusable without being subscribed to the Premium model of it. As someone who vowed never to subscribe to listen to music, I also ended up caving a few months ago and subscribing to the Student Plan due to the complete lack of streaming accessibility on the free plan - three ads play between each song, there is no autonomy over which song you can play, and changing a song means prompting another advertisement. While one can argue that people have always had to pay to listen to their favourite artists, unlike CDs and physical records, Spotify Premium is not enabling their users to own any of the albums or playlists - they are simply letting them temporarily access these uninterrupted until they stop paying for the service. 

Spotify's several subscription tiers at different price points and with different features

This type of consumer feedback has also prompted the great migration back towards physical media, even by generations who were not active participants within the physical media culture. While younger generations have cultivated a love for digital archiving, such as the “Tumblr generation” who grew up curating blogs about video games, e-zines, websites and music playlists, these digital copies agave become monopolised by big corporations, such as Netflix, Spotify and Amazon, and with the rise of anti-piracy sentiments, copies of these medias become fleeting memories locked behind increasingly expensive paywalls. This phenomena is not simply observed with media however - this has become the model which is becoming adopted for most technology. 

A recent viral sensation was the “Free Television” which paid for itself with targeted advertisements, which has a built-in second screen that constantly rotates through commercials that are curated by the artificial intelligence technology based on the data gathered on the consumer. While proponents such as  Artie Beaty, the writer of the afore-linked article argue that this is simply the norm of most smart televisions now, it also highlights the lack of user autonomy within modern technology. Secondly, there no more remains the promise that the physical service that you purchase - a television or a smartphone, for example, will continue to remain in the same condition with the same features that were initially promised, especially when the parent corporation has more autonomy over it than the consumer. Several examples of this come to mind - the Spotify “Car Thing” which was simply shut down once it proved more of an inconvenience to the company, or how thermostats can nowadays be remotely controlled, and shut down once the monthly subscription fee is paid - a tier-based model for something which functions in the same manner as a remote. 

Telly's "free" 55-inch 4K TV that continuously displays advertisements as part of the second screen

Theorists refer to the reaction to this phenomena as “subscription fatigue.” Jay Fitzgerald writes for the Harvard School of Business about “subscriptionitis”, saying that “subscriptions have become so widespread that many consumers are starting to feel overwhelmed with what some are calling “subscriptionitis.” And customers have made it clear that subscriptions aren’t appropriate for all products and services.” Citing earlier literature by Ofek and Konary, he illustrates this point by discussing BMW’s controversial decision to charge  $18 a month for heated front seats, $12 a month for heated steering wheels, and extra subscription-like payments for other options on its cars in some countries, which left buyers confused and feeling cheated as they had assumed that the hefty sum they had spent on buying the vehicle should already cover these charges, paralleling the sentiments of users of modern technology.

On Property and its Ownership

The war over intellectual property has been a major one with the rise of artificial intelligence globally, with legal systems being unprepared to deal with this major crisis and the shift in the manner in which ownership is perceived. Technology has developed at such a rapid rate in the last five years that our legal systems still lag behind the times. There still remains ambiguity and lack of judicial control over the concern of intellectual property in relation to generative AI, and this has extended into physical and material ownership as well. This concern can be traced to things bought physically, but which on the whims of the company, can be remotely taken away from us, such as functionality and performance of smartphones noticeably declining once a newer model is suddenly released. Companies are also able to disable service until users agree to certain changes imposed upon them, such as the recent controversy of Roku disabling their televisions until users agreed to their updated terms of service. In short, products that we have already paid for can be taken away from us at a moment’s notice - they are not made to last, but to have unparalleled elasticity based on the trends and money-making schemes of the time.

Examples of this are scattered around our social landscape, where phones and computers are designed with in-built systems that simply shut down if the user does not update the software - my own laptop reverted to the Blue Screen of Death a few days ago, only for me to find out that it was due to not updating it, even though a new update had just been installed less than a week ago. Companies have realised that there is little to no scope for major technological advancements at this point of time, and thus rely on sneaky microtransactions or other unethical practices to keep on profiting - the Themes app that had a huge amount of free themes for my last Android phone are now all behind paywalls in my new phone.

Social media also functions without little to no consumer autonomy. Most of the time, we don’t open our social media apps with a goal in mind, we simply consume whatever it shows us, and then close it again and continue the cycle. We are not overlords of our algorithms or homepage, yet we are submissive viewers of the same. We have become conditioned to accept this relationship, too. Content consumerism is most often placid and unconscious, and as Sindhura Gade puts it, “The ratio of our content consumption and how much of it translates into meaningful times in our lives can be shocking, and the glacially gradual impact of the content we consume on our personalities, what we believe in, and who we are, is downright scary.” Who owns who, then, exactly?

On Common People

Sure, Black Mirror feeds on the most pressing anxieties and worries of our time, and it is also another product that just be sold, consumed and profited upon, and thus must present fantastic exaggerations and dramatic sagas to be palatable. However, it is also equally true that art-horror is one of our best mediums to reflect the trajectory of society, and this show has become, knowingly or unknowingly, an agent of that. With the exponential decrease of human autonomy and ownership over their purchases and technology in general, where technology is being heavily pushed to even replace human thinking, “Common People” provides a realistic exaggeration of the dangers of over-implementing subscription models and advertisement “breaks”. It also spills doubt into the overtly positivist attitudes that proponents of unquestioned technological advancement have.

As Youtuber Drew Gooden points out, it becomes less exciting to look forward to newer technology when it so obviously becomes geared towards greatly exploiting its consumer base, and only innovates in the manner in which this exploitation takes place. It is not about standing in the way of modern convenience, but questioning the predatory motives behind most of these advancements. Returning to older, physical media is definitely one way, but it also becomes our incentive as consumers to not be paralysed viewers and buyers of sensationalised products, but to question and be aware of our positionality and autonomies, and also help our loved ones do the same as well. 

This blog is not sponsored by Netflix or Black Mirror showrunners. But it could be.