Thu Feb 19, 2026
My first subscription was to Google Play Music (since renamed to YouTube Music) in 2014. At the time I was overjoyed with the freedom it gave me and vowed to ditch all physical media. Since then, I’ve added one more subscription after another. But, instead of feeling more joy with each new sub, I’ve felt increasing resentment. Despite holding out for years before pulling out my credit card and carefully vetting any new service, the subscriptions have started to pile up - and, not unlike jacking out of the matrix, they’re not easy to cancel.
I’m not the only one feeling like a cash cow offering my udders to literally every company on the planet to milk dry. In recent months, there’s been a backlash against what has aptly been named Technofeudalism.
Simply put, digital capitalism is shifting toward a new kind of economic control. Power has been consolidated to a few big tech companies, who now act like medieval lords. But instead of owning land, these new feudal lords own digital platforms and data. We are the modern-day serfs who must rely on these companies because there are no other choices and no competition from smaller players. As lowly serfs, we no longer own our own media - we must rent it in perpetuity. We also do not own our own data - the feudal lords own the cloud where our data resides, deciding how our data is to be used.
The excellent documentary Why Owning Nothing is So Expensive sums up this disturbing new reality in no uncertain terms. The ubiquity of subscriptions give companies recurring revenue and higher profits they will never relinquish. The lifetime cost of renting is always more valuable than owning a product outright. Employing “dark patterns” to make cancelling difficult, and even relying on the easy revenue stream of people forgetting to unsubscribe, companies will stop at nothing to usher in the “own nothing” economy.
But some people have had enough. Some are fighting back. Unfortunately, it’s a losing battle.
I totally get it. With the shows you want to watch scattered over dozens of platforms, subscription fatigue is real. Consolidation won’t help the issue either. The proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. by Netflix is a case in point - higher prices and less competition. Astronomical annual price increases are hard to swallow, especially when the only alternative is a cheaper plan with ads (most of those ad-supported plans don’t even support 4K, by the way).
So it’s absolutely not a shocker that piracy is on the rise.
The thing is, to avoid being blacklisted by your ISP for repeated illegal torrenting, you’ll still need to subscribe to a reputable VPN. So all you’re doing is trading one subscription for another. Tech-savvy pirates, mostly young dudes with cash-flow problems, can make it work, but it’s hardly a frictionless experience.
On the other hand, for those mainstream folks, setting up a Plex Server probably isn’t on their to-do list. However, they apparently have no qualms with buying those dodgy Android streaming boxes from farmers’ markets, church festivals, and Facebook groups. The Verge article Everyone is Stealing TV explains how frustrated Cable customers are becoming uncontrite cord cutters.
Unfortunately, nothing is truly free. The price to pay for using illegal Chinese hardware is malware and botnets. A price that techno-illiterate grandma probably doesn’t know she is paying while her streaming box happily allows cybercriminals and hackers free use of her network for fraudulent activities.
On the other end of the age spectrum, we have kids in their twenties ditching their “toxic” smartphones and cancelling their Spotify subscriptions. Instead, they’re overpaying for old iPods on eBay. Or even buying CDs. In Canoopsy’s video Why We Started to Hate Technology, he argues that people are seeking authenticity, ownership, and the beauty of human imperfection in an increasingly sterile digital world. It’s a deconstruction of when Steve Jobs feigned the announcement of three new products. The first, he said, was a widescreen iPod with touch controls. “The second is a revolutionary mobile phone,” Jobs continued. “And the third is a breakthrough internet communications device.” He was, of course, setting up the punchline where all three were distilled into one device: the iPhone.
Kids who never grew up with old technology like pagers and digital cameras are now seeking them out. Desperate to reduce their screen time, they’re breaking up the iPhone into multiple single-use devices. It’s nuts. If you’re as old as I am, then you’ll remember how much old technology sucked.
You’ll also remember how liberating it was to be free of more stuff. Not only of multiple devices, but of physical media. The answer isn’t throwing all that Marie Kondo shit out the window and burying yourself under a mountain of old junk. After all, to quote Tyler Durden from Fight Club - “The things you own end up owning you.”
The answer my friends is to live simple, disciplined lives like the Buddhist monk eschewing all attachments to earthly possessions. Practically speaking, this philosophy can be distilled as follows:
- Rotate your subscriptions so that you’re only paying for one at a time. For example, watch everything on Disney Plus for six months before cancelling and subscribing to Netflix for six months. Rinse and repeat.
- Have an exit strategy. Don’t upload your entire photo library to the cloud and call it a day - follow the 3-2-1 Backup Rule. In other words, have all your full-resolution images on a hard drive. Have a physical backup on a second hard drive, and have a cloud backup. If you need to cancel the cloud subscription later, then you aren’t screwed.
- Buy your most beloved media - worth it for those cheesy movies you watch every Christmas or the repeated Lord of the Rings marathon viewings. It doesn’t have to be on Blu-Ray, unless it’s a collectible box set that you’ll forever cherish. There’s nothing wrong with buying digital copies - these won’t vanish when licensing deals expire like on streaming services.
- Keep your life simple - you only need one device, not dozens and the smartphone isn’t going away anytime soon. Most smartphone addictions can easily be kicked by removing any apps with infinite scrolling feeds. Getting off social media will solve 99 percent of your screen time issues.
When I was a kid, one of my favourite possessions was a piggy bank in the shape of a coffin. It was something like this one. When you offered a coin to the coffin, a skeleton hand would emerge and drag the coin into the slot. The caption on the side sums up this entire post: “You can’t take it with you - but you can try”.