Subscriptions are Endless
I think most people at this point are feeling the annoyance of subscription fatigue, the feeling that everything is a subscription and more popularly, “You will own nothing and like it”.
I know I hit that feeling, that it felt like everything was $5 a month, and then $10, and then $15 a month. Subscriptions are ubiquitous, and then suddenly about 5 years ago I decided enough was enough, and purged 90% of my subscriptions in one evening.
What started as a cathartic purge of everything that had been draining my checking account soon grew to a passion of finding the free alternatives for things I used daily.
To those who have read my blog you'll know that usually I go fairly technical in hosting my own services, and that is definitely something I encourage. Today though I want to simply chat about concepts of owning things vs renting, and what we give up when we click the Subscribe button. Did you know you can subscribe to me on the Fediverse/Mastodon/Pixelfed? Go ahead, click subscribe, I dare you after that last sentence
You used to own your music
Music is an easy item to think about because those of us in our thirties were some of the last who generally owned our music. Yes there is the nostalgia of record stores to some, but I came after that. For me, the iTunes store was brand new, I had an iPod nano and then I very proudly purchased the Zune. I would buy CDs and using the iTunes/Zune software I would upload the discs to my devices, and walk around.
I remember CDs being expensive at the time ($12 for a minimum wage employee at the time), so a purchase really had to be worth it to me, and so I picked my music carefully. I found that those I purchased became very dear to me, and I'd listen to the albums on repeat constantly.
Then smartphones came around, and instead of two devices in our pockets we could now carry one. I uploaded music to my phone for a while, plain mp3 files uploaded and organized, played through custom made apps, until finally something new came around – Google Play Music.
For those who don't know, Google Play Music changed music discovery for many of us. There had been Pandora of course, and Spotify was just starting, but Google Play Music let you choose what music you wanted to play. At the time most services only offered random playlists of music that was almost what you wanted to hear but never quite what you wanted. On top of that key difference I could take my collection of CDs and upload them directly to Google Play Music. This meant I could take my collection with me, and now unifying my personal collection along with their catalogue. This was for a modest monthly fee of course. (I think it was $4 a month at the start).
So over time I started giving away my CDs, or they were lost to old boxes and roommates. Thing was that I didn't care, I was streaming my music now, I was in the new decade, the 2010s, and tech was exciting and new, and Google had only made fun products that I wanted to use constantly.
Then one day they decided Google didn't want to keep Google Play Music anymore, and officially started “sunsetting” it in favor of their new version, Youtube Music. They promised most things would stay the same, but to me it was a shattering of an illusion that I was in control of my own music.
This “migration” suddenly and immediately shifted my concept of ownership, and shook off the dust that had accumulated in my comfort. In an instant I realized that the collection I had lovingly crafted for years could suddenly and permanently be revoked. There was no argument, no customer service who could hear my pleas, only forums filled with other people who were upset at the change, and empty corporate platitudes in response.
The Realization
I'm sure the marketers and directors at Google didn't plan for this to happen in me, an individual using their platform but this kicked off a spiral of thoughts. The Google Graveyard already had several entries in it that had never affected me before, but suddenly I realized how attached I had become to Google.
Suddenly new questions I had never thought of before were forced in front of me.
What happens if you are banned/lose access to your Google account? Reader, I want you to think about this, right now. Today you lost access to your account. What do you lose access to? Your Google Drive? Your Google Photos? How many years of photos are in there? What files are shared with others that are now gone? What important saved writings, receipts, PDFs, backups are locked away if you don't have your account anymore?
How many other websites do you “Log in with Google”? Your social media pages? What about your banks? Tax Info? Google Docs, Sheets? Would you be able to pay your credit card bill if you lost access to account? Electricity? Car Payment?
How much of your life would be interrupted immediately if you lost access to an important account?
You may be thinking “I don't have anything they can ban me for”, and you're probably right. You probably don't have anything they could ban you for. That's also exactly what so many other people have said themselves before losing access to their Google account and going online trying to figure out why they lost access. Reddit is full of stories from Google users who suddenly and without explanation had their accounts disabled. This user lost around 5,000 photos, over 100 website logins, paid subscriptions, their Google Drive, all to go through an automated appeals process. This user is on their 4th appeal. This person's account was banned they think for someone attempting to phish them.
This person lost their account because they uploaded photos of their familymember's new baby.
Maybe it's not Google. Maybe it's Apple, or Microsoft. What would you lose access to if an account was banned?
You don't really own your devices
That becomes a more unsettling thought. What are you reading my blog on right now? Who owns the software on that device? How did you sign in today on that device?
If it's Windows, you more than likely signed into a Microsoft account today. Mac of course has their Apple accounts, which then includes the iPhone. Android uses Google of course.
With this hopefully you start to understand the picture, that at any time, for any perceived policy violation, not only can online services be disabled but yes, even devices in your hand or on your desk can be rendered inoperable bricks of silicon and plastic.
Technology didn't used to be this way. I may sound like a tinfoil hat wearing old timer (and maybe I am), but we used to store files on our computers, and we used to log into our computers with a password that was also only on our computer.
We edited documents using software that was installed and never expired, and we listened to music that never had a “license expire”.
The case for Digital Sovereignty
“Digital Sovereignty” is a concept that you should be allowed to own, control, and manage access to your own data. That your data shouldn't be gated or controlled by others, but yourself.
Your decades of photo albums, your writings, emails, tax info, that's all your data, and you deserve to own it – not have someone else dictate that you should or shouldn't have access to it anymore.
It's not going back to 1995 and backing up data to floppy disks again, but it's conceptually that you should be able to use your files how you want to without signing a privacy agreement in the process.
Where we are now
We have become entrenched inside Tech's heavily fortified walls, with a false sense of security. Google/Apple/Microsoft make us feel safe within those walls from outside attackers, but it's important to know that at any moment they can kick us out of those walls. At the same time billions of dollars have been spent to make you feel like it would be an enormous amount of effort to leave, and in some cases, that is true.
The journey for myself to break away from big tech's endless subscriptions and “walled gardens” has been a process marked in years. It is not something that you can decide to do and say “Next week I will not have a Google Drive subscription”. However, it is something that piece by piece, bit by bit, you can start to recover that autonomy that you once had.
The next few posts I have will be introducing some of the daily tools I use that can help break free of a few of their controls. Yes you can go tomorrow and uninstall Windows and throw out everything you use, but in my experience, choosing small incremental changes will have a lasting impact.
but I want to start today
I know some of you want to do something right now and not wait for my next post. For them, I would say a very easy place to start is to do a personal accounting of your own personal logins. How many use “Sign in with”? How many accounts are you linking to a big tech login?
Start investigating password managers. They probably deserve a whole post, but I personally recommend 1Password. Using a tool like 1Password (or any verifiable password manager) can help you come up with unique logins for websites, in a secure way, where you do not need to memorize yet another password. Start unlinking your accounts from your Google, and making sure you can access important information without access to your email.
Extra Credit: Who is your email provider through, and if you're auditing yourself, what services would you lose access to if you couldn't “Verify your email account” anymore? Yes we'll talk about that too in the future.
You control your digital destiny... if you choose to
Leaving behind the world of subscriptions and big tech is going to be an uphill battle. These systems are designed to make it feel insurmountable to leave, and like you're doing something wrong. This and the upcoming posts are going to help you recover some of that control that we have gradually lost over the last 2 decades.
It will take a bit of willingness to learn and some trial and error, but in the end it is very possible. It could mean switching to alternative software, or trying a different service, or maybe even returning to your local record store to peruse their used CD section.
My 104 year old grandmother and 75 year old mother both learned how to use Linux and free tools and now pay no subscriptions for their computers. If they could learn, I'm betting you can too.