Thank you for unsubscribing! Said no one, ever.

Period of history when subscription was only signed for something that made sense to be committed to is distant memory we remember with nostalgia. While we revive such memories, we hang on our phones and there is already a next thing that requires us to download an app, or create account, or both, and then subscribe for full experience. Try for free, see how your life magically transforms and then pay on an ongoing basis — automatically, for your convenience, of course.

Do you even know what exactly are you subscribed to at this moment? Streaming services, digital magazines, news portals, newsletters, book and reading platforms, cloud storage, apps for everything and anything: fitness, mental health, games, personal finance and budget apps, some of which are supposed to help you feel better.

Most of the time you’ll get overpriced service, served by underdeveloped robotic agents, but that’s not important. The important part is that you are a member! You finally belong!

It’s great doing business with you

As long as you are paying and keeping the mouth shut.

If you keep your expectations low, accept all the terms and conditions, and never question the quality of whatever is provided you are a dream customer.

Make no mistake, the subscription model is brilliant, and mostly so because it runs on our inertia and consent we hesitate to withdraw, not for actual utilization extent and meaningful purpose. So why don’t we all sell subscriptions and get rich?

It turns out, we do. Slowly but surely, everything moves behind the paywall. Even stupidity is now behind the paywall, which is collateral advantage we should probably be thankful for. From services that are actually practical to be ongoing contracts to tools, apps, platforms that once were standalone programs we could own and dispose as we see fit, all the way over to the grocery store chains — because buying low fat milk without someone registering your misguided notion for healthy food is now somehow appalling.

When I first discovered Substack and initially launched neatSHIFT there, it didn’t take long for me to understand that what I stand for with Neatsheet doesn’t match the vibe there. That is very reason this blog existing on it’s own: compulsory monetization of independent thinking.

Suddenly, everyone there expects to replace their 9-5 salary with steady income from whatever they might be writing about in their newsletter. Tragicomically, many do live very comfortably of teaching the rest of us how we can do it too. Substack’s business model feeds of exactly that and their direct interest is in users setting the price tag on their newsletters.

Nevertheless, I’m still trying to wrap my mind around something I’ve read fairly recently there, which triggered me to finally write this piece that was simmering for quite some time.

I have over 200k followers yet my paid subscriptions have fallen of a cliff. (…) I wish I could turn off the ability of anyone to “follow” me. Because what good are followers when follower growth seems correlated with loosing paid subs??

As the platform introduced option to “follow” in addition to their default “subscribe”, large accounts who got very comfortable with their immodest earning collected from 100 000 or more paid subscribers didn’t even try to hold their breath and count to ten before they so openly told their audience to get the f*ck off unless they intend to pay and called out platform for giving the audience even more power to choose the level of commitment. The movement is born and their main argument being: free content is free because it’s garbage.

The audacity on Substack is merely an extension of behaviour that has already been normalised everywhere else.

So why stop there? Why don’t we start punishing people for choosing to opt out?

Terms and conditions

Is just socially acceptable synonym for coercion that makes us a bit more on ease during the day and to sleep at night. In reality, depending on the service, those text dense and lengthy documents might as well consist of one page and very few words.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to switch and opt out and significant resources are used to make it so. As far as my experience reaches, you cannot even go and check your sight without optician following up and guilt-tripping you for leaving without buying prescribed glasses and demanding you come back and place the order — literally to subscribe because, brace yourself, prescription glasses are now also sold with subscription.

Mobile operators are going to measurable lengths in efforts to lock you in for the next 24 months. Then their telemarketers get pissed off at you, right there during the call, when you don’t immediately jump at the first hint of discount for the more expensive package that comes with additional perks which you don’t need anyway.

I once received a call from a telemarketer, claiming that he called on behalf of my mobile operator. It ended up with a guy screaming at me for being suspicious when he got pushy that I digitally sign his “great” offer with zero value for me. Upon hanging up on him, I really hoped that it was a scammer, but after contacting customer support to confirm the phone number the guy called from was legitimate it has been confirmed that it was indeed their telemarketer. That was how I found out that you can actually demand and be removed from these calling lists. That’s not exactly the type of information readily available and shared with customers whose sole purpose is to be drained for more money and locked into a new deal simply because revenue goalposts never stop moving. Since there is no real competition, or at least not the one worth the hassle of changing, knowing they all operate under the same pretences, the resistance is futile.

Right of withdrawal

We don’t use it enough.

We keep getting distracted by new subscriptions to the extent that we forget that we can cancel, delete, unsubscribe, and unfollow anything and anyone at a random moment. At this point it is no longer about exercising the right of withdrawal, it’s about exorcising the devil from aspects of our lives which were not intended to be micro-managed by subscription.

Exorcism can look however you choose it look, e.g. limiting the number of streaming providers at any given time to max two, which I personally do. As fed up as I am, I've been cutting down on everything that implies ongoing payment terms. Truth to be told, I’ve been aggressively pushing back on human-slop too, the one I’m expected to pay for and graciously welcome regardless of quality of the delivery and output itself.

Financial burden is not necessarily the most significant factor at play, although it's very relevant and still significant. The mental load from things we're paying and barely touching or cannot use because it’s just cobbled together is invisible, yet draining, and that is even more troublesome.

Psychology of human mind will soon become, if already isn’t, interchangeable with pathology of human mind and none of those will be of any help to human kind. With so much resources nowadays directed into exploitation of our most controversial weaknesses for the sake of revenue and profit, the world stands no chance against greed, camouflaged into ambition.