I probably can’t introduce myself with the same flourish of Tres Savage or Blake Douglas — or any professional journalist, for that matter — but it’s time to give it my best shot. My name is Garett Martin, NonDoc’s (paid) summer development and distribution intern, and as I turn 19 this month, I’ve chosen to exercise my Birthday Rant right in this newsroom and introduce myself to our readers.
This summer, I have spent my time analyzing NonDoc’s email newsletter data with the goal of maximizing digital outreach. This means I did, in fact, look through the entire newsletter signup database, and I’ve learned some interesting things about our (free) subscribers. For instance, to the person who entered “shit face” as their first and last names, I say, “You are seen. You are heard. You are a statistical anomaly.”
Most of my time here has been spent swimming through spreadsheets, but as much as I’d love to launch into a monologue about the state of digital news media, something even more menacing has occupied my thoughts lately: the ever-frustrating deterioration of entertainment subscription services.
When I open Netflix, I see little worth watching. Prime Video? It’s a desert. Hulu? They’re always asking me for an upgrade. Disney+? Sure, Disney owns your childhood but not the films you want to watch. So you end up renting your desired movie or show on YouTube like it’s DirectTV in 2010. Despicable.
Even worse is that now some paid services are hosting ads on their platform, doubling down on the already raging dumpster fire that corporate media have become. Somewhere between re-activating Netflix for the third time and realizing HBO Max is now just “Max” — like it rebranded as a bootleg frat guy — I had a realization: We have come full circle. It feels like cable is simply cheaper and somehow more convenient, which means my grandpa was right all along.
‘Renting our own convenience back’
Of course, it’s not just streaming services that have gotten out of control. Have you seen the existential horror of BMW trying to charge people monthly for heated seats? (They’re walking it back owing to public backlash). What about a fridge that locks your bacon behind a paywall? In all, we have the makings of late-stage capitalism bingo where people truly own nothing at all.
I understand the need for generating monthly revenue. I really do. If you’re a business, recurring payments make investors salivate. Subscriptions offer stability, predictability and the sweet illusion of growth without having a better product, because nothing says innovation more than charging an additional $7.99 per month for a feature that already exists. When it comes to entertainment subscription services, it feels like we are renting our own convenience back from the people who sold it to us in the first place, like we’re being mugged politely.
I yearn for the days when buying meant owning and you didn’t have to “activate” your blender like it were a CIA asset.
At this point, the only logical move might be to purchase 300 acres in Billings, Oklahoma, grow my own food and whisper libertarian manifestos to the cows. Knowing my luck, however, I would probably end up just down the gravel road from one of Bill Gates’ many growing agricultural empires. But that’s a rant for next year.
