Subscriptions are so successful simply because they exploit human nature to hide the true costs of what you’re buying, and can be infinitely expensive (in theory).

Good article. Interesting read. I avoid subscriptions wherever possible simply because I think they’re an anti-pattern designed to exploit your mind into paying more money than you would’ve been willing to pay otherwise.

Sort of a meandering article that doesn't have a strong thesis. Posch wants to say that we used to have cool consumer electronics that we owned and now we have subscription services and we own nothing, but it gets distracted by detours into "here's a history of consumer electronics" and "look at these smartphone features we lost because corporations are greedy". And like, all of it suggests the thesis, but idk. I don't disagree that we are in an era of subscription services and surveillance and owning less and less, but everyone knows that so it's kind of a banal point to make in an article. And the article doesn't really explore this idea from a new and interesting angle, it's just recapping everything we already know.