Late Stage Capitalism

Can we normalize calling them wealth parasites instead of elites? Please and thank you.

Rent is a home subscription.

Streaming music like Spotify is just FM radio except that they have you paying for the radio waves this time, too.

Ownership is capital. The definition of capitalism is leveraging ownership for profit. When people own things, they are competition. You can avoid purchasing their goods or services, devalue their goods or services by offering your own at a reasonable price, or kick them out of the market entirely. A sale for them now could always turn into a lost sale later when you resale your property to someone else. A company wanting to buy that property from you will have to spend more to pay you enough profit to make it worth it for you to sale. If you leverage equipment to provide a service and a livelihood, they compete with you day after day and get no piece of that pie.

But what if you had to pay a license to use that equipment? Or you had to go to them to get it fixed? Or you only rented that property in the first place. They could start taking a cut of your profits for themselves.

What if you couldn't afford to own essentials like a home or your transportation. What if you had to lease to meet your essential needs. What if the pool of property owners was so small and so overwhelmingly made up of mega corporation that have the resources to outbid every prospective home buyer and turn that property into a rental, or better yet, a hotel room through air bnb where the resnt pays for even a massively inflated buying price in a matter of months? What if in paying over asking repeatedly, you artificially inflate the value of your own properties and those around them making homes even less affordable for non-corporate entities, and make your competition pool even smaller. Now you and you alone can buy more homes and have more streams of rental money to fund more purchasing. Meanwhile it is taking 2+ adult incomes to make your rent prices, which rise every time you artificially raise property values by over spending on new properties in a massive feedback loop until people are spending every spare dollar on a basic necessity that barely meets their needs anymore.

They feed on dependency, forcing out competition, injecting themselves between you and your livelihood, and maximally extracting every single ounce of resources they can from you. Yay capitalism.

Subscription allows a lower cost of entry than outright purchase, so your market is bigger. The average user spends more over the lifetime of the product, so your profit per user is higher. Its all a out profits.

However, money is an analogue for power, so you could also say it's all about power and control too.

All these systems for control, but I keep thinking to myself that it's a house of cards waiting to fall apart.

It's kind of like holding the leash of a hundred dogs. Something sets them off, and you're face is painting the pavement red.

Likewise, something goes wrong that is not man-made or man-relative and suddenly it's like that scene in Prince of Egypt where the Pharoah is putting his hands forward to stop the water from throwing him back ashore.

I refuse to pay a subscription for anything. I also won't use my real phone to scan codes or verify identity or age. If I encounter those demands for my information, I go find better things to do with my time. I once participated in a product survey for $3,000 hearing aids. In addition to paying for the hardware, for a monthly fee, you have access to their app which was actually amazing at filtering out background noise. The questions were, would you pay for the subscription, how much, low long . . . My answers were no, zero, never. Otherwise, you are paying for purposely crippled hardware. I doubt my opinion swayed them but they will never have me as a customer. What if you cancel the subscription, $3,000 for a brick?

The great thing about recurring revenue is that it’s coming back for each quarterly report. Investors love that shit.

No, thats wrong. Subscriptions just provide a continuous revenue stream and in long term larger profits than a one-of purchse.

It actually has the opposite effect, people that own, have something to lose, people who don't own have nothing to lose. And you do not want to anger people, that have nothing to lose.

They want the "company town" for all of us everywhere.

"Elites" making money from the rest of us doing the actual work... smh

Thanks Reagan.

Privatizing health care and tying it to our employment did it first. Bend the knee to your employer because if you lose your job you lose your medical.

This whole "elites" talk is a very convenient way to redirect systemic criticism toward individualized justice and action. Liberals respond positively to these narratives as it presents a system that is functional save for the few naughty ne're-do-wells who are intentionally making it worse.

The reason why ownership is threatened is because the material limitations of production are quickly confining an economic system that relies on infinite, progressive growth to exist. Yes, ownership is "dangerous" to this system in that it presents a potential endpoint of profit when the product has been purchased once and never again, as opposed to an ongoing revenue stream, but the control is incidental to the digital age, not emergent from it. What this meme refers to is "debt," which has always been used under capitalism as a form of control, but ownership remains a concept as it always has. You do legally own a license to that service, the same way you own a license to your electricity, water, and internet services, and because streaming is literally a continuous transaction, there was no need for a new precedent that maintained the concept of ownership. All ownership is arbitrary, since it isn't actually a real thing, which means pathologizing one arbitrary form of ownership over the other inevitably validates the concept of ownership at all, which was the root problem.

Also, I can't help but scoff at the proliferation of this kind of discourse now that middle-class people's toys are getting more expensive. Material insecurity and rent seeking certainly functions in this system in the way described above, and that insecurity has been intentionally inflicted on marginalized and vulnerable groups historically, but that isn't why they're doing it to middle-class and above property owners who have a vested material interest in maintaining this system anyway. It's just a consequence of the unreality of capitalism as there is not actually an infinitely continuous material world to draw from and create new commodity demands through. They need profit streams for this system to continue, so they eat into the product itself and commodify elements of it to create those streams.

I'm glad more privileged people are finally talking about this, but it's important to remember that they will also subscribe to narratives that reproduce as much of their way of life as possible while addressing the perceived injustice they've now experienced. "Elites" as some vague, disembodied benefactors of this system neglects the reality that yes, your middle-class parents and their suburban home on dispossessed indigenous property bought through materials and labour extracted from colonized spaces in the global south are also "elites," in that they benefit from the way this system is organized and distributes material necessities. Be careful about accepting populist narratives that will inevitably reproduce the inequities and violence of this system which will inevitably result in the power and wealth disparity this meme references as the real cause of society's problems.

Gosh, it could almost be related to the means of production.

It’s what they do in the South. You’re forced to rent, and they’re often republicans, then they extort you into voting likewise.

So true. 5 years just gone, didnt make progress for shit

Nah. It's just profit motive. It's just profitable for companies if you have to pay for something every month than paying once.

Wow, dude figured out consumerism

Governments around the world disagree. I get to pay a continuous stream of taxes on anything major that I own. My current real estate taxes equal about 7 of what my mortgage payments use to be. It feels like I'll always be paying rent on my own house.

I don't think they're that smart. Perhaps they realized it after the fact.