Netflix Sucks and So Does Spotify and All the Rest (Premium)

In an ideal world, we would pay companies for the products and services we use in a win for both sides of these relationships. But the inherent nature of capitalism has always contorted the benefits of competition—more choices, lower prices, and so on—because of the need for for-profit companies to continually grow. This isn't new, but our relationships with the companies we rely on has always been one-sided in their favor, and technology has only exaggerated that balance, leading to ever-bigger companies, less competition, and reactionary attempts to reset the market with regulation. And in recent years, this unbalance has shifted even further, and faster, thanks to the rise of the Internet, subscription services, and now AI.

That's all very simplistic, I know. But one of my earliest observations in my career, back in the suddenly nostalgic 1990s, was that people who used Microsoft products like Windows and Office seemed to misunderstand their relationship with the company that made these products. You are paying for this software, I argued, and the one-way nature of this relationship was backward. Microsoft, I said, should listen to its customers and address their concerns instead of continually seeking out new sources of revenues while leaving existing shortcomings unfixed.

Yes, that was also simplistic. But I assume you can see the point: For a product like Windows to make sense in the 1990s, when personal computing use was just starting to explode, the benefit it provided had to be commensurate with the money its users paid for that product. These things may be difficult to calculate, and it's perhaps too easy to complain about the cost of anything. But when it comes to paying for things, you either see the value or you do not.

These days, the sheer volume of products and services at our disposal, the effortless ways in which they can be delivered, and the ease at which we can pay for them has led to a situation in which personal technology almost seems to be eating itself. Just in the entertainment space, we've moved from slow-moving generations of various types of physical media, to digital media, and now to streaming media in our lifetimes. In doing so, we saw the value of each transition as choice and convenience multiplied.

But we also complained. First, about the need to rebuy the same content in new formats. And then about not actually owning any of this content. And even more recently about the curious ongoing price hikes despite there being more choice and competition than ever. In each case, we feel wronged because that value equation, that balance we expect of any win-win, seems off. And those hard feelings are magnified when the price hikes keep coming and coming and coming. We have more of everything than ever. But it feels like we have less, in part because these companies don't respect our needs, let alone meet them, and in part because the prices keep going up.

As I'm sure you know, this shift is cal...