The Subscription Terror

An interruption to every word of yours, every sound of yours, and now, even your breath — awaits an interruption. There was a time when people warned that water and oxygen would one day come with a price tag. But in the subtle tyranny of our current age, we’ve found a new way to sell life itself through subscription.

Companies and corporations today profit off the illusion of innovation. Innovation, in their world, means adding one more feature, one more restriction, one more paywall — not to enhance user experience but to reduce production costs and maximize profit. But amidst these towering profits, one question remains: have businesses forgotten that the consumer exists? A company cannot survive feeding only the producer; it must at least pretend to cater to the consumer.

Take Instagram, for instance — an app once meant for connection, now a clutter of features chasing “engagement.” Every update feels like an invasion disguised as advancement. A step that mistakes privacy for closeness. We don’t want to pry into what others like or who they follow every second. Yet algorithms insist we must. The line between social connection and surveillance has blurred beyond recognition.

Most infamous of all, and my personal favourite – Spotify. The app that haunts the very conversation where ‘premium’ is mentioned. Its ads are a masterclass in psychological warfare. Capable of irritating enough to drive you insane, and being repetitive enough to force you into submission. Every two songs, you’re punished by a minute-long jingle that feels designed to rupture your calm. From a marketing lens, it’s sheer brilliance — sing irritation as persuasion. They know that even hate generates engagement. And yet, here I am, still devoted to Spotify, loyal not to the company but to the comfort of curated playlists and late-night vibes — tolerating their “torture” because they’ve made themselves too essential to abandon.

Subscription models once promised convenience. Instead, they’ve turned into a web of quiet extortion. Streaming services like Prime Video now charge you upfront and show you ads. What exactly are we paying for? The shift from TV to OTT was supposed to free us from commercials, not double them. Subscriptions, stacked upon bills for internet, electricity, food, and water, are no longer luxuries; they are obligations. Every app now feels like a digital landlord, renting us access to things we once owned outright.

What used to b convenience has splintered into an endless à la carte nightmare. Every click, every view, every skip has a cost.

Worse still, these models have redefined customer service itself. It’s no longer a support system — it’s a strategy. The less accessible help becomes, the more dependent we are forced to remain. We’ve entered an economy not of choice, but of chokeholds. And that’s the terror!

We are no longer paying for what we love. We are paying to keep from losing it. Subscription culture has turned ownership into a memory and dependence into the new normal. The modern world doesn’t need to take away oxygen to suffocate us, it just needs to make us subscribe to breathe.