Last year Volkswagen made headlines by deciding to lock the full horsepower of their ID.3 Pro and Pro S behind a paywall. Consumers would have to pay a monthly fee in order for their car to function to its full capacity. Other manufacturers have experimented with locking heated seats, GPS, and remote start behind a subscription. Worse, some manufacturers have installed kill switches in cars that allow the lending company to shut off the engine if you miss a payment. The message is clear: you own nothing, but we own you. This is less of a traditional capitalist arrangement—workers produce goods for the capitalist, the capitalist sells these goods to a consumer, the consumer owns and uses the goods—and more of a feudal one: you may use the goods, but you may only do so behind the landlord’s gate.
Capital rewards the pursuit of endless profit, so firms cannot only seek to expand their customer base, they must extract more and more from the base they already have. By limiting the full use value of a product and gating it behind a paywall, firms can drink endlessly from the same well. This is not to say that innovation is truly dead, it is just being used to innovate against the consumer. A better screen for your smart fridge to display advertisements on has taken the place of inventing a fridge whose compressor doesn’t die within five years. The customer is now a tenant. The capitalist the landlord. The purchase no longer ends the relationship, it is now mediated directly through the power that the product seller retains over its commodity.
Whereas the orientation of industrial capitalism was more about selling a product and hoping for a satisfied customer who would return again and buy something new, its modern iteration is often in conflict with the needs and desires of the consumer. The orientation of capital towards its consumers is often even downright hostile. Things as simple as canceling a service are intentionally designed to be as difficult as possible, items are made to eventually break, websites use dark patterns to manipulate visitors into purchases (“subscribe for one month free!”), and warranties are voided if you try to repair. None of these things serve consumers, but they all operate in order to increase extraction. When ownership is only ever partial and always revocable, it gives capitalists a level of control over commodities they didn’t previously have.
An oft unexamined side effect of this increasing enclosure of the commons in pursuit of profit is that the preservation culture for future generations will now rest largely in the hands of private firms. The historians and collectors will need to rely on private companies to allow them to archive all that exists. When archivists need explicit permission to make physical copies of things that don’t have a physical product, how much will they be limited in their ability to document and save our history? Even just the preservation of photographs is now up to expecting the cloud will always be there for us. We can’t leave our iCloud account to our children, so if there were ever a data catastrophe what would we leave behind? In this quest to remove all secondary markets, capital is ensuring our footprints only exist in cyberspace, the real world be damned.
