Is the onus on the consumer? As much as I hate to say it I am pretty judgemental when it comes to people paying for subscriptions.
While its wholly negative to have this mind set in the modern world is it such a bad thing.
Like if we were all in a Lemmy community swimming pool and 80% of lemmys where pissing in that pool would I be unjust to be mad, my thought pattern here is by people supporting the subscription model will impacts everyone and it goes further than just more subscription only content, it impacts hardware where a lot of iot device and gaming device are less about serving the enjoyable media/useful features and more offering a portal to subscription services which impacts usabilities like rooting, custom ROMs, emulation, general tinkering, now every modern console, shady iot device has some kind of encrypted lock or circumventing that lock will also attract negative attention from corpos. At what point will consumer PCs start running locked down software with a locked bootloader.
Should we as consumers stop buying game pass, Disney plus, vibrating massarg rings, mill kits, cable TV. As to not incentives corporations.
I hope I’m not doom saying just general frustration and concern for what the future will hold. And I’d like to see what the general concus is on the subject
We should mostly blame enshitification. Which isn’t the consumer’s fault. The market has been engineered to encourage human animals to exhibit specific group behavior.
You can blame animals for doing what they do, but this just makes you angry, doesn’t solve problems and actually disengages you from lines of thought that might lead to constructive behavior. A human has a choice, but if you study groups of humans you’ll find that they always 100% throughout all of history exhibit herd behavior. The famous quote from Men in Black, “A person is smart, people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it.”
I think we can and should blame the system that encourages the behavior (from the perspective of both consumer behavior and corporate behavior), then target our ire at the people who most benefit from perpetuating and defending that system. Yes, they’re also exhibiting herd behavior (the predatory wealthy can always be counted on to focus on short-term profit, ignore long-term consequences and thus behaving predictable ways), but they’re a small enough group of people and human society is big enough to enforce changes on their behavior when enough of us get mad at us at them.
Sometimes this results in chaos, but sometimes it results in periods of good policy and relative prosperity.
EDIT:
I should add, the rich ALWAYS hate periods of good policy and relative prosperity and always work relentlessly to change the policies and enable themselves to accumulate more wealth, regardless of (wilfully ignorant to) the long term political, social and environmental consequences. They always feel like their opportunities for profit are being limited by the state and that they’re contributing more than their fair share to a society that they always feel aloof from and seek to insulate themselves from. ALWAYS. We have examples from ancient Egypt, examples from Medieval Europe and Medieval China., setting aside the history of the last two centuries where we can see this playing out in a bunch of obvious ways. Those are just examples I’m aware of, I’m sure an Historian could give us a dozen more examples.
The point is, if you get the opportunity to contribute to a radical economic transformation, try your damnedest to engineer it to be “rich, dumb, greedy asshole” proof. This is JUST like security engineering (think of ways to attack the system, then think of ways to patch the problems).