Freedom From Licensing
How parasitic notions of convenience pervade digital life and how to fight back.
New year, new horrors to behold. The news feels overwhelming, and when we talk about change, it’s often in the context of changing a system. Oftentimes, this is with good reason, of course. It’s usually a numbers game when it comes to pushing back against the cruelty of our current government, pushing companies to treat their workers and the environment better, and encouraging countries to be better stewards of the world we live in. Great change has always comes from masses of people banding together to claim it.
Those battles are always going to be worthy of our time. Still, as I’ve grown older, I’ve found that there is another conflict that must be fought and won, this one is in some ways more insidious than many of the macro-level issues facing humanity. I’m talking about the fight for freedom from the parasitic claws of convenience dug into us by today’s tech companies and big corporations.
The main weapon in these companies’ arsenals is convenience.
I’m talking about the monotony of what life has become for many middle-class consumers in the United States. I’m talking about all the ways subscriptions both bleed us dry and keep us anesthetized from speaking up, feeling better about ourselves, having actual personal tastes in art, and truly voting with our wallet
With assets, movies, TV, and music, the basic trade-off is that building a personal library of digital goods is a lot of work, so just pay a small monthly fee, and we’ll give you a license to access our massive libraries. We’ll even make helpful suggestions on what to consume if you’re unsure.
With video games, you get a similar bargain, trading ownership for a license to play, but then many games on top of that will offer you microtransactions as an additional source of parasitic convenience. Billed as an alternative business model that allows you to play a game for free in exchange for offering exclusive digital assets that often take the form of either expensive cosmetics or lootboxes—the latter essentially being a form of legalized gambling—these extra goodies are often pushed heavily, are quite pricey, and offer you a patina of ownership of something while still being merely a license. This isn’t even going into the psychological hacks employed by developers to convince you to buy what often amounts to nothing.
The same is true for books with Kindle and Audible. The same is true for information with paywalls, sports with subscriptions to ESPN, online courses with Duolingo and LinkedIn Learning, creative software like Adobe Creative Suite, and even apps. My notes app has a subscription, though, they at least offer a one-time lifetime purchase option.
There has undoubtedly been a subscription boom that has extended that business model to almost every facet of our digital lives. I was one of the early subscribers to Netflix. I bought numerous games on Xbox and Steam and paid for Adobe Creative Cloud and subscriptions to the New York Times. Now, it is bleeding me dry, and I think it is bleeding you dry too. So, that’s why I have decided to enlist and fight back against this parasitic convenience that has been thrust upon us by our tech overlords, and you can too with just a little effort.
We’ve become a world full of digital renters and few digital owners.
Ownership is being stripped away, piece by piece. They came for housing, and now they are coming for your digital life. There are three main reasons why you should push back against this. Freeing yourself from subscriptions will be cheaper in the long run. It also gives you the freedom to use whichever service you want. Finally, you will undoubtedly end up appreciating the things that are truly yours even more.
I was an early subscriber to Netflix, paying $8/a month to have most movies and TV shows at my fingertips, and it was great for a while. In the wake of Netflix's early success, people signed up in droves. A decade or so later, the movie and television subscription business splintered, delivering far less value than when it first began. Now, you have to subscribe to at least four different subscription services to get most of what you’d want to watch, many of them also making you watch ads even on paid tiers to access the content you want. What was once less than $10/a month often can now add up to $50-$60 a month, and it can be incredibly hard to keep track of which streaming service has which show or if the show is even available to you where you live.
Additionally, Netflix and other big streaming services constantly look for ways to crack down on tactics such as password sharing, downloading content to watch offline, casting, and other quality-of-life features that they once offered but now frown upon for whatever reason. It’s the promise that’s too good to be true. The goal is to get you hooked so that you won’t stop paying, no matter how poorly these companies treat you. There’s a whole phenomenon that documents this trend in tech called enshittification, where something starts great and then over time loses its utility, like a machine slowly breaking down.
Beautiful walled gardens start to feel more like hostage-taking.
There are many culprits here. One of the most well-known and egregious is Apple. This is a company that prides itself on being a walled garden ecosystem. Once you buy one piece of hardware, it becomes tantalizing to buy all the others, and, to their credit, they are a premier hardware company. That said, they aren’t perfect, and when you inevitably bump up against the walls of their ecosystem because there’s an app that you want that’s not available on the Apple App Store, or there’s a piece of hardware that Apple doesn’t make that you want to integrate into your workflow, that’s when the frustration begins.
The worst part about this is that Apple doesn’t really have to change or innovate that much, because in practice, they have a mostly captured consumer base that doesn’t want to take the effort to force them to change. There are numerous examples where Apple has changed its practices, after kicking and screaming, only because they were forced to by a court, and even then its often at the margins. I have personal experience with this since I recently switched from Iphone to a Samsung S25. Most of the Apple services that I enjoyed using, like Apple Music and Apple Pay, either don’t work now or work far less well.
This practice is rampant in the video game industry as well. More and more video games are designed to be what’s called “live service” games, often financed by microtransactions for exclusive cosmetics and other items that are only useful in that specific game itself. If you ever quit or stop playing the game, then those digital goods you purchased are rendered useless until you start playing again. For example, I played Apex Legends with friends for several years, spending too much money on cosmetics and other items. I eventually moved on from that game, but all those cosmetics and extra things that I bought still sit there gathering virtual dust, wasted now on a game I likely won’t play again.
Being deliberate about what you like is fulfilling.
I had forgotten what being picky and choosy about the art I consume felt like. My larger goal among many smaller ones in this fight is to develop my own digital library of music. For the longest time, I’ve been a passive consumer of sound. I currently have one playlist of favorited songs that I shuffle through over and over again. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. Many of the songs I couldn’t tell you the artist, name, or album they are from. I just listen on repeat.
It’s only recently that I‘ve felt this need to be more deliberate about my music consumption. The catch-22, though, is that with these big music libraries, almost any type of music you could imagine exists to be accessed at your fingertips, but it can often be difficult to discover something new that aligns with your taste. It’s like trying to find something to watch on Netflix. Oftentimes, you just revert to what you know.
Add to that how little most artists get paid from these music platforms, most of it going to a glorified middleman, and the recommendation algorithms that are usually not great, offering you what’s popular vs. what actually aligns with what you might like, and you get a recipe for feeling overwhelmed by choice. This cycle creates whole crops of people passively engaging with the art that’s all around them.
The mission of reclaiming digital ownership.
No one person has the resources or time to create the massive libraries of content that companies like Apple Music, Netflix, and Audible do, so you must be deliberate. You are forced to choose which artist to invest in and where to put your time. It’s a sad thing. I know I still haven’t fully accepted that I likely won’t read all the books I own before I die. But it’s also freeing. Spending your money and/or your time in seeking out and acquiring art means it’s yours and no one else's. That is an incentive to really engage with it.
You might find you like it and then look into what else the artist has done, engage with similar artists, or create art of your own inspired by it. You also might not like it, which then allows you to analyze why you didn’t like it and avoid similar art in the future. Growing your own personal library also encourages you to talk with others and maybe trade, swap, or discover new things you didn’t know you liked before.
It becomes a journey that can lead you down incredible paths to wonderful communities.
I’ve provided some tactics that I am using to slowly build my own library of content below. One day, I’ll venture into more detail. I hope this can offer you some inspiration.
Plex - This is essentially an easy way to set up a media server and have it stream to multiple devices. It handles music, movies, and TV easily. You provide the files, and with minimal effort, it handles the rest
Bandcamp - This is one of the few places left where you can get music files for download legally. The prices are usually reasonable, with some artists offering parts of their discography for almost free.
Brave Browser - Has the best YouTube AdBlocker in the business.
YouTube - Great place for getting the news and other information. Combine with Brave Browser for even better results.
Proton VPN + other tools - Provides a package of tools that rival some of Google and Microsoft’s offerings, but are less intrusive.