If you are a reader of the Oxford Political Review, you may have noticed that as you scroll through your newsfeed you are being invited to subscribe to a variety of periodicals: The Economist will run you £10 per month; The London Review of Books will set you back £12 for 12 issues; and The New Yorker is going for the low, low price of $10 for 12 weeks. Being the sort of person who keeps up to date on the going-ons of politics, arts, and the latest New Yorker cartoons, you might think that it is a good idea to have a trial run with a few of these.
Once the honeymoon period is over, however, and a massive stack of unread periodicals has taken over a corner of your living room, you may very well decide to unsubscribe. You might even consider all the other subscriptions in your life: your smart device ecosystem; your Netflix, Spotify and Audible subscriptions; maybe you even subscribe to a Substack or two.
Determined to set your life in order, you log onto so-and-so’s website and manage to find and click a button, which reads: ‘Suspend Subscription.’ And this directs you to a form that informs you, in sans-serif fine print: ‘Please note that this form is to be used to pause your delivery of issues. If you need to cancel your subscription, please contact our subscription team.’ ‘No worries,’ you tell yourself as you dash off a quick email. A few days later you hear back: ‘Dear customer, Thank you for your recent email. Unfortunately, we do not hold your details here in Country X. They are held by our subscriptions department in Country Y. You can cancel your subscription by calling customer care.’ You dial the number, only to hear the dreaded phrase: ‘The number you have reached is no longer in service.’ At some point in this Kafka-esque bureaucratic run-around, you may come to suspect that the whole point of a subscription service is to ensure that you never unsubscribe.
Perhaps this is unrelatable. You may be very happy with all your subscriptions. Nevertheless, a conversation about the politics of subscriptions is long overdue. If you are in doubt, simply Google the phrase ‘how to unsubscribe from . . .’ and you will be presented with over five million results. Evidently, there is some incompletely theorised frustration going on, begging the question: what would it mean to start seriously theorising about the politics of subscriptions?
Cue the critic: but why should anyone waste their time thinking about this? Maybe all of this is just a banality of modern life that is hardly worthy of our attention. After all, there are no laws preventing you from unsubscribing: it just takes a bit of time. True, but does the absence of legal restrictions really make you free? Not quite. Consider how many workers could, in principle, quit their jobs at a particularly hazardous factory. But suppose they cannot afford to quit, or that the other factories in town are equally dangerous. It would be strange to say that they are free on the grounds that nobody is forcing them to stay. What they really need, you might think, is positive freedom: the actual ability to leave, as opposed to the mere possibility of doing so. But if that is what workers require to be free, then this raises the question: Could a subscription service ever undermine your positive freedom?
At the micro-level, the worry seems more like a personal complaint than a political issue. It is hard to make the case that your tiny irritation with a particular subscription service seriously undermines your positive freedom. Yet what starts as a trivial personal tragedy might evolve into a farce within the body politic. For when we take up the macro-level perspective, the worry does seem like a political problem. Think not only of everything you are subscribed to, but also of everything your friends are subscribed to. Now think of everything their friends are and will be subscribed to. And think finally about how the list of subscriptions grows year-over-year, seemingly ad infinitum. The numbers are staggering. Given that it is often so hard to leave, you may ask yourself: Is there a story to be told about how a complex web of subscriptions could undermine our positive freedom?
I think so. Once we adjust our perspective, it does seem intelligible to talk about the politics of subscriptions alongside the politics of technology. Consider, for instance, how many countries already regulate against spam email and telemarketers. The thought seems relatively simple. Nobody wants to be incessantly bothered, and so saying goodbye to those pesky emails or telemarketers should not be too onerous. Reasoning by analogy, it would seem that subscription services deserve the same treatment. Indeed, over the past decade there has been a plethora of multi-million-dollar class-action lawsuits against companies misleadingly advertising auto-renewal subscription services. But what is at stake, I want to emphasise, is not simply all the wasted money on unnecessary monthly subscriptions.
What is really at stake when we consider the politics of subscriptions is how subscriptions shape our sense of self. Imagine I were to wave my magic regulatory wand tomorrow, thereby making unsubscribing intuitive and effortless. An unsavory truth still holds: once we are embedded in a complex network of subscription services, we might not want out. Just as the state we were born into, the family we find ourselves in, and the friends we have shape our preferences, so too might the network of subscriptions we have form our preferences and, ultimately, our sense of self. The more the process repeats itself, the more difficult it becomes to locate our authentic preferences (if there are any). At the heart of the politics of subscriptions, then, is a Euthyphro-style dilemma: Do I subscribe to The New Yorker because I genuinely like the cartoons, or do I merely like the cartoons because The New Yorker convinced me that I am the sort of person who understands the cartoons?
Regrettably, decisive answers to Euthyphro-style dilemmas are hard to come by. Still, one thing seems obvious. It would be naïve to aspire to a life without subscriptions simply because they shape our sense of self. Some shaping is inevitable, and arguably desirable. Subscriptions, like friendships, can be incredibly enriching. Perhaps, then, we ought to actively strive to create a world where the shaping aspect is, as much as possible, up to us. The bleak alternative is to passively observe a bundle of auto-renewals run on autopilot ad infinitum.