“In this country, you got to get the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, you get the women.” Scarface laid it down. But somewhere along the way, the script flipped. You don’t get the money. You don’t get the power. You don’t get the women. You just get billed. Quietly, relentlessly.
It starts with a little taste. A few bucks here, a few bucks there. Join Netflix. Add Spotify. Sign up for an Adobe license that never really ends. The leech doesn’t take it all at once. It slides under the skin quietly, feeding on you month by month. Before long, you look at your bank statement and realize your entire life is being rented back to you in neat little digital invoices.
That is the beauty of the subscription grift. It does not bleed you out in one go. It works like heroin. You never notice the drain until you are hooked. And suddenly everything you use, everything you think you own, is on loan.
The World Economic Forum dropped that infamous vision: you will own nothing, and you will be happy. It was supposed to be a prediction. Instead, it is becoming the operating manual of corporate life. You do not own your music, you do not own your movies, you do not own your software, and if the suits get their way, you will not even own the heated seats in your car. You will just rent them until they delete them.
This racket did not just appear out of nowhere. Its roots go back to Reagan’s America, 1982 to be exact, when the SEC rolled out Rule 10b-18. The name sounds boring, but it was a pivot point that reshaped capitalism. Before then, if a company bought back its own stock to juice the price, that was fraud. Illegal market manipulation. Rule 10b-18 handed them safe harbor. Suddenly CEOs could pump their company stock at will. And since their bonuses and stock options were tied to those prices, they became filthy rich almost overnight.
The CEO to worker pay ratio in 1965 was 20 to 1. By the early 1980s it had jumped to 42 to 1. Today the average across the S&P 500 is over 340 to 1. At Amazon, it has hit over 6,000 to 1. Buybacks turned into corporate crack. Subscriptions became the perfect needle. Wall Street worships predictable revenue, and there is nothing more predictable than millions of customers auto-billed every month, unable to escape without a fight.
Look at how this bleeds across generations. Boomers spend about sixty bucks a month on subscriptions. Gen X spends eighty. Millennials hit ninety. Gen Z is coughing up one hundred and thirty-three dollars a month. They are the most subscription heavy generation, the poorest, and the most indebted. And yet they are mocked for avocado toast instead of the thousand small cuts draining them every month.
Now line up the corporations and see how the game plays out. Netflix started streaming at $7.99 a month. Today Australians pay $22.99 for premium and still get ads unless they fork out more. When Netflix went public in 2002, shares floated at $15. By 2021 they were over $690. In 2007 profits were $67 million. By 2024, $8.7 billion. CEO Ted Sarandos took home nearly fifty million last year. The median Netflix worker makes around two hundred grand. That is a pay ratio of 248 to 1. And customers report worse satisfaction than ever.
Spotify launched premium in 2009 at €9.99. Today it is $12.99 for individuals, $18.99 for families in Australia. Shares peaked at $350 in 2021. In 2024, Spotify finally posted its first billion-dollar profit. CEO Daniel Ek made nine million. Median worker pay is around $100,000. Artists scrape by on pennies per stream. The music you think you own is gone the moment they decide.
Disney+ opened in 2019 at $6.99 a month. Five years later, the price doubled. CEO Bob Iger pulled in $41 million in 2024. The average Disney worker makes $55,000. A pay gap of 746 to 1. Meanwhile shows disappear from the platform without warning.
Amazon Prime launched at $79 a year in 2005. In Australia today it costs $9.99 a month and now includes ads. Amazon stock moved from $40 in the early 2000s to over $3,700 pre-split. Net income exploded from $359 million in 2005 to nearly $59 billion in 2024. CEO Andy Jassy took home $40 million last year. Median worker pay is listed at $37,000. Include the warehouse staff and drivers, and the reality is far uglier.
Apple joined the club with Apple Music in 2015 at $9.99. Today Australians pay $12.99. In 2015 Apple’s stock sat around $30. Today it hovers near $170. Net income nearly doubled from $53 billion to almost $100 billion. Tim Cook pulled $63 million in 2024. Median Apple pay is $94,000. That is a 672 to 1 gap. And you still do not own a single song.
Uber pushes its Uber One subscription, selling back discounts that used to be standard. Tinder charges lonely men $30 a month for boosts and swipes that used to be free. Adobe turned Photoshop from a $600 one off license into a $60 a month trap. Their stock tripled. Their profits soared. Their CEOs walked away with tens of millions. And you? You rent your own work files until they cut the cord.
Customer surveys show the rot. Netflix with ads. Disney pulling shows. Spotify changing catalogues. Amazon upselling. Adobe punishing cancellations. Uber drivers scraping by while riders pay more. Tinder bleeding the lonely. Satisfaction is tanking but revenues climb. Because these are not services anymore. They are traps.
Governments could step in. They could cap CEO pay. They could regulate subscriptions so value cannot vanish overnight. They could outlaw stock buybacks again. But they do not. Politicians hold speeches about going green while corporate lobbyists keep the leash off. And that leash tightens around your neck.
This is the new feudalism. Kings in glass towers, peasants billed monthly for the right to exist. You have rented convenience so long you have forgotten you do not own any of it. The music, the movies, the apps, even the seats in your car. All of it is temporary. All of it is on loan.
My choice? Cancel what I can. Go back to physical media. Put a CD on. Watch a Blu-ray. Print a photograph. Step outside. Experience life unplugged. And tell these corporate shills to fuck off and take a pay cut for the sake of their overworked employees. Because if they will not give us value, the least we can do is stop feeding the leech.
