Hi, folks. Everybody is making fun of Jack Dorsey for changing the name of Square to Block. At least he didn’t consult the geniuses who named Omicron.
The Plain View
I watched a three-part, eight-hour documentary about a rock band’s recording session last weekend. Usually, I consider myself among those who can’t get enough of the Beatles. But this experience severely tested that belief. I felt the walls of Twickenham Studios closing in on me as I painfully viewed way too many hours of previously unseen footage. Fortunately, the mop-topped lads prevailed, and I was once again charmed by their personalities and buoyed by their exuberant rooftop performance. Get Back was worth it.
Certainly it was worth $7.99, the tribute sent to Disney+ to see the documentary. To date, I had resisted that streaming service, but Peter Jackson and the Beatles compelled me to view the exchange as I would a movie—and eight dollars is certainly less than a seat in a theater. But I had no option to buy a one-time ticket to view this spectacle. I could only access it by committing to pay the Magic Kingdom a monthly fee. Eventually, that eight bucks might wind up costing me hundreds.
Add another charge to an alarmingly long list. Once my paycheck survives a spreadsheet’s worth of deductions for taxes, health care, 401(k), and the like, I pay the monthly fees for apartment maintenance, electricity, mobile access, internet access, and so on. The remainder is now ripe to be picked clean by the vultures of subscription. Sure enough, my bank account is drained by them: Google One, iCloud, Spotify, Amazon Prime, YouTube TV, Netflix, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Athletic, The Atlantic, Scribd, Mmhmm, Authory, Apple One, and a whole bunch of others I’m forgetting.
Wait, here’s my credit card bill … I’m still paying for Evernote?
And now, Disney+.
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I am not an outlier. In 2020, boosted no doubt by the pandemic, people subscribed like never before—an 84 percent increase, according to a report by Recharge, a company providing payment services to subscription companies. J.D. Power says US households pay on average $47 a month for streaming services alone.
We are living in the age of subscriptions, where businesses now realize that having users who auto-pay every month frees them from constantly hawking piecemeal purchases. Also, consumers are getting increasingly wary of internet advertising, where, as critics endlessly charge, you are the product. With subscriptions, the product is the product. Once people sign up—a process designed to become as seamless as possible, all too often offering a free trial and burying the actual commitment in the fine print—they’re locked in. Even when they tire of the service, inertia usually keeps them on the subscriber list. When they do want to cancel, they usually find the process to be like the first round of Squid Game (available to Netflix subscribers), where most players get picked off before they reach their goal. Sometimes it’s nearly impossible to figure out who to even contact to cancel. Typically, consumers have to do it via phone, where, after long minutes on hold, they encounter some creep in a boiler room who tries to browbeat them into staying.
No wonder startups have emerged with the mission of helping people get rid of those obligations. Earlier this year WIRED wrote about six—six!—services to help you pare down subscriptions. Some of these, naturally, ask you to subscribe to them.
Disclosure: WIRED also wants you to subscribe. If you don’t, you can’t get this Plaintext newsletter. Support journalism! But those other subscriptions are really getting out of hand. So easy to sign up for, so hard to cancel. If I die tomorrow, my legacy will be late fees.
That’s why it’s encouraging to see that regulators are noticing the phenomenon and actually thinking about making things easier for consumers. Consider the proposed bipartisan Senate bill called the Unsubscribe Act, which would mandate clear disclosure of what people sign up for and, even more important, make it easier to cancel. Similar legislation is underway in the House. Of course, this is the US Congress, so don’t get your hopes up. But there’s also a second front in the Federal Trade Commission, led by consumer warrior Lina Khan. She recently unveiled a policy that dictates easy exit from subscriptions. The principle is that services should make it as easy to cancel as it is to sign up.
For many of us, though, the problem isn’t disclosure or the obstacle to dropping the service. It’s that so much of what we want these days is packaged in ongoing monthly increments, busting our budgets. The discipline required is not from the government but our own whims. At a certain point we must say enough, and resist temptation.
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Unless it’s the Beatles.
Time Travel
Last month we lost Jim Warren, an important figure in early personal-computer history. He was quite a character. Some will remember him as the editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal, which was like a technical journal that sometimes read like the weird text on the Dr. Bronner’s castile soap container. But his crowning achievement was the West Coast Computer Faire, which began in 1977 and turned out to be the coming-out party for the Apple II PC. Here’s a bit of what I wrote about him in my 1984 book, Hackers.
In early 1977 Homebrew Computer Club member and editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal Jim Warren was hatching a rather large scheme himself. Warren was the short-haired, wide-faced, bearded fellow who considered “technogossip” as a hobby and saw Homebrew as an outlet to spew all sorts of rumors about firms in the “Silicon Gulch.” Often, his rumors were true. One night he was talking to Bob Reiling, an engineer at Philco, and Warren decided they should put on a show which would, in hacker spirit, be an exchange of information, equipment, technical knowledge, and good vibrations. It could have the idyllic atmosphere of the annual “Renaissance Faire” in Marin Country—a genuine “Computer Faire …”
Warren turned out to have considerable talents as a promoter. He began a tabloid newspaper specifically to pump up excitement about the Faire and, incidentally, to spread his brand of techno gossip. It was called Silicon Gulch Gazette and there were stories about what the Faire would be like and little profiles of some of the speakers and also a profile of “chaircreature” Jim Warren. The paper boasted of the Faire’s “co-sponsorship” arrangements with non-profit groups. (Joanne Koltnow, who helped out the Faire from her job at Community Computer Center later said that “everyone was shocked” when they later discovered the Faire was a for-profit organization …”)
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Apple Computer had taken space for two of the $350 ten-foot-square booths and somehow managed to wrangle the prime space near the entrance to the exhibit hall. They hired a decorator to design the booths and prepared professional-looking signs with their spiffy new logo, a rainbow-colored apple with a bite out of it. Most every other company relied on the true-and-true yellow-curtained backdrop with pasted-in cardboard signs spelling out the company name in block letters But Apple’s booth gleamed with its six-colored Plexiglass logo …
On that bright sunny day in 1977, there were thousands of people standing in five long lines, snaking around both sides of the block-long auditorium, and meeting in the back. A long-long beaded necklace of hackers, would-be hackers, people curious about hackers, or people wanting to know what was going on in this freaky new world where computers meant something different than a guy in a white shirt and black tie and fat billfold and dulled-out expression which all added up to IBM.
Ask Me One Thing
Sam asks, “Is space trash a legitimate problem that needs to be addressed in this decade?”
Sam, I hope you are not referring to space tourism companies’ policies for selecting their self-styled “astronauts.” Admittedly, those who casually shell out ludicrous sums to sample space may not be the cream of humanity, and Blue Origin is dangerously veering toward stunt casting. Ex-football players, Alan Shepard’s daughter, the oldest astronaut, the youngest astronaut … how long before we’re blasting off centenarians and infants? Plus, after William Shatner, what’s left for anyone to say? But I would never, never, never call these people trash.
And I suspect that’s not what you mean. You are talking about debris. Right? Yes, this is a problem! While space is infinitely vast, the band around Earth where one can reasonably orbit is tiny in comparison. And we’ve used it as a dump. NASA now tracks about 27,000 shards of litter circling Earth and admits there are countless other detritus too small to monitor yet dangerous enough to cause havoc if they hit something. When a piece of space trash hits a satellite at 15,700 miles an hour, it not only takes the orbiter out of commission but causes more space trash—in 2009 a defunct satellite collided with an Iridium unit and created 2,300 more pieces of trackable garbage, and a lot of other tiny projectiles capable of ruining a Space Station astronaut’s day. Meanwhile, we’re sending up more satellites with abandon. Elon Musk wants to launch at least 60 satellites for his Starlink internet service. Sooner or later someone is going to get walloped. I hope it’s not a space tourist—we need those executive/philanthropists, actors, and progeny of Project Mercury! And when is Elon going to space? Scared of a little debris, Mr. Musk?
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You can submit questions to mail@wired.com. Write ASK LEVY in the subject line.
End Times Chronicle
The second person in the US with a verified case of the dreaded Omicron variant attended an anime conference in New York City. Cosplay has gone too far.
Last but Not Least
When we gave this story the headline “Jack Dorsey Is a Block Head,” I wondered if it was too harsh. Then I saw this.
Also, Dorsey resigned from Twitter but remained CEO of Square. Which is now Block. See above.
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A deep Q&A with whistleblower Frances Haugen, who still recommends people work for The Company Formerly Known as Facebook.
Haugen also testified before Congress this week as legislators consider regulating content moderation. It’s part of a movement for algorithmic justice that includes New York City, China, and the EU.
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