"Upgrade Now" To Get What Was Previously Included At No Extra Charge
In this realm of extraction, exploitation, artifice and illusion, "growth" is garbage.
Tube of toothpaste: $4. Tube of toothpaste with cap: $5. You may reckon this is an exaggeration of the trend to coercing us to "upgrade now" to get what was previously included at no extra charge, but rest assured some marketing maven is reading this and thinking, hey, this is brilliant: we can make the cap leak or fall off, and then offer a Premium version with the cap they currently get for no extra charge.
We're being dimed to death by "Upgrade Now" to get what we once received at no extra charge.
As I note in my new book Ultra-Processed Life, it's now impossible to parody the excesses of "upgrade now to Premium" because they're already self-parodying.
I didn't say nickel and dimed to death because inflation has already consumed the nickel. As costs soar, the nagging to "upgrade now to Premium" only intensifies.
The US Postal Service now offers Premium Tracking for a few extra dollars. When did regular tracking become so deficient that we now need Premium Tracking?
Airlines have squeezed more seats into the coach class to immiserate passengers to the point that they cave in and pay extra for an extra comfort seat which is only slightly more roomy than the standard coach seats of the 1980s.
The software you could buy once and use for years is now a subscription-only service. This is of course what Cory Doctorow has aptly called ensh*tification, the process of snaring customers which high-value offerings that are degraded once the hook has been set. Now that the sunk costs of switching are painful, the corporation squeezes more cash out of the immiserated customer.
If ensh*tification doesn't work, Corporate America doubles down with outright coercion and deception. Mr. Softee (MSFT, Microsoft) is a master of the this process. For example, the unwary customer discovers everything they've been saving hasn't been saved to their own drive; it's been saved to Mr. Softee's OneDrive, and guess what, Honored Customer, your OneDrive is now full and you need to pony up monthly cash to expand your OneDrive capacity.
As for transferring all your saved data from OneDrive to the drive you own, fuhgeddaboudit-baby, no dice.
In a similar fashion, every digital action now launches a nag to "upgrade to Premium." Do you want to schedule a bulk email to be sent later? Now that requires upgrading to Premium. The virus scan found a gazillion trackers that could be threatening everything you hold dear, but now the standard antivirus software doesn't fix that problem, you're prompted to upgrade to Premium to protect your precious digital life.
When did Corporate America veer so close to bankruptcy that it must now squeeze a few more dollars out of every customer lest it dry up and blow away? Well garsh, poor Corporate America must be barely scraping by. But if we look at corporate profits, they're at record highs, far above where they'd be if they'd only tracked inflation.
The propaganda of "free markets" promised that corporations would seek higher profits by increasing the value of products and services and reducing prices. The opposite is what's actually true: corporations are maximizing profits by reducing the durability and value of products and services and relentlessly immiserating customers to herd us into paying more for what we once received at no extra charge.
Let's call this what it actually is: the garbage time of history, a travesty of a mockery of a sham of "value," a ruthless exploitation of trapped consumers, who are already being bled dry as either debt-serfs or tax donkeys, or if particularly unlucky, both debt-serfs and tax donkeys.
In this realm of extraction, exploitation, artifice and illusion, "growth" is garbage.
The Garbage Time of History Is Global (9/5/25)
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