The Joy and Fiery Rage of Subscriptions
There's a pattern showing up everywhere lately where companies take things people already own and find a way to charge for them anyway. It always starts small: a printer, a car feature, a little gadget, then it spreads until you're paying monthly just to keep using something that used to be a one-time purchase.
Nowhere is that more obvious, or more frustrating, than with home printer ink. Believe it or not, every printer in my house was made before 2020. They're hardwired and run on the local network the way a printer always should. You can have as little or as much ink as you want, and the thing just prints without needing your wallet to hold your hand. That used to be the standard; now companies like HP and Epson have decided printing should work more like a Netflix subscription than something you own.
They want you locked into paying monthly just to keep using ink you already bought and never ran out of. Personally, I think this is one of the most ridiculous business decisions a company can make. Say you print something once every six months and you cancel the subscription because paying monthly for something you barely touch makes zero sense. The second you do, the printer soft-locks itself, and the ink gets bricked, just like a jailbroken Nintendo Switch. You didn't do anything wrong; you just stopped paying for ink you didn't need at the moment. Unfortunately, that's corporate greed operating on unspeakable levels of stupid.
What If Your Car Did This Too?
The scary part is this mindset doesn't stop at printers. What happens when the same logic gets applied to something bigger, like your car? I don't drive anything fancy, modern, or electric, but I know exactly what happens when a company tries to pull this stunt on drivers because BMW already did it. In 2022, BMW started charging owners a monthly fee just to use the heated seats that were already built into cars people had already paid for. The hardware was already there; BMW just decided you needed to pay extra every month to flip it on. The backlash was so loud and so fast that BMW pulled the feature by September 2023. The moment you start to gatekeep something behind a paywall, people get fed up enough that they stop looking for a modern fix and start looking for a classic solution.
When People Reach Their Breaking Point
Sometimes that breaking point looks a lot less like frustration and more like an actual explosion. A Finnish Tesla owner named Tuomas Katainen decided it was cheaper to blow up his 2013 Model S than pay the $22,600 Tesla wanted to replace the battery. Believe it or not, he strapped 66 pounds of dynamite to his own car and detonated it on camera rather than hand over that kind of money for a repair that cost more than the car was worth.
This isn't just an easy way out of a finacial decison its an Irish goodbye from how society wants you to think these days. We're at the point where you see the same pattern all over the place lately, from AI startup gadgets built around a service that can vanish overnight, to Spotify's Car Thing. A device people paid real money for that Spotify decided to just brick when they ended support, turning a perfectly working piece of hardware into e-waste for no reason. Other than a decision made somewhere in a boardroom miles and miles away from you.
Modern hardware doesn't just break; it gets disabled overnight because it didn't meet the needs of corporate America. That's really the whole point of this article: a printer from before 2020, a classic car, or even art hanging in your home is yours and will forever be yours.
