Check your bank statement and count the recurring charges. Streaming, cloud storage, music, a fitness app, maybe the software you need for work. For many households the list now runs past a dozen. Some cars even charge monthly fees to unlock features that are already built in.

This feels new, but it isn't entirely. For much of the twentieth century, most Americans didn't own their telephones. They rented them from the Bell System. What changed is scale. The digital revolution turned an old rental model from an exception into the default, quietly rewriting what it means to buy something.

After 1945, the Western consumer economy was built on ownership: the house, the car, the refrigerator. Once you paid, the thing was yours. That bargain started bending when products gained software. In 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell's 1984 from customers' Kindles over a rights dispute. Few people missed the irony.

Since then, the pattern has spread. In 2022, BMW offered heated seats as a monthly subscription in some markets, even though the hardware was already installed in the car. Spotify's Car Thing stopped working entirely in December 2024. Peloton began charging owners of secondhand bikes an activation fee. The object in your hand works only as long as a distant server agrees.

There's precedent. IBM long preferred leasing its machines to selling them, until a 1956 antitrust settlement forced it to offer sales too. What's different now is that the lease is hidden inside something that looks like a purchase. You pay the price of owning and get the terms of renting.

Takeaway

When a product needs its maker's permission to keep working, you haven't bought an object. You've bought a relationship, and the other party writes the rules.

Subscriptions have a history too. The Book-of-the-Month Club launched in 1926, and Columbia's record club followed in 1955, later becoming famous for offering stacks of albums for a penny. The trick was the negative option: unless you actively said no, you got charged. Complaints became common enough that the US Federal Trade Commission wrote rules about it in 1973.

Today's version is the same trick multiplied. Each fee looks small, so no single one seems worth the effort of cancelling. Together, though, they add up, and surveys repeatedly find that people underestimate what they spend on subscriptions. Cancelling is often harder than signing up: a maze of menus, phone calls, and last-minute discount offers.

The bigger cost is attention. Every subscription is a small open loop: a renewal date, a price increase, a free trial about to convert. Psychologists call this kind of background tracking cognitive load. Owning something required one decision. Renting it requires a decision every month, and companies are betting you won't make it.

Takeaway

A subscription isn't just a price. It's an ongoing claim on your attention, and your inertia is the business model.

The pushback started somewhere unexpected: the auto shop. In 2012, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly approved a right-to-repair law for vehicles, requiring carmakers to share diagnostic information with independent mechanics. The idea was simple. If you own the car, you should be able to fix it, or choose who does.

Farmers took the fight further. John Deere tractors increasingly needed authorized software for repairs, so some farmers turned to hacked firmware traded online. Colorado passed a farm equipment right-to-repair law in 2023, and the Federal Trade Commission sued Deere in 2025 over its repair restrictions. New York and the European Union have adopted broader repair rules for electronics. Even Apple, long a holdout, began selling parts and repair manuals.

Much of this conflict traces back to 1998, when a US copyright law made it generally illegal to bypass digital locks on software, even on devices you had paid for. Repair activists are arguing over what that law means for ownership. It's one of the oldest questions in property: who has the final say over a thing once it changes hands?

Takeaway

Right to repair isn't really about fixing phones. It's about whether ownership still means control when every object contains code.

The subscription economy didn't appear from nowhere. It grew from old ideas, such as leased telephones, rented mainframes, and book clubs, that digital technology made cheap to apply to almost everything.

Seeing those roots helps. It shows that the shift from owning to renting was a choice, made by companies and permitted by laws, not a law of nature. Choices like that can be revisited. As voters and farmers have shown, sometimes they are.