We’ve all heard the line “If you aren’t paying for a service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product,” yeah? My problem with this quip is simple: They’ll make you the product either way. End of post.

Jk, let me give a few examples:

• I pay for shit on Amazon but they still have tracking and metrics on every page, creepy suggested products, and constant upselling and guilt tripping about not having Amazon Prime.
• I pay for a Costco membership and they still make me listen to a dump spiel about, idfk, “executive hour” or something and how I should buy the more expensive membership.
• I pay for public transportation with my taxes and then again with my rider’s fare and I still have to endure ads in the subway. Sometimes the ads are bright, distracting, and offensive, sometimes for products I find objectionable like sports gambling.
• I don’t pay for anyone’s Patreon or whatever, but apparently it’s very common for the so-called “direct access” to creators that you get through these subscriptions (ability to DM, etc.) to actually be outsourced to ghostwriters/LLMs.

The problem is that money is valuable. That’s true for the skeeviest for-profit corporation you can think of, but it’s also true for public utilities, non-profits, and random bloggers. Paying for a thing doesn’t remove the incentive to commoditize your attention. It’s just a way of asking nicely.

Basically, if you want non-enshittified service you have to either pay exorbitantly for it (billionares are not standing in line during Costco executive hour; they have people for that). And if you want non-enshittified service as a rule then you have to change the actual law to prohibit the bad thing.

I pay for Hetzner to host this dumpster fire of a website because, sure, they are providing a service that costs more than $0 to deliver and is pretty good for the price. But lots of companies offer similar stuff. A big advantage with Hetzner is that they are based in Germany, which has actual data privacy laws that provide a modicum of reassurance that Hetzner won’t try to, idk, monetize my blogging cycles to detect my nonexistent period cycle. Not that I think the GDPR is perfect or anything—but if I can’t change the laws, at least I can kinda change jurisdictions.