Back when I participated in #Fediverse (often left-leaning), I made several jabs and critiques towards communism, socialism and their fierce anti-AI circlejerking. I’m now on #Nostr where the majority of users are the so-called “crypto bros” (anarcho-capitalism and libertarians), now I also make jabs and critiques towards capitalism and pro-AI as well.

I disagree with any political “-ism” beyond pure anarchist ideologies. Anarcho-comunism, anarcho-socialism, anarcho-capitalism and all their “shapes and sizes”, they’re anything but “anarcho”. And I don’t care being the contrarian person. True anarchism must have no market and no corps, no proletariat and no “great leader”, no societal power and no anthropocentric hubris, no direct or indirect human leadership, for we (yes, “we”, me included), bunch of laughable hairless primates… who the fuck we think we are!? We aren’t in position to lead and rule over even our own hairy and stinky rectum and whatever comes out of it! Yeah, me too, I’m just a pifyful primate, a wandering soon-to-be corpse.

That said, here it goes another jab at capitalism, starting with my endorsement of it.

I purchased several games, both from Steam (when I had an Steam account) and from GOG (after I discovered GOG and their DRM-free, backup-able game installer policies).

Some games I purchased twice, such as Slime Rancher (purchased it from Steam, then I purchased it from GOG in order to cancel my Steam account; a good game, sad thing it heats up the CPU inside my potato laptop).

I purchased Sketchbook, and made LOTS of art pieces with it. I had and have LOTS of fun, pleasure and rage (due to the whole system freezing and crashing all of a sudden).

I purchased a photo/image editing app. Extremely useful.

I even purchased a Morse Code keyer app, and I purchased a virtual keyboard.

Yesterday, I also purchased a posing model app, and I already had plenty of fun with it. The scene, illustrating this article, was made using said posing model app, and post-edited with the aforementioned photo/image editing app.

I have no problem with purchasing digital goods as you can notice. I’m also a former developer, I know what it takes for a developer to come up with a whole project from the pure thought to its draft, all the way to a full software. And when it involves anatomical and physical rules, it can get pretty complex (things such as Inverse Kinetics, Inverse Square Law, Laplace Transform, NP-Hard Problems crossing the developer’s path, etc) very quickly.

However, here’s the jab: aside from something that takes constant costs (such as the ability to use resources from/save to someone else’s computer a.k.a. the “cloud”, and/or non-local AI inference computing), there’s no justification for an app to be subscription-based.

Subscription-based services are akin to a taxation in disguise, except that it’s a taxation that one (supposedly) can “choose” (except when it’s part of a Derren Brown-esque social compliance such as electricity, where humans, being brought to this world without their own consent on being born, can have no consent on choosing not to use electricity at all, shall they need increasingly more of the fucking smartphones and Internet to “afford a living”).

An “opt-in” taxation where the alternative can also (supposedly) be “doing their own thing” (pay no attention to all the elephants in the room aka “intellectual property” and predatory capitalism where big corps purchase and eat smaller corps and if the former ones refuse to be bought, they get targeted by nefarious dynamics).

And taxation is theft, amirite? Yes, I can also agree on this specific stance: taxation is theft, period. Any kind of taxation, including taxations in disguise. But then, all of a sudden, subscription is acceptable by the same people who vowed to be against taxation. All of a sudden, the subscription-based model is a “marvel” of capitalism because “could someone think of the poor shareholders and their cumpe… erm… i mean… their children?”. Hell, one needs subscription to afford a job to pay for their fucking subscriptions!

So whenever I seek paid apps (when FLOSS doesn’t cut it), I use the “Premium” filter from Google Play Store, I use the “Paid” filter from software and game stores, I’m willing to pay it upfront. I don’t care if I can’t test the software before purchasing, given that said software got enough pictures, videos and reviews regarding its features. I’m not going to purchase your app from inside your app (except, of course, if your app is a store app where I’ll purchase goods). If it’s behind subscription-based paywall, “Just $6.99 for 3 months, billed yearly, cancel anytime”, fuck it, fuck you and fuck your piece of software: shove it into your primate rectum, where it belongs (before it rots and gets liquified into cadaveric fluid as it’s eaten by cemetery necrophages… yeah, because even our buttholes will be mercilessly eaten by vultures, as weak apes we irrevocably are).