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Subscription service scams: The hidden trap of digital planned obsolescence
Exploring modern subscription models
“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” — Henry David Thoreau
In my highly cited 2012 book, User Experience in the Age of Sustainability, I explore the concept of planned obsolescence — a business strategy in which the obsolescence (the process of becoming obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer usable) of a product, is planned and built into it from its conception, by the manufacturer.
Back then, in the book, I told the story of my uncle Andrew’s Toyota Hilux. When I was a little girl, in the eighties, my uncle drove a canary yellow Toyota Hilux. When you saw this Toyota driving through my village, even from afar, from atop a hill, or through the trees looking out to the road, everyone knew it was uncle’s truck.
This truck was built not only to take the occasional sick person or pregnant woman, in my village, to hospitals in the nearby towns — but it was also one of the very few, in my small town, and on its regular shifts navigated rough terrains carrying vegetables, mostly bananas from our deep inland farms up to city harbours for export to England. That was then.
