Paywall People (52 Weeks: Episode 6)

The personality-as-subscription model, and the digitization of self.

We are the product (Trevi Fountain, 2025)

Thank you for reading. There’s no obligation, and in light of today’s post, this will be an ironic opportunity. If you enjoy what I’m putting down,

Also, if you missed last week’s poem, “Daddy,” check it out here.

1.

My grandmother subscribed to a milk service when my grandfather returned from the war. She knew her milkman by name. It was probably Bill or Frank or Charles because everyone in the 1940s and 50s was named Bill or Frank or Charles. Bill or Frank or Charles delivered the same number (x) of milk bottles y times a week, with each bottle costing 31 cents. Grandmother spent $1.86 on milk each week. For those of you who remember algebra, yes, this is a word problem.

It wasn’t just milk, though. A large swath of the population used to subscribe to the newspapers, too. This created a whole economy for twelve-year-old boys to ride around on bicycles and toss paper products onto the neighbors’ doorsteps at 5:00 in the morning. The customer paid by the month. The paperboy was paid by the paper. This was Warren Buffett’s first job. Buffett went on to buy the Omaha World-Herald.

When I was in high school, the internet came of age. My family subscribed to America Online. My folks paid a monthly service for the privilege of dialing into some server somewhere so they could connect to message boards and email and whatever else the fledgling internet offered. As best as I can tell, AOL is now an online newspaper, which is not owned by Warren Buffett.

Over the years, I’ve dinked around with various subscription services. I was in an Airship Coffee Canister Club, which was a coffee subscription service. Of course, I’ve had subscriptions to cable, though I never sprung for the premium channels. But in the 2010s, I noticed a dramatic shift in subscription services. There was Netflix, then Apple Music, then Stitchfix. Most of the Microsoft Office products shifted to subscription services. All of my photo editing tools run on a subscription model. News sites are subscription based, which is why I only read the Wall Street Journal. There are Amazon subscriptions for your vitamins and toothbrushes. There are sex toy subscription boxes. There’s a subscription box where you receive a monthly box containing a fossil or shark teeth or crystals with explanatory research cards.

Humans are suckers for subscriptions. The shortest distance between our money and their profit margin is a monthly installment plan. Maybe there is some glitch in our DNA.

I like subscriptions, too. I have a multitude. I accidentally subscribed to an Enneagram subscription service and was charged $9.99 for months before sorting out who was charging me money for what. I subscribed to Skillshare a month ago, and almost forgot to unsubscribe before the expiration of my free trial, which would have set me back $129.99. I subscribed to RocketMoney, a subscription service that finds all my unused subscription services so I could stop spending money on subscription services.

In the Subscription Economy, we’ve turned ourselves into subscriptions. On this platform, you can subscribe to my words for the low cost of $8.00 per month. If you do, you’ll get a post a week on a range of topics—the sickness of a son, existential AI threats, photography, whatever. You can also subscribe to people who write about Catholicism or Crypto or Cooking. There’s an amazing photography essayist who earns some of my subscription money. There’s a cartoonist who makes a living here. Bari Weiss parlayed her Substack (and podcast) subscription success into the editor-in-chief seat at CBS news.

I suppose all of this was inevitable. With the advent of personal branding, the productization of self, and the birth of self-publishing platforms, the course was set. And let me be clear: this is not necessarily a bad thing. Writers deserve to be paid for their hard work, and writing a weekly column is no small task. But as with anything else, the subscription economy has taken personal writing (what we used to call the “blogosphere”) by the throat. Put another way, we have become the product. More cynically, we have made ourselves the product, which might be some form of light narcissism.

C’est la vie.

2.

There are tools-as-subscription, services-as-subscription, and now, people-as-subscription.

There are a few subscriptions that are worth my time. I could take or leave Netflix—I’m too lazy to unsubscribe—but I could not live without my subscription to Adobe Lightroom, the program I use to edit my photos. I couldn’t get my work done without a subscription to Microsoft Office. There are also a few writers I pay for their hard work, and I’m happy to do it. But in a world of so many subscription opportunities, I’ve developed subscription fatigue. (Am I the only one?) And in that, I’ve started to measure people by the product they produce.

If I don’t like the product, I don’t like the person. This, despite the fact that I’ve never met the product—i.e., the person.

Now, here is a sort of mea culpa: I may have caused you subscription fatigue. I’ve hit you up for subscriptions. I’ll probably do it again. I’ve hidden posts behind paywalls, and when I start writing more substantive pieces, I may resort to some paywall activity. And if you don’t like my product, you may decide you don’t like me. (There’s at least one consistent troll here who shares that opinion.) That’s fine. I’ve brought it on myself.

I wonder whether turning ourselves into milk bottles or newspapers or streaming services or Stitchfix boxes is a good idea. When we become the product, do we tailor the art to the paying customers? Do we pull punches, hedge bets, write things we don’t believe or stay silent on the things we do believe? How far will we go to protect the brand, even at the cost of losing ourselves?

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