a bizarre level of generosity
or how to get everything for free in a late-stage capitalist world
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Dear friend —
Have you noticed how inexpensive it’s become to live?
I know, I know — it’s gotten expensive too. Twenty dollar salads! Four grand a month for a one-bedroom in Venice! Two hundred bucks for earphones you can actually use with your iPhone! Healthcare costs OMG!
But consider this too: So much of what we used to spend good money on has become really, really cheap — and quite often, totally free.
Take music, for example. Not all that long ago, when you wanted to listen to a song at will, you had to go out and buy the whole CD for $16.98. This is in 90s dollars, which translates to $29.30 in 2021! We’d spend small fortunes amassing sizable collections of these plastic objects despite the fact that CDs don’t even play properly unless you hold the player flat and immobile, staying tethered to one spot —
Now, Spotify will let you play pretty much any song you want, anywhere, anytime, for $9.99 a month — or free, if you’re willing to listen to commercials. And streaming services will let you play pretty much any TV show, movie, or clip, anywhere, anytime, sometimes for a small fee, sometimes gratis.
We used to have to buy DVDs! They cost like $25 a pop in the early 2000s!
It’s not just entertainment that’s become strangely inexpensive. There’s so much I do these days for free or cheap that I either used to pay a lot of money to do or went without because I felt I couldn’t afford it. Grocery delivery — basically free with Instacart Express, which pays for itself if you factor in the cost of gas (this is assuming you drive to the grocery store). Yoga and barre classes — free on YouTube. Thousands of stock photos and easy-to-use graphic design tools — free, thanks to Canva. Cab rides from the airport used to cost like $50 bucks — an expense I avoided as a grad student by resigning myself to shuttles and Flyaway buses, adding an hour or more to my trip. Now, a Lyft pool costs like $13 to get you efficiently from LAX to the westside.
Both Uber and Lyft constantly send additional discounts to my phone to entice me to ride, and in Uber’s case, also to eat things. In fact, the discounts and free trial offers that are dangled in front of me on a regular basis have reached a bizarre level of generosity.
For example: Calm. I’ve had this meditation app for close to two years, using it almost every day — yet I’ve never paid a cent for it. How? First, I got a free year-long subscription through my then-shrink because Kaiser Permanente and Calm had struck some deal. Then right as that freebie ended, my Amex card emailed offering another free one-year membership, on which I clicked yes.
Will I cycle through these free Calm dealios forever? Does anyone actually pay Calm’s $14.99 a month fee? I assume some must, but I don’t know anyone who does.
Another example: WeWork. When my Zoom calls kept dropping at my Austin Airbnb, I had to look for coworking options with reliable wifi. Lo and behold, WeWork was offering a free 30-day trial — which meant I could work free at any WeWork location in the whole fucking world. Free strong wifi 24-7! Free office and lounge areas, with ambient music or without! Free mail service! All the free coffee and tea I could drink! Five hours of free conference room use — complete with TV, whiteboard, and landline! More than a hundred pages of free printing!
On my first trip to WeWork, I was given a free keycard to let me in and out whenever. My parking was comped. My letters and packages were delivered to the post office on my behalf. Then later that week, WeWork sent me an email, this time with the subject line, “Just for you: Lunch is on us (up to $15 USD).” All I had to do was make another trip to use WeWork’s free amenities — and they’d give me a $15 UberEats credit.
What kind of world are we living in? Why’s all this shit free?
The reason has to do in part with venture capital money and monopolies. Charles Duhigg details this in a New Yorker feature, aptly titled “How Venture Capitalists Are Deforming Capitalism.” Basically, all that venture capital money investors are pouring into tech companies is subsidizing the true cost of these services I’m getting for cheap or free — which is why I’m asked to pay so little. Why are the venture capital investors being so generous? By offering free or low-cost services, these companies can outcompete their competition — with the goal of ultimately putting all their competitors out of business and dominating the market. Once these VC-backed companies accomplish that, they’ll be monopolies — with the freedom to do whatever the fuck they want with their prices because we the customers will have no other options.
As you can imagine, indie coworking spaces, local restaurants, and other neighborhood services end up losing out in these deals. Recording artists say they don’t get the kind of cut they used to before Spotify came long. Book sales went up in 2020 yet indie bookstores nonetheless suffered while Amazon prospered. And we all know writers aren’t making much money these days for the work they do.
And I’m guilty. If it hadn’t been for WeWork’s free 30-day deal, I would probably have spent $100 or so at a local coworking space this month — and helped it survive during these challenging times. Should I not have taken the WeWork deal? Or is it better that I did so, as I’ll help drain that VC money more quickly, so long as I don’t actually give any money to WeWork?
It’s so strange, late stage capitalism. It feels ominous in theory — we know our every point and click is being tracked, analyzed, and monetized by someone, somewhere, and that our world has already changed irrevocably as a result — yet so comfortable and convenient in terms of making our way through our day-to-day lives.
Here I sit, drinking free herbal tea in my free air-conditioned conference room, hooked on free wifi, while writing about the dangers of free stuff for a love note that you’ll receive in your inbox or read on the internet, free of charge.
Are you too worried about when the other shoe might drop?
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
“If there is a central recurring theme to billionaire literature, it is this: an insistence that what has made the billionaire rich is helping other people rather than helping themselves.” In Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson takes a look at the memoirs of billionaires. His analysis is illuminating.
Did you know giving your Instacart shopper a 4-star rating could keep them from making rent next month? Instacart shopper Ehud Sopher lays out how Instacart’s rating system affects his livelihood.
Amazon profits and taxes: Anne Helen Peterson runs through the numbers in Culture Study:
Percent increase in Amazon net profit in 2020: 84
Amazon’s federal income tax rate in 2018: 1.2%
Amount Jeff Bezos would pay in state taxes if Washington passed a proposed wealth tax: $2 billion
These are such good points. I've been aggressively hounded by Uber Eats with near-daily emails urging me to accept $30. All I have to do is start an Uber Eats account, which I've not yet done. These emails' insistence has turned me off. But I am an outlier in most respects. I assumed Uber Eats was hedging a bet that I would go on to use its services regularly, and that it wanted my personal information to add to its database. Now, from your story, it seems it may have indeed been more than that.
Have you seen that WeWork doc on Hulu yet? So good!