You'll own nothing and you'll be happy.

As much as the right wing cranks completely misunderstood this, they were right to be upset about it.

It is selling us a world in which we will have to rent access to everything, and telling us we should be happy with that development, where we can be nickel and dimed to death to an eternity. A class of people permanently in debt, a perfect consumer, who will pay them every day for the rest of their lives. That's what companies actually want anyway, a consumer they can count on to give them money month to month until they die.

However, the consumers are also to blame here. It's 2023, and we still have people completely bought into the lie that Black Friday deals are good (they aren't and never were) and that we all need to have an absolute blowout in terms of presents for one another for the "holidays." The number of consumers who haven't stopped to question any of this madness are indeed part of the equation. While corporations sell us down the river and keep buying out our civil rights, there are still plenty of consumers who keep paying more and more, but never stop to question why. Which is honestly really crazy, how could you have made it to 2023 and seen the explosion in costs of, well everything, and not be like "something is amiss here, maybe this game is rigged and wrong?"

american credit usage/reliance has fucking sky space rocketed. All of this pay later bullshit getting normalized to fuck to the point you can fucking payment plan a goddamn pizza.

terrifying implications

Personally, I’m not buying and not paying. Because I have no money after spending it all on rent and food.

Reminds me of that P K Dick story “Ubik”. Aside from the fantastical stuff that happens in the book the one thing that struck me was the implication that you had to pay for everything. Pay for your shower in your own home. Pay to turn on the TV. Pay to access your apartment. Old fashioned because you’d drop coins into a slot for the access, now you just use subscriptions.

I loved scifi for the amazing possibilities it imagined for the future. Medicine, travel, aliens, materials sciences, etc.

I was reading the wrong scifi, I should have read more of the dystopian stuff by Dick, Gibson, or any other author that shows a world consumed, failing, and decrepit thanks to corporatocracy extracting everything from the people with a useless and ineffective government controlled by corporations.

Far, far more realistic.

Why would you not use it? They offer 0% interest at a time when interest rates are sky high. Someone needs to pay that interest and my guess is that it’s built into the price. So you basically pay more by not using it.