#i miss when photoshop wasn't a subscription

[awakefor48hours]

If you guys can't tell, I fucking hate Adobe and how expensive their products are.

Get pirated Adobe

[artufex]

Living Up to the "Leftist" Part of My Blog Title, or: Late Stage Capitalism Steals Utility from Us

TLDR: Marx was right. Capitalism's focus on profit maximizing has infiltrated everything, makes products worse, and makes us unhappy and more mistrustful of each other.

I hate how late stage capitalism incentivizes everyone to monetize everything.

I was trying to listen to an album I bought on my computer and Windows' modern Media Player doesn't let you skip tracks or play whole albums. Like, WTF? I have to go back to the legacy player to play music albums. Who would want to lose that feature? What does the new player even do that makes it worth using?

I know the legacy player is there and it's still free, but I wonder, then, what's the point of the shitty modern player? It seems like it would only drive you to either a better open-source or a better paid alternative.

So going back to the legacy player in all of its Windows 7-era glory reminded me of how we used to get extras like minesweeper or solitaire or that awesome pinball game in XP as part of our purchase. Now, the pinball game is gone, and you have to watch ads to play solitaire or pay a monthly subscription to avoid the ads they force on you, no way to just pay a finite amount for stuff.

I miss Web 2.0 when there were like a million different websites and you could find so many different communities, when Google search worked and wasn't just a vector for search-engine-optimized ads.

I remember going to one of a million different Flash game websites and playing games that people just made for others to have fun. I miss going to websites that would do cool services for you, like letting you turn your handwriting into a computer font for free.

Now, I'm not saying there's any problem with wanting to make (or actually making) money from your work, of course not, but I think there is a problem with every interaction with another person or their work needing to be some kind of monetary exchange. I think Marx has a specific term for this, but it's been a minute since I've reviewed him.

Anyway, part of the reason that all changed was because of capitalism's drive for endless profit leading to corporations nickel-and-diming everything they can, like Adobe not letting you just buy and own Photoshop for one purchase anymore, or AAA game companies not allowing you to own everything in a video game after paying your $60 or $70 or whatever the sticker price is.

Along with that nickel-and-diming came squeezing more and more profit by paying workers less and less, making our jobs more precarious so we have to have a side hustle, we have to scrimp and save and we have to use social media to gather fans whose attention we can monetize through ad revenue and selling merchandise.

Because our sense of security is so unstable, because so much has been robbed from us, because we have decaying--and in the U.S. basically nonexistent--social safety nets, we are constantly having to look out for scams, to ask each other for mutual aid, and being forced apart. Like Marx argued, capitalism is alienating: It alienates us from each other, it alienates us from ourselves, and it alienates us from the joy of creative labor. (I might be forgetting a fourth kind of alienation. Again, it's been a minute since I taught theory.)

In the past, like my childhood on the internet mentioned above, people did things--and they still do things--for free because we like making stuff, thinking up ideas, and showing off our stuff and sharing our ideas with each other. That's why social media is popular: we're a social species! Marx argued our species-being, our human nature, is to work: is to create, to labor more than what is necessary for the propagation of ourselves and our species. That is, we do more than just eat, sleep, and fuck. We draw, sing, write, dance, play, talk, make longwinded blog posts at 12:35 in the morning instead of sleeping, etc.

People did this "free labor" more often in the past because people had a greater sense of security. They had this greater sense of security because their basic needs were being met. In Marxian terms, they were earning enough to meet their means of subsistence.

And with that greater sense of security, borne from having their base needs met, came more trust in broader society. It's less risky to trust people if your needs are secured. It's also easier to trust people won't scam you because there's less incentive to scam if they are secure.

But now that we see our institutions failing, crumbling around us while the state bends to the will of capital and ignores the will of the majority of the population (weed legalization? minimum wage increase?) people come to feel they can't trust those that are different from them. Social order and social bonds become weaker and, again as Marx predicted, capitalism is sowing the seeds of its own destruction.

I started writing this to complain about how Media Player sucks, and of course it's because of capitalism. I hope I did a good enough job of linking the two. It's not just an aphorism to say "capitalism caused it". I could go more into how capitalism uses the state to prop itself up and this merging of the state and business exacerbates fascism, but I'll save that for another post.

[brehaaorgana]

So op was referencing a post that basically said all games used to be like $20. Which...definitely wasn't true lol, and so that's why we're discussing historical pricing. I *do* definitely agree that psychologically games feel more expensive when you're buying like, the game scaffold/base and then also need to buy a ton more DLCs to enjoy yourself, or the base you buy isn't even finished really and have the content is updates and the other half is dlc.

But even saying that, I grew up playing The Sims and my family bought every expansion of Sims 1 & 2, so it's not like we didn't also have dlc content constantly in the 00's. My mention of PC games above is my 90's experience (if shit was really cheap it was bargain bin, or it was pirated, lol). Another newer thing is definitely that a lot of games now have the concept of loot boxes and pay to play and people probably do local multiplayer much less, and a lot of online access multiplayer games have a cost associated with it when you're talking video game consoles (this was usually true for PC mmorpg's tbh). So you start getting piles of various subscriptions in addition to other subs that didn't exist in the 90's/early 00's. There's definitely more potential for additional gaming expenses nowadays.

(Unrelated: god I miss magazine style game guides soooo much).

And to put pricing in context for early PC games, my dad gave our state university's architecture department his copy of the original Sim City to burn copies for their use, and they gave him a copy of like, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator because a single computer game = adobe creative suite in terms of value.

Gaming consoles were also pricey as were the games.

I'm not going to rag on the original post, but video games have generally always cost around $30 to $60. A GameBoy used to cost around $80, with each individual game was around $30 unless you caught it on sale or on resale at like, a flea market. The legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, which released in 1998 on the Nintendo 64, cost $59.99 on release, which in today's value is $108.

This is not to say that video games are not expensive, and it's not to say that it doesn't suck that they're getting a little more expensive (AAA games used to cost around $60 10 years ago, now they're up to $70 after hovering around $65 for a while), but the prices aren't actually changing that much in comparison to what they've always been. Video games are costing about the same amount as they always have, the adjust for inflation and the value of money in different periods of time. We really need to avoid romanticizing the cost of things previously, because it leads to this idea that we can go back to a time when things were a lot cheaper.

If anything we need to go forwards to a time where we have price controls for certain goods and an increase in living wage for people as a general rule rather than misremembering the past and how much we used to pay for things.