Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, where we remember the past and choose to repeat it.

We're taking a bit of a vacation to recover from the winter darkness, but in our last new episode, we highlighted the scam at the heart of Silicon Valley, which is itself currently at the heart of American capitalism.

So today, we thought we'd look back to our episode about scam culture more broadly from

back in January 2023. And so to look back, but with an eye on the present, sources today

include thought slime, Illuminati, The Analysis, The Problem

with John Stewart, Wisecrack, Ben Jordan, LBC, Rebel HQ, Second Thought, and Big Think.

Everything in the world is a scam. Subscription services make no sense. They only exist to ring more money

out of the consumer by offering upfront savings offset by far greater costs over time. $11 a month,

for example, feels like less money than $120, but if you use the service for 11 months,

you've already spent more money. It's not that the monthly subscription service is a business

model I'm necessarily against. There are plenty of services where it makes perfect sense. A movie

streaming service would charge a monthly feat. Of course it would, right? Every time I use that,

I cost the company money in the form of server costs and licensing agreements. Plus,

these services also tend to make it worth my while by constantly updating their library of content.

Not to mention, they're usually cheaper than like buying even one of the movies I'd want to watch on them anyway. So this is a pretty good deal. But in the case of this teleprompter app, it's sure some bullshit, because this isn't a service I'm expecting to roll out a ton of useful new features over time. And should they do that in the future? And I want those features? I would expect to pay for them then. What's they gotta do is let me download the fucking software.

That's it. They're not streaming gooies in 4K to me every day like the full moon app is.

And there are plenty of programs with far more complex features, far greater download sizes,

and far more utility that are one-time purchases.

I bought Clip Studio Paint, for example,

that's just $60, not $5 a month in perpetuity. I bought it like five years ago. I

still own it. When they update it, which they do regularly, I get access to the new

shit too, which I will grant you is a luxury that smaller companies probably

...