Subscription Society
John Ink2Quill Editorial
www.ink2quill.com

Business models continue to change with the times and technologies. The same way milk deliveries at peoples’ doorsteps became a thing of the past, only known about from old black and white movies new models of business are disappearing and being replaced by newer ways of doing things. I remember seeing people getting deliveries of ice in movies before the days of refrigerators and freezers. So what new developments are happening in the world of business and how will that effect us?

The way people consume and buy things for one is the most obvious. Watching and buying movies from home has been going on for over two decades now but I feel it is still in a kind of transition. We are not done with the way we consume and purchase entertainment. Take story telling or just the news, which some cynics might claim are one and the same. Podcasts will continue to grow in popularity with many more types of personalities in spite of any censorship. There will always be effective and growing censorship in the West just like there will always be those that wiggle past it and say what we all think but dare not say. I see entertainment as being more interactive and immersive. This might be done with headphones or implants where we turn on our TVs and implants put our senses in an imaginary world. In such a world we would not only see and hear things but also taste and feel the digital world we are in. All this thanks to A.I. because it would be able to calculate our expectations and weave stories around them. So we would not only watch a story but experience it as well. It’s the next best thing to physically building a world and visiting it.

I can see advertisements change because of immersive technology. Commercials would be more immersive and addictive, geared toward grabbing a younger audience who would be expected to spend most of their lives in the digital world. So, for example, the ad for a box of cereal might be a journey down a river of pure chocolate on a delicious smelling cookie. And you would not even have to pick what you liked best for each commercial because the A.I.s would do all that for you. I am describing the triumph of over-consumption, addictive consumption.

The way business would be paid could be more passive than today. That is to say, payments will be more automated, done with apps through subscriptions. The subscription model although not always sustainable now will become the new way of doing business. The consumer of the not-too-distant future will have dozens and dozens of subscriptions for everything from blogs, videos services, clothing companies, supermarkets and anything else you can think of. Now A.I. will always be there to help us manage our long list of subscriptions of things and services we cannot do without.

There is one slight problem with the subscription model. It is not sustainable under the current model. For a subscription model to work a lot of the business process would have to be done by robots, A.I., algorithms and generally non-paid employees. So, the department store of today might only need 10% on their employees tomorrow after full technological upgrades and changes. That means that the job market of tomorrow will be a very different place from what we have today. For better or for worse we might have more of a subscription society with coworkers that inhabit the digital realm.

John Ink2Quill

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