By Derek Green
True Romance was the last straw. No, not the final nail in my effort to revisit pop culture phenomena via a 2026 lens. It was the moment I realised that you can’t win the streaming whack-a-mole game – jumping between services, exhausting the catalogues, only ever subscribing to one at a time. The digital cartels have colluded to deny the dream – that everything we could ever want to watch or listen to would be at our fingertips; fast, cheap, always available.
But we’ve been sucked in – the game is rigged. You, me, everybody – we’re paying for things we already own. And not just Elton John’s cheeky little ditty about part time love, thanks to Spotify, Apple Music, or whichever other giant has its hooks in you.
How did we get here? It all started with “feel good Fridays”.
“Hey, let’s watch Top Gun.” (We don’t have Stan.)
“What about St Elmo’s Fire? That’s a classic!” (It’s buy or rent only.)
“True Romance? Didn’t Tarantino write that before Reservoir Dogs?” (Nah, not available on any streaming platform in Australia.)
WTF? At all? Didn’t we have that on DVD? What’s going on?
While the big players have been siphoning your cash into their ballooning coffers, they’ve been bouncing your favourite movie titles around so that you can never quite nail them without subscribing to everything. And when they’re not moving the goalposts, they’re replacing the classics with in house crap. I call it the “Netflix glow”. You’ve never heard of the actors, the plot sounds vaguely familiar, and five minutes in you see it – the bland filter has been applied and the snoozefest begins.
We talk about the cost of living, and yes, it’s a thing. I feel for young people. When I was first renting, I paid my share of $150 split three ways (including bills), and wasn’t forking out for mobiles, internet, tolls, apps, TV, music, audiobooks, software, etc. When you bought a book or a record you were a customer for a moment. Today when we purchase, we become customers for life. We own nothing. We hold nothing in our hands. We don’t feel the weight or value of our purchase. We download and dispose, always chasing the next digital hit – we’ve been cajoled into some bad digital habits. A quick check of my credit card statement shows I too have failed. Spotify, Netflix, iFit, Binge, the New York Times Cookbook (WTF — I don’t remember signing up for that) — they’re all there in a neat row. A testament to my privilege, my complicitness, my laziness.
Think back to all the analogue “things” you’ve owned and discarded over the years – LPs, cassettes, books and more. Maybe it’s time to open that bulging closet you’ve been ignoring, or brave the spiders in the attic, and reclaim ownership, and power. Yes records are a problem, they tried in the ’60s and ’70s, but nobody has ever come up with a practical portable turntable. But we still have cassettes, CDs, Walkmans; I reckon I’ve still got a couple of iPods brimming with great tunes in my “cables and hard-drives” tub under the stairs. Does it all feel too hard? That’s the idea. Without really noticing, we’re greasing the wheels of corporate greed while handing over our agency. A recent study in the UK revealed that Brits are paying £117 million a year for “zombie” accounts – forgotten, duplicated, shared but no-one is sure who’s actually using them, or just too bloody hard to unsubscribe from. That’s about £400 per household ($800), an absurd, obscene amount of money.
So what can we do? Fight back. If we can somehow strip back to one or two services, many of us could save $500–$800 a year, or $2,500–$4000 over five years. That’s a friggin’ holiday!
Let’s recapture the excitement of music, films, and art. Dig through your storage, ask your friends and neighbours, or hit the op shops, libraries, and your parents joint (they never throw anything away!) Find ways that work for you to retreat from systems we rely on that keep content behind paywalls, gym memberships trapped in apps, software and “smart” hardware that stops working once you upgrade, and our thoughts, memories and photos held hostage in a cloud that charges you to access your own life. Retire the Kindle, touch paper, find out “whodunnit”, and rediscover the hundreds of recipes you forgot you owned.
It’s possible – if you believe. The great theft has happened right in front of us, but I’m on the path to redemption. You can join me in taking back ownership – of your soul, your sanity, and a shitload of things you already paid for.
