The Subscription Subject and Neo-Feudalism

There remains a burgeoning and dormant side of social media that is yet to face serious and sustained critiques: the subscription side of social media. The Social Media Subscription Model (SMSM) acts as an outlet for a contradiction of "peak data" (Lovink 2019, 7). "Peak data" is when the economic lifeblood that upholds social media, data, swallows itself whole and is no longer economically reasonable. Therefore, the SMSM reflects important transformations from two aspects. First, is it now time to consider social media as part of a Mixed Model approach (Fuchs 2020, 134)? Second, it unearths a new area of social media for fresh critiques. Therefore, from this backdrop, this paper proposal will focus on one new development of the SMSM: the Subscription Subject. The Subscription Subject has interesting implications in multiple different fields. First, a debate can be fashioned between should the Subscription Subject be considered more of a consumer instead of a prosumer. Or can the Subscription Subject pose a democratic threat insofar as its paying users now have the potential for a larger voice? However, I will develop the Subscription Subject from a Žižekian perspective. I will develop part of Žižek’s ideological argument and argue that the Subscription Subject embodies a reconfigured expression of surplus enjoyment (surplus-enjoyment being the ideological glue that attaches an individual to an ideological edifice) that shifts focus from the algorithm to the tier structure (the tier structure being those who have access vs those who do not have access) as the new centre for ideological processes. Second, the Subscription Subject also embodies a different Lack, in the Žižekian/Lacanian sense. The Subscription Subject shifts from a previous version of social media as a sort of democratic, utopia, community-driven, "a place for friends" to use Instagram’s slogan, to a streamlined capitalistic expression of access and enjoyment. Finally, instead of arguing for the usual perspective of reproducing neoliberalism, the Subscription Subject operates and reproduces neo/techno-feudal logic. There is a small but growing literature that advances the claim that society has moved past capitalism or at least neoliberalism and has shifted into something new. Following in this thought, the Subscription Subject embodies a neo-feudal dynamic in three ways: rent, siphoning off part of the public square and the tier system. These three elements justify a transition away from standard neoliberal reproduction and a move towards an entrenching of neo-feudal logic.