Like what exactly is bad about the microtransaction model, where you pay 0.5 cents a click or whatever to your ISP and every month the money is doled out accordingly by website?
Cognitive load, cognitive load, cognitive load. The thing that does so much to define human behavior and human preferences in complex modern systems, and gets talked about so little.
Having to think about a random mundane thing sucks, if your mind is already busy and your working memory is already overtaxed. It sucks even more if the random mundane thing is unpleasant, which having to spend money always is. And if something is monitored and you’re charged per-usage, that means you have to think about it every time you use it, and make a little cost-benefit calculation, which is itself a much higher cost than the cost of any legitimately “micro”-transaction.
This is why “free” is such a big deal, right? This is why the difference between 0 cents and 1 cent is often so much more salient than the difference between 1 cent and 10 dollars. This is why people are often much happier to pay lump sums (monthly passes, subscriptions, income taxes, etc.) rather than being nickel-and-dimed through tolls or transaction prices or whatever, even if the lump sum is more expensive. Not getting your money’s worth out of a good or service is, so often, much less unpleasant than turning every usage into an economic encounter.
(This is one of the big baked-in conflicts between economists and rationalists on the one hand and, well, everyone else on the other. Making systems more efficient so often involves some kind of close monitoring to make sure that sufficiently-productive usages happen while other usages don’t – that the price is in the right place – but this kind of thinking has a way of ignoring its own psychic maintenance costs.)
It doesn’t help that many of the people involved really seem to think that money is, like, a mean joke rich people play on poor people, instead of a transactional medium that signifies actual value, and we could have everything for free if the mean rich people just went away.
The people who think that way are usually part of the thinky/intellectual/artistic classes, and for them, it often really doesn’t make sense to think of their work as essentially an economic product that’s best managed through money transactions. It didn’t make sense way back in the day, when (in the ideal cases) they were working for patrons in exchange for some nebulous room-and-board kind of support, or being paid flat stipends by profit-insensitive institutions to research whatever-the-hell. It makes even less sense now, in a world of non-scarce digital information.
Artistic and intellectual work really just doesn’t fit very well into a merchanting infrastructure, and the sheer stupidity of the patches that we use to make it fit – the whole advertising circus, especially – displays that very clearly.
