During this MKV & Digital Transformations higher seminar, Aaron Shapiro, Assistant Professor of Technology Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will present the latest research on the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

How did software subscriptions become normal? The quote in the title comes from a consumer complaint following Adobe’s 2013 decision to stop selling licenses to its suite of creative software programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. Whereas users could previously purchase copies for perpetual use, they now had to rent access.

Aaron Shapiro, Assistant Professor of Technology Studies at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, contextualizes this move by tracking the proliferation of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model from a business IT solution in the 2000s to consumer-facing applications in the 2010s. While cloud computing is often credited with SaaS’s success, Shapiro argues that SaaS is better understood as a replicable techno-financial template, configured as much by accounting and valuation metrics as cloud infrastructure.

By reconstructing discourses of consumer resentment, Shapiro aims to clarify the moral-economic implications of techno-monopoly rentiership and discusses how SaaS’s transposition from corporate accounting expense to household budgets entrenches neoliberal logics of self-enterprise.