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Zohran Mamdani wants to be a knight in shining armor, coming to save New Yorkers from … their streaming subscriptions.
The mayor’s office has announced a new city rule that promises to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up for one.
Do New Yorkers seriously need the government to step in and save them from their streaming subscription after a free trial renews? Let’s be adults here.
This new rule, touted by the administration as a pillar of “Mayor Mamdani’s affordability agenda,” is part of the larger phenomenon that propelled him into office: pandering to the entitled.
For too many Mamdani supporters, the affordability crisis isn’t about the price of eggs. It’s about their inability to exercise the most basic requirements of fiscal responsibility without the government swooping in to hold their hand through the process.
These are the same people who whine about affordability while spending $8 on an artisanal latté. Who resent their Boomer parents for enjoying retirement while glossing over the fact that older generations are prosperous in their golden years because they spent decades growing savings and exercising austerity.
“For years, companies have built their business model around making it harder for working people to hold onto their money,” Mamdani said in a Friday press conference, where he blamed difficult-to-cancel subscriptions for making “working people pay more while corporations profit.”
Like disgraced former Senate candidate Graham Platner’s origin story, this is a new-fangled, DSA-centric conception of the “working class”
In reality, actual working people check their bank statements and don’t let unwanted subscriptions drain their accounts just because a few extra clicks feel too inconvenient. They don’t need the government to swoop in and help navigate through a few last-ditch discount offers before hitting “confirm cancellation.”
A real man of the working class mayor would be more attuned to the cost of groceries and gas than Netflix and Amazon Prime. But that’s not what Mamdani’s audience is asking for.
Monitoring your own bills and expenditures is not a responsibility of the government. But too many members of Gen Z have thrown fiscal responsibility out the window in favor of “doom spending.” They’re the types to cheer for this sort of regulation.
Hate to tell them, but the regulation is largely redundant.
New York already bans subscription services from failing to “provide the consumer with the option to cancel at any time using a simple cancellation mechanism that is as easy to use as the mechanism that the consumer used to provide consent.”
Mamdani is just adding a city layer on top of existing state legislation, while presenting the move as a landmark consumer protection.
But our mayor, elected on vibes and a vibrant social media account, will still take his victory lap, because his strategy centers photo ops over substance — which is why he posed with anti-capitalist icon and former FTC chair Lina Khan and a massive fake receipt.
Whether this populist, anti-business glory leads to any real changes or not, it will still earn him tens of thousands of Instagram likes.
And when that’s your appetite, there’s no dragon too small to slay.
English (US)