John Oliver on ‘smart’ appliances: ‘Spying on you through the washing machine’

The host also discussed the rise of forgotten monthly subscriptions for anything from dishwashers to litter boxes On the Sunday night episode of his HBO show, John Oliver discussed the rise of subscription-based business models across the worlds of music, film and TV, beauty, food, cleaning services and more. “Subscriptions are now basically everywhere and many of us don’t even realize how much we spend on them,” Oliver said. A recent report found that Americans pay double the amount that they thought in monthly subscriptions, while about half of those surveyed still pay for one they had forgotten about or do not use. “Subscriptions are a universally annoying problem,” Oliver said. While newspapers and magazines have long had a subscription based business model, “the internet has made it much easier to apply a subscription model to basically everything.” Now you can subscribe to just about anything such as Apocabox, which sends you survivalist tools, and BoneBox, which ships you (non-human) skulls. The normalization of subscriptions for music, film and TV streaming services began in the late 1990s when Netflix launched its DVD rental service and Salesforce introduced

Aug 24, 2026 → Aug 24, 2026