A few years ago I started getting issues of Modern Luxury in the mail. I had no idea why they started coming, and I tried to get them to stop. This should have been easy, and was instead hard. Here’s my process, in case anyone else is in the same boat.

First, if you use it, try to unsubscribe via PaperKarma. This is convenient and works for a decent number of companies. PaperKarma kept reporting they’d successfully unsubscribed me, but Modern Luxury kept coming.

Second, write to subscriptions@modernluxury.com. I got no response.

Third, call any numbers you can find associated with the company. Leave voicemails on anything that claims to be Modern Luxury related. Along this path I wound up discovering a Borgesian labyrinth of sketchy offers for life-alert style emergency devices and other things that felt vaguely like elder abuse; long story short, this did not work.

Fourth, Modern Luxury’s email format is [first initial][last name]@modernluxury.com. Start writing emails to a few names from your local edition that seem relevant, like the local publisher and editor. When they don’t respond, expand your emails to include everyone listed in the magazine. Start digging through corporate filings of their parent company, Cumulus Media, and emailing people there. Start short and simple; when that doesn’t work, try humor. This didn’t work either, but it was fun to write:

I love me some esoteric rich people nonsense. Fabergé eggs! Ominous lawn obelisks! Having oneself taxidermied and wheeled out for council meetings of University College London! Unfortunately, Modern Luxury contains nothing like this; perhaps rich people have forgotten how to be interesting. In any event, I would like you to stop. If you can figure out how to stop sending me magazines, I promise to stop sending you emails about it, and we can all go on to live happy lives.

Contraluxuriantly,

Kyle Kingsbury

Finally, cut out a suitable article from an issue of the magazine. Look up up the home address of the regional group publisher in city records. Mail the article back to the publisher, along with a letter asking them to stop.

Dear Mr. Uslan,

As the regional group publisher of Modern Luxury magazine, I would like you to stop publishing Modern Luxury to my home each month. I never asked for it, and I have been trying to unsubscribe for years. E-mails, phone calls, Paper Karma: nothing works. I appreciate your most recent column, entitled “Spirit of Generosity”, but please: it is possible to be too generous. Kindly stop sending these magazines.

Exhaustedly,

Kyle Kingsbury

This actually seems to have worked.

I think a lot about this idea of the Annoyance Economy—that modern life places ordinary people in contact with a dizzying array of opaque, nonresponsive bureaucracies, and that those bureaucracies have financial incentives to ignore you. This is why it’s so hard to replace a CPAP or get paid back when movers break things. This is why Redplum (one of those advertising/coupon mailers) ignored my unsubscribe requests for years, and only stopped when I started e-mailing the entire C-suite about it. I try to pick and choose these battles, but sometimes it’s hard to let it go. And goshdarnit, if nobody pushes back then bureaucratic indifference works, and we all have to live with it.

I don’t want to bother people like this; I think it’s unreasonably rude. I still start with the official support channels and escalate gradually. I like Patrick McKenzie’s strategy of presenting oneself as a boring, dangerous professional. However, I have also found that in the Annoyance Economy, one of the ways to get things done is to find specific people with power, and annoy them right back.

I hope this whole misadventure convinced Modern Luxury to build and document an easy unsubscribe process. If not, you know what to do.