Adobe announced Tuesday that the psychological concept of object permanence will now require a paid Creative Cloud subscription. Users on the basic tier report that closing a project window leaves them completely unable to verify if their unrendered files continue to exist in a physical state.
The update rolled out across the company's flagship design suite overnight. According to the release notes, Adobe will no longer allocate cloud compute to maintaining the ontological reality of local assets belonging to free-tier users. When an unsubscribed user minimizes Photoshop or simply looks away from their monitor, the software immediately suspends the file's material existence until the user looks back, occasionally resulting in total atomic dissolution if the autosave function fails to catch the transition in time.
Maintaining continuous spatial existence for files that aren't actively being perceived is a massive drain on our backend architecture. Shifting persistent reality to the premium tier ensures our power users have the robust, objective files they need while keeping the entry-level product lightweight.
Support forums were immediately flooded with complaints from freelance designers experiencing severe separation anxiety. Several users reported spending their entire workdays staring unblinking at unrendered Premiere timelines, terrified that taking a bathroom break would cause their client's footage to revert to a state of formless potential energy. Others noted that turning their laptop around to show a colleague a design resulted in a blank screen and a localized vacuum where a vector graphic used to be.
Adobe customer support is currently advising panicked users who can no longer find their documents to simply purchase the full monthly plan, which restores the fundamental properties of matter to the hard drive. Users who cannot afford the upgrade have been instructed to hold their hands over their webcams and play a quick game of peekaboo to trick the application programming interface into rendering a temporary thumbnail.