
Our Ownershipless Future - ivailop
https://www.ivaylopavlov.com/our-ownershipless-future/
======
acdw

        At a first glace our ownershipless future is not 
        necessarily bad, there’s just something unsettling 
        about it, but I just can’t put my finger on it.
    

The author gives away the answer to this last sentence in the sentence
directly before: "the trend where we actually own as fewer things and are
going toward permanent renting of everything is definitely here." Under the
model we're working toward, we're not actually going to an "ownerless" future,
but a future where fewer and fewer people own more and more of the property,
leaving the rest of us to pay them rent. An actually "ownerless" society
wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. It's the renting that worries me.

~~~
scottlocklin
Yep; this future is a direct rentier society. It's a decent projection from
where we are now, where the entire society is built on a mountain of debt.
It's also horrifying the vision of serfs paying a hamster wheel subscription
model for the basics of life. Whether funded by debt or subscription models;
we're just simulating prosperity while living as serfs.

" With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well
fitting"

~~~
erikpukinskis
You have described the worst case well. We should fear it.

But the best case is worth considering too:

Every person who could be a talented crane operator can rent a crane, can
borrow the cash to rent the crane, can rent an agent who can help them find
crane gigs, can rent a trainer who can make sure they know what they need to
and practice, can rent insurance to protect the whole venture from risk....

The ownership society tends towards stagnant labor ecosystems. Because owners
want to be able to walk away from their assets and passively collect dividends
from them, the social structure around those assets calcifies.

A 1000-fold increase in the kinds of things that can be hired would seem to
give the actual laborers and managers the power to compete with their capital
class “directors”. Even director is probably giving them too much credit
because it implies some administrative labor. “Lord” is really the best word I
can think of for what capital class people aspire to.

In a society where everything can be rented in a fine grained way, the capital
class is no longer needed. In a truly robust rental market, margins would tend
towards the cost of administration, so even the rentals themselves are only
serving to support the wages of the renter-worker and the rental
administrator-worker.

------
mynegation
For myself I draw the line as follows: (1) do I need it all or most of the
time (2) Am I the creator. I own a real estate because this is where I live.
On the contrary I own the car but I use it rarely enough that - given the cost
of ownership - renting vehicle as needed seems appealing to me. For music,
software, and movies situation is more complicated - even on a physical medium
- you do not own them, you have the license to use it. For the content I
create - however uninteresting and worthless to other people - I prefer to
keep it on my servers (backed up of course). I would never leave a single copy
of anything that I would like to keep on Instagram or Facebook.

I welcome renting when it reduced waste. I do not need power tools, snow
shoes, or a ski chalet all the time, I can happily rent them.

~~~
gregmac
> For music, software, and movies situation is more complicated - even on a
> physical medium - you do not own them, you have the license to use it.

I don't think this is the proper comparison of rent vs own for media content.

While it's true you don't own the _actual_ content (in the sense you own a
house or car), you do own the _physical medium_ , and this gives you non-
revocable access to the content. An EULA or other contract may still say you
don't have an actual _license_ or right to use the content, but it can't just
make that physical item disappear.

When you 'rent' access (eg, streaming service), aside from obviously losing
access if you stop paying rent, the actual content owner can decide to stop
licensing the content and it will just completely disappear.

~~~
jstarfish
> When you 'rent' access (eg, streaming service), aside from obviously losing
> access if you stop paying rent, the actual content owner can decide to stop
> licensing the content and it will just completely disappear.

There's also the shitty hybrid model where even though you own a physical copy
of digital goods (say, Grand Theft Auto), the content owner can still revoke
all or part of the content-- as happens with the soundtrack of every GTA title
after about ten years.

------
CM30
What disturbs me about this isn't just how these business models remove basic
ownership rights in exchange for a locked down, walled garden ecosystem at the
whim of a large company, but how so many people seem to either think it's a
good thing or don't care about the issues at all.

You try to tell young people that putting all their work on social media sites
and platforms like Reddit, Discord and YouTube isn't a good thing, and they
don't get it. You tell people that digital distribution services could kill
media preservation and render games, TV shows, films, etc lost to history.
They don't get it.

Worse still, even the web development/software engineering community seems to
be the same here. Every time I look for a solution for something on my site
(commenting, likes, user logins, analytics, etc) I get answers saying to 'use
X service that charges this amount per month and relies on their servers to
run'. No, I don't want that. I don't want to 'rely' on any startup or third
party company for website functionality. I want to host everything myself, and
have full control over the source code as necessary.

It's why I always try to use open source stuff where necessary, and refuse to
buy anything with a monthly fee.

And it doesn't stop there either. No, here on Hacker News we see comments
advocating these setups for cars and transportation, as if the utopian ideal
is that everyone s ride sharing or using public transport for their entire
life. No, that's not a good thing. I don't want a world where getting places
means paying a company every time, in an overly santised, samely environment.
Where everything I do is under constant corporate surveillance.

That's a dystopian nightmare, just like every other aspect of this 'make every
product a service or platform' philosophy is overall. And it's one a
disturbing percentage of the population seem almost happier to switch to
without a second thought.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I think it just depends on what we’re talking about. It seems like you’re
ignoring the total cost of ownership. Yes, you can drive your own car across
town without paying a corporation....as long as you do your own maintenance
with parts you make, refine your own gasoline, have your own insurance
company, and can park without paying. And it still may take longer and be more
hassle (depends obviously). It’s not like we all were born with infinite-
lifespan cars that run on fairy dust. When done well, public transportation is
vastly cheaper and more efficient. It’s fine if you want to drive, but don’t
pretend like it’s not costing you as much or more (again, assuming you have
good public transit as an option).

Let’s take music as an example. Yes, listening to my music on Spotify may
theoretically somehow someday result in a loss of music diversity, or result
in music being lost because no one owned it, or may result in me losing access
to all “my” music if I stop paying, or the artist yanks their music from
Spotify, or if Spotify shuts down. That all _may_ happen.

But if I go for the pure ownership model of music, it will _definitely_ cost
me more in time and money and hassle. I’ll also have to worry about backing up
these files, having enough storage for them, protecting them against file
format changes over the coming decades. And it’ll cost me a lot more too!

Why? I just don’t care that much. 99% of what I listen to is personally
ephemeral. Listening to it in 10 years would be an interesting afternoon of
nostalgia, but that’s all. It’s the same for movies and tv shows.

Books are a little different for me, in that I’d probably be interested in re-
reading 30% of the books I read. And I’ve started buying my favorite books in
paper for this reason. But I always buy in digital first, because the pros for
me vastly outweigh the cons.

------
keiferski
Personally, the idea that police / the government/ someone somewhere can
control my electric car entirely rules out buying one. Completely
unacceptable.

The idea that “it will only be used against criminals” has been shown
repeatedly to be a fallacious argument. Ditto for any other “product” that
isn’t consumer entertainment like Netflix.

~~~
theandrewbailey
By "electric car", you mean "self-driving car", right? (The original article
switches the terms, too.)

~~~
logfromblammo
A modern electric car is electronically regulated, which means there is
controller software involved somewhere. Even if someone else cannot direct
where your car can go, they can certainly insert code that prevents it from
moving or charging if certain conditionals are met.

Unless you write your own firmware, your electric car is vulnerable to control
by non-owners.

But this condition already exists on internal combustion cars, so there isn't
really any reason to prefer them over electric cars, except that you can buy
and own ones that are so old there are no complex control systems.

------
mrleiter
It's a socio-economic shift, the growing imbalance of renting vs. owning. It
mainly has to do with wealth accruing faster than income grows. Wealth is
heritable, it transcends a human lifespan. Income (which partly ends up being
wealth) is most often not. This trend has lead to the well known .01% debate
and it is in fact, to the society as a whole, unhealthy in the long run.

It's not our ownerless future, it's the highly skewed owning society that
rents out its property. It's in a sense a modern feudal system, where the few
own a lot and in exchange to utilise those goods, you pay. You cannot afford
to buy, although legally you could. You are, if even, able to pay the rent.

There is this narrative of "sharing is caring", which may have some truths to
it, but it also plays into the hands of the ones who own.

------
hombre_fatal
What complicates this is that the negative issues with these systems are
invisible to most people.

For example, the Kindle doesn't even expose its filesystem to the user. A
power-user may use Calibre (separate software unaffiliated with Amazon) to
extract an ebook from one Kindle in an effort to read it on their own Kindle.
But upon opening the ebook, they will get a message "Sorry, this ebook is
licensed to <friend's name>".

So there's really not going to be a big market for a DRM-less ereader/book
store (Kobo, Kobo's store). My premise here being that DRM undermines
ownership.

A similar issue exists for Steam vs gog.com. The latter gives you an
executable you can copy onto a USB drive. While Steam won't even let you play
a game if you haven't connected Steam to the internet in 30 days. The other
day I couldn't even launch Steam because it knew there was an update but I had
no internet, and it would not progress beyond the "updating..." launch modal.
The average person doesn't run into these issues, else they would likely
prefer gog.com where possible.

It's all a bit frustrating. There are almost zero market forces that reward
the pro-consumer options, so there are no real drawbacks to being anti-
consumer.

------
mmcconnell1618
Uber doesn't own the cars and Airbnb doesn't own the property because it would
constrain their growth rates. It would require significantly more capital to
own everything. Franchise models are designed for the same reason. There can
be a Dunkin on every corner because anyone can pay a license fee to the
company and create one.

Long term, I think this will change. As Airbnb secures a more dominant
position, they will look to some vertical integration for additional revenue
and cost savings. So you may see an Airbnb owned cleaning service and
eventually, they'll want to own the properties. Same with Uber, when we have
truly autonomous vehicles, it will make sense for Uber to buy or rent a fleet
of company vehicles to control the experience and cost of the service. Surge
pricing then becomes a business lever rather than a motivation to get drivers
to a specific area.

~~~
arbitrary_name
Why would they want to own the property just because they provide cleaning
services?

~~~
mmcconnell1618
Cleaning services would be a first step to vertical integration, later they
may wish to own the properties to collect the profit margin currently
collected by the property owners who rent through airbnb.

------
jayess
I tend to view ownership as more transactional. Does ownership confer a shot-
term and long-term benefit? Some of the biggest purchases in our lives turn
out to be wasting assets: cars and houses. I'm happy to not own because those
things are liabilities. I put my money into income-producing assets whenever I
can: rental real estate, stock and bond funds, hard-money loans, etc.

I'd be more than happy to not own a car and just pay a monthly membership fee
for a driverless car that will pick me up and take me wherever. I like renting
my home because it offers maximum flexibility and I don't have to worry about
a broken water heater, leaking roof, or getting in trouble for not shoveling
the sidewalk.

------
nimbius
chiming in as an auto mechanic by trade here, the biggest rental scheme in
American society has got to be the automobile. In a months time ill maybe work
on six cars that the owner actually _owns_ outright.

Almost nobody owns a car anymore but everyone seems to be on a lease/finance
plan. [https://www.valuepenguin.com/auto-loans/average-auto-loan-
in...](https://www.valuepenguin.com/auto-loans/average-auto-loan-interest-
rates)

most people are into these things for 60 months.

------
simonebrunozzi
Not sure the post author fully understands the implications of what he has
written. "Open source is thriving" might be true, but has almost nothing to do
with ownership or ownershipless.

Plus, it's a future where few people own most things, and most people rent and
pay even when paying a rent doesn't make sense.

------
TimJYoung
To me, the distinction is between a society where individuals are free to
choose to rent or own, based upon their private circumstances, vs. a society
where individuals are _forced_ to rent because it is impossible to own. It
seems to me like we're heading towards the latter, and that's not good.

------
vinceguidry
One can compare and contrast this dynamic with actual land and real estate. In
the beginning land was cheap, concepts of ownership over it made no sense.
Then tribes grew into civilizations which could hold on to the best lands, and
drove out or assimilated other tribes. The concept of individual ownership
still didn't make any sense, and even when it did, only kings partook on
behalf of their kingdoms.

Slowly, slowly, the concept of total control by individuals evolved. Royal /
imperial control devolved to feudal systems which eventually devolved to
mercantilist systems, where our ideas of own vs. rent finally started to take
shape.

Even there land was a huge investment and tended to be a family shared good,
if you were lucky enough to have any at all. Everybody else rented. Slowly the
economic position of individuals and the financial system itself, particularly
in Anglo nations, improved to the point where individuals could, under their
own economic steam, acquire real estate and use it to derive income, something
that used to require massive investment on the part of an entire society.

The concept of ownership over a thing has always relied on the ability of
whoever has ownership over it to derive income from it, to further the cause
of industry, and therefore society. It makes no sense for individuals to have
to buy up the publication and distribution rights for something like a movie,
as they have no way of utilizing those rights. It makes no sense for AirBnB to
actually own real estate.

It's ownership itself that is the anomaly, not the lack of it. The number of
things it makes sense for an individual to own, soup to nuts, is always going
to be a very small list. I foresee the era of invincible owner-chairmen to be
a short one, to be replaced by an era where smaller businesses that can be
fully operated by small teams to grow, where those businesses eventually cede
control to larger collectives.

~~~
elliekelly
There's a major difference between the "no one owns anything" concept from
earlier civilizations and "a few people own everything" concept from
feudal/imperial times. In one the things are held in a sort of "public trust"
like a park or our highway system. In the other, the many are exploited into
working to death so that the few property "owners" can derive (often
excessive) "income" from "their" property.

The renting economy you describe brings us closer to the latter and that
concept of ownership only works for the wealthy, who ironically end up not
having to do any of the actual work.

~~~
solidsnack9000
In the present day, most land is held _fee simple_ \-- we have many rights,
including the right to transfer the land and have our name taken off it; but
we must still acknowledge the superior ownership of the government, which can
take land by eminent domain, impose taxes, and enter the land with its police
forces.

This is in contrast to _allodial title_ , land held in an absolute sense, on
which no taxes can be imposed by any authority. This is close to the sense in
which nations hold land today, relative to one another. Allodial title is now
a rarity.

Present day landholding is thus a situation where "many people own many
things" and "one entity owns everything". It might be said that the government
owns a certain minimal slice of rights of all land; but sells the the rest of
the rights.

Maybe the same ideas apply for "stuff".

------
tempodox
The (indirect) control they hold still gives them all the power they need
without the cost entailed by ownership. You can hack capitalism just like you
can hack software.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
> You can hack capitalism just like you can hack software.

Any tips on this topic?

~~~
CuriousSkeptic
The geoliberal approach could be considered a hack perhaps?

I.e go full circle and have all property be rented from the commons.
Distribute the extracted rent as a public dividend.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
I see. I was hoping for suggestions on more local/individual approaches.

