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.
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"
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.
I think that's actually a very resilient model--one that consistently reinforces a cycle of the oligarchs getting murdered or otherwise ruined, and all their stuff taken by someone even more ruthless. Occasionally, the cycle is delayed by distributing the property more evenly among a larger group of people, or by establishing a cooperative security apparatus among the oligarchs.
But it does appear to be stable, in that there is always an upper-class and a lower-class, even if the faces of the upper-class get swapped out on a semi-regular basis.
The model where there is just one, "middle" class of people in society, where everyone has equal rights and protections under the law--that is the one that doesn't seem very resilient. We only just tried it in the US, starting in the 1960s, and it's already reverting to upper class over lower class.
We could split a lot of hairs in this topic and still never agree on a common set of premises.
Much of history has seen only two classes: the people who own everything; and the people who own nothing, who then pay rent/tribute/tax/scutage/royalty/duty/whatever to the ownership class.
By some combination of popular rebellions and mercantile guild/cartel strong-arming, those who did valuable skilled labor were able to pry some ownership away for themselves, forming the middle class. The protections for the ownership of the middle class had to be very broad, in order to keep the apprentices from being taken back by the owner-class, and so the non-owner class was able to use them, too. Some of them, anyway. It helped to be white and European.
Then we had a three-class system: owns-most, owns-some, and non-owners. The middle class had to use law and custom as a means of protecting itself from the upper class, for whom all standards of personal conduct are negotiable. So the middles slowly bent the cage of law around even (some) kings and queens, keeping their cartel strong by violently punishing the renegades. They even founded their own nations. For themselves, mainly. Not for everybody.
At this point, it could still be argued that the middle class was simply trying to push out the old aristocracy and become the new owns-everything class. The vote was only granted to land-owner males, at first. And maybe around now a conquering army comes by and wipes out the democracy's fresh prosperity, so the emperor/king/shah/khan/caliph/voivode/whomever can take ownership of all the stuff. But maybe also the defense succeeds, and the owns-some manage to fight off the owns-most.
Now there's a choice. Draw a new line, and become the new owns-everything class, or recruit the owns-nothing and have just a single owns-some class for everyone, where no one is above the law, and everyone has something to lose if they try to reneg against the cartel. A man with nothing to lose and nothing to gain has no incentive to obey the law. But with carrots on one side and sticks on the other, everyone can be convinced to operate by rule of law. And this strategem was finally realized in the US after the civil rights movement, when finally, as a matter of law, everyone had nominally equal status, even though the white people had a loooong head start on accumulating all their property.
Then, in the late-1970s/early-1980s, the richest in the US started making a break for it. They cut their own cartel fees to a fraction of what they formerly owed, and cleared some runway in the direction of being the new owns-everything class. They formed corporations to be their personal dictatorships, attacked unions, depressed wages, and made political influence a purchasable commodity--which they then began to purchase more of. And this time around, they have decided to make ideas and culture ownable properties. If they are allowed, they will end up owning entire planets, dwarf planets, and other named celestial objects, and the walls keeping the serfs on the land will equal the depth of the gravity well.
If, for a hypothetical example, Elon Musk openly stabs someone to death in the main habitation tunnel of the Mars colony built with his cash, how would he be held accountable, given that the company he owns could possibly retaliate by cancelling all future support missions? The jurisdiction of the US does not extend that far. The mechanism would have to be built into the organizational structure of the SpaceX corporation (and to my knowledge, it is not). Would it be any better, if he told someone else to do the murder for him, or else have their water and oxygen rations cut off? You can't enforce the rules of the cartel-of-laws, unless you have leverage over potential renegades.
Another key thing happened in the 70s, Nixon closed the gold window allowing for devaluation of the dollar, which enabled government-led wholesale theft of the productivity of the labor class and direct transfer to bankers and government contractors (mostly defense), and indirect transfer to the financial sector and investment capitalists.
The wealthy didn't make a break for it, it was handed to them on a platter, and continued to be justified on the grounds of centralized management of the economy.
And yet, lots of people own index funds. It's more like more and more people own tiny shares of lots of different things and don't make any actual decisions about what they own. Owning some tiny fraction of Netflix doesn't let you make any decisions.
The decision-making gets outsourced to managers, who pay themselves more and more.
On the other hand, consumers do collectively decide which products win and lose, even when renting.
This is an interesting parallel to what's been happening across America (and possibly other countries) since the late 80's.
The fraction of people who hold leadership roles or at least actively engage in local civil groups is smaller than ever since the boom of the 40-60's.
Less and less people are participating in these groups, yet ironically, group membership around the nation is at an all-time high because of the rise of the mail-order activism group. Americans may be involved in 2x or 3x as many social groups, but the chances of this involvement growing past a recurring donation is increasingly small.
Now, group membership means donating a few dollars in the mail every few months while other people make decisions for you, instead of being involved in the decision-making process yourself.
Great book, but "at length" is right. I think Putnam's message would have a lot more palatable if a lot of the supporting content was moved into a separate section and the first section presented a more streamlined argument.
Bogle's book "Investment vs Speculation" discusses this point at length. He calls the world today the "double-agent society" in that there are two levels of intermediation (corporate management and investment management) between productive activity, and the ultimate owners of capital.
Think about the energy demanded by Ownership. Do you think the majority of people would be able to sustain their property? Owning a house, for example, is demanding work and if you, as an individual dont have the time, motivation, commitment or know-how to sustain the property then it becomes a losing investment and a mental and physical burden. Ultimately, it's kind of wasteful. In an owenshipless society people can spend less time and energy dealing with the baggage that comes with owning something and can instead invest that time and energy into other, more productive or leisurely things. I think it's great!
edit: specifically I think it's great because I believe overall quality of life will increase due to this shift.
I think you missed the part where someone else is the owner. The parent stated that they're worried about a smaller and smaller group owning most everything.
Owning less, and not having to maintain the ownership of multiple different things is good. Having a few people own them for everyone is not.
Some sort of a solution, still compatible with your remark, might be reached if the new "specialized" ownership was distributed in a way that no single group amasses a lot of power.
This, precisely.
I rent my house right now.
It's a good deal because I don't have to worry about maintenance, property taxes, etc.
But it's only worth it because I rent from someone who only owns a few properties -- he's a small player, so he has time to be responsive to my needs and his other renters' needs.
It's a win-win situation this way.
There would be a problem if I rented from a property management corporation.
Just from a logistics standpoint, they simply wouldn't have as many resources to help me when I have maintenance needs on my (really, their) house.
That's ignoring all the other problems that come with concentrated ownership -- the buying of political power, etc.
I don't know what the answer is, I wish I did.
Maybe something like what you say, a sort of "specialized" ownership.
I don't know what that would look like though.
A lot of these changes are driven by economies of scale. It's much more efficient to live in a huge apartment building than hundreds of small houses. You use less energy, the overall maintenance bills are less, etc.
But you give up some independence and more things become about politics. Example: if my pipe breaks in my house I just hire a plumber and fix it. If I live in a huge condo/apartment I have to convince the manager to fix it. That allows all kind of favoritism and chicanery to emerge.
I think we'll find a new equilibrium where fewer things are owned (more leased/rented) because it is genuinely more convenient, and "efficient" in some sense. But it's less robust (in the Talebian "antifragile" sense). But it's not going to swing all the way. We'll have to build new mental tools/understanding to cope with the new set of options that we didn't have before.
I maintain that we’ve been sliding very rapidly from a capitalistic society to a neo-feudal one. Rising inequality and companies increasingly interested in rent extraction over competition are the big giveaways.
The one thing I’m struggling to figure out is the vassal structure. Actual feudalism had all parties binding themselves to the next step up the chain in exchange for power and protection. Serfs are bound to minor lords who respond to greater lords who answer to the king. The closest structure I can identify is corporate hierarchies, but those are far too fluid compared to feudal nobility.
"I maintain that we’ve been sliding very rapidly from a capitalistic society to a neo-feudal one. "
I think it has been that way all over history. People start pretty equal, then some people get to the top because of merit, these people then shape the systems to solidify their rule so they stay in power independently of merit. At some point the people had enough of it, dethrone their overlords (often kill them) and the cycle starts new. Unfortunately this can take hundreds of years to finish.
In the past the feudalists often came from the warrior or religious groups, now it's business people, but the cycle is still the same.
"The closest structure I can identify is corporate hierarchies, but those are far too fluid compared to feudal nobility."
Feudal nobility also was fluid to some degree. There were always some peasants that somehow made it to the top because they were very smart.
Sort of.. on the other hand we switching cars, computers, phones so fast that many things are rarely owned for more than a few years.
We never owned the means production. But in this information age the means of production seem less and less important. You can also always find a manufacturer for your product.
Wasn't owning the means of production more about not being exploited for your labour, rather than about owning what was produced?
Seems to me we're moving towards a society where people are exploited not just for the labour, but their very existence. You live to pay rents and subscriptions.
"Seems to me we're moving towards a society where people are exploited not just for the labour, but their very existence. You live to pay rents and subscriptions. "
And a few can exploit because of their existence, or even worse, their parents' existence. Maybe we should increase inheritance taxes by a lot to avoid dynastic wealth and power.
Compare it to the cloud. Each company used to have their own DC, now they can use public cloud / service providers. Less and less companies have their own DC, and more and more pay "rent". Is this bad? Perhaps the rent frees up capital that can be spent on other things.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
There is one catch with owning real estate. You still pay property taxes. Try not paying your property taxes for a few years and you'll find out that you may own the dwelling but you don't really own the land on which it sits. We're all renting. Home owners just pay a lower rent in the form of property taxes.
Agree - although I have an additional criteria for digital things: is it fungible? - in the sense that if the current service provider takes it away from me there is a realistic chance of getting an identical copy from elsewhere for the foreseeable future.
And that's the worry, especially if the providers share ban lists (like casinos do). When the government provides a service, I have a right to benefit from that service, and due process for that right being taken away (I hare a right to use the streets, and I can't lose my driver's license without said process). If all significant transport is via shared vehicles, and Uber/Lyft put me on their banned-customer list, can I travel anymore?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not very much of a hack of capitalism, and much more simply a different configuration. A "hack" for capitalism would be "circumventing" the value-form or some such.
