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I don't know why you are being downvoted for asking a question, but I think it's incredibly important to educate people on the dangers of your proposal, i.e. to
by bo1024 9y ago
I don't know why you are being downvoted for asking a question, but I think it's incredibly important to educate people on the dangers of your proposal, i.e. to answer it.
A short answer is "everything Stallman has ever warned us about (most of which has already come to pass)."
A longer answer contains many, many reasons, so I'll just throw out some paragraphs.
Ownership is more than psychological, it's about your right and ability to do what you want with your stuff. It's also about whether your stuff is designed to help you or to work against you. "Do what you want" includes modifications, repair, and any usage that you might want even if not officially sanctioned by the company. If you don't own your stuff, you can't control whether it's tracking you and sending back data about you. You can't control whether one day the company goes out of business, or gets bought by a new owner, or decides for liability reasons or whatever that they should remotely disable or recall the product (maybe at the moment you need it most).
There's also a reason that "rents" are a hugely important concept in economics. In general, the renter is open to exploitation by the rentee who continually makes money not by creating additional new welfare/value but due to a historical circumstance, i.e. being the one who originally owned the thing being rented.
More issues: paying for services actually accentuates the problem of planned obsolescence, because it gives the service-provider the ability to terminate or alter terms of the deal at intervals (or immediately via software update) thus virtually forcing an upgrade.
When products are built to actually last, buying is perfectly environmentally-friendly. If you look at a mid-20th-century family's home, almost everything in it was built to last for decades -- furniture, appliances, vehicles, even clothing (with appropriate repairs). That was a result of the purchasing equilibrium. Many people have had to move toward the renting equilibrium where they don't expect to own things permanently, and the stuff they own is crap.
I'll stop there, but reiterate that the number 1 issue is ownership and control. I suggest you try the thought experiment of placing goods on a scale from "most ownership" (purchased for long-term reasons, customizable, repairable) to "least ownership" (comes with terms and conditions, may be updated or changed by the company at any time), and evaluate each good by how long it lasts, environmental-friendliness, how much it respects the rights of the user versus the wishes of the producer, and how much it is subject to planned obsolescence. (Starter: the iPhone is on the far end in all categories.)
- amelius 9y agoSo you don't think that we can capture all of what you said in laws that protect the consumer? Also, how is using a service different than paying someone to do a job for you. E.g. paying someone to do your laundry instead of buying a washing machine. The person you hire can choose any means of doing your laundry, including putting a washing machine in your home. If that's causing problems with exploitation, isn't that a fundamental flaw in our economy, rather than with the idea of preferring services over products?
- bo1024 9y ago> So you don't think that we can capture all of what you said in laws that protect the consumer? I'm not saying it's impossible to picture a society where this happens, but it's not very reachable from where we are now. We're struggling to get down basics like repairing your own devices. Nor is it a particularly desirable society compared to a society where everyone owns and controls all their own stuff. > how is using a service different than paying someone to do a job for you I'm not sure what this question has to do with what I wrote. I don't want either one. I want to pay once for a quality washing machine that I can repair, use when, where, and how I want to. For another example, I want a bicycle that fits my exact size, style, speed, and safety preferences, that I can pay for once and keep repaired and in good condition and resell later on, rather than throwing money at some company year after year to ride awful one-size-fits-none rent-a-bikes. Those bikes are useful for many scenarios but a bad replacement for long-term ownership. (edit) For example in the washing machine scenario, the service I employ to launder clothes can easily decide to hike their rates for all clothes not purchased from Banana Republic, or they can sell data about my clothes preferences to advertisers, or they can make me sign terms of service that give bad compensation for damaged clothes or delayed washing. Their incentives are often misaligned from mine; they aren't usually acting in my best interests. I guess you'll say "but competition will magically fix that", however, if we look at the real world, most markets don't have enough competition for that to be true. > If that's causing problems with exploitation, isn't that a fundamental flaw in our economy, rather than with the idea of preferring services over products? I don't understand what you're saying here. It sounds akin to arguments that roads should all be privatized, where the fact that nobody would build roads to rural homes gets written off as some problem with the economy rather than a flaw in the idea itself. Or similarly, sounds like you're advocating a system that you know clearly wouldn't work because you are able to picture some idealized version of society where it might.