7 ms·

Our Ownershipless Future

62 points by ivailop 8y ago

tempodox 8y ago
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_ 8y ago
  > You can hack capitalism just like you can hack software. Any tips on this topic?
  - CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
    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_ 8y ago
      I see. I was hoping for suggestions on more local/individual approaches.
    - claudiawerner 8y ago
      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.
acdw 8y ago
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.
- Juliate 8y ago
  Exactly. It's not so much "ownerless" than "owned by a few (each in their domain)". Notwithstanding moral, ethics considerations, that's not a resilient model. At. All.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    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.
    - hammock 8y ago
      It's an interesting question but I think we need more detail with supporting evidence and not just assertions.
    - dnautics 8y ago
      The middle class in the us started growing in the 1860s, and it was in the 1970s that it started turning around.
      - logfromblammo 8y ago
        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.
vinceguidry 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
mynegation 8y ago
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.
- KineticLensman 8y ago
  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.
  - secabeen 8y ago
    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?
- gregmac 8y ago
  > 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.
keiferski 8y ago
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 8y ago
  By "electric car", you mean "self-driving car", right? (The original article switches the terms, too.)
  - keiferski 8y ago
    Yeah, but they seem to be coalescing into the same thing.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    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.
jayess 8y ago
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.
honestoHeminway 8y ago
If you lived in one of those german towns owned by some aristocrat, you did not own anything, most of the time actually you where owned via some debt, handed down for generations, a slave bound to the house, land, service. On the surface your life was not bad, it was not good, it was utterly without hope for improvement and direction. A horse was a horse, was a horse, will ever be a horse. People did run away from this "simple" existence to work in the slave-pits of industrializing cities and the uncertainty of frontier countrys and colonies. Because there was something that happened, things where changing, not always for the better, but at least your live wouldnt be just another layer in the sediment. Its better to burn it all to the ground, then to be a servant bound to the whims of some billionaire, who might gamble your life away on a bad days afternoon. Guess that memory is not something alive in america. But your ancestors should have vaccacinated against that.
nimbius 8y ago
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-interest-rates https://www.valuepenguin.com/auto-loans/average-auto-loan-in... most people are into these things for 60 months.
mmcconnell1618 8y ago
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 8y ago
  Why would they want to own the property just because they provide cleaning services?
  - mmcconnell1618 8y ago
    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.
mrleiter 8y ago
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.
CM30 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
TimJYoung 8y ago
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.
hombre_fatal 8y ago
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.
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
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.

62 points by ivailop 8y ago

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_ 8y ago
> You can hack capitalism just like you can hack software. Any tips on this topic?
- CuriousSkeptic 8y ago
  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_ 8y ago
    I see. I was hoping for suggestions on more local/individual approaches.
  - claudiawerner 8y ago
    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.

acdw 8y ago

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.

Juliate 8y ago
Exactly. It's not so much "ownerless" than "owned by a few (each in their domain)". Notwithstanding moral, ethics considerations, that's not a resilient model. At. All.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  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.
  - hammock 8y ago
    It's an interesting question but I think we need more detail with supporting evidence and not just assertions.
  - dnautics 8y ago
    The middle class in the us started growing in the 1860s, and it was in the 1970s that it started turning around.
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      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.

vinceguidry 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

mynegation 8y ago

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.

KineticLensman 8y ago
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.
- secabeen 8y ago
  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?
gregmac 8y ago
> 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.

keiferski 8y ago

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 8y ago
By "electric car", you mean "self-driving car", right? (The original article switches the terms, too.)
- keiferski 8y ago
  Yeah, but they seem to be coalescing into the same thing.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  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.

jayess 8y ago

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.

honestoHeminway 8y ago

If you lived in one of those german towns owned by some aristocrat, you did not own anything, most of the time actually you where owned via some debt, handed down for generations, a slave bound to the house, land, service. On the surface your life was not bad, it was not good, it was utterly without hope for improvement and direction. A horse was a horse, was a horse, will ever be a horse. People did run away from this "simple" existence to work in the slave-pits of industrializing cities and the uncertainty of frontier countrys and colonies. Because there was something that happened, things where changing, not always for the better, but at least your live wouldnt be just another layer in the sediment. Its better to burn it all to the ground, then to be a servant bound to the whims of some billionaire, who might gamble your life away on a bad days afternoon. Guess that memory is not something alive in america. But your ancestors should have vaccacinated against that.

nimbius 8y ago

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-interest-rates https://www.valuepenguin.com/auto-loans/average-auto-loan-in... most people are into these things for 60 months.

mmcconnell1618 8y ago

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 8y ago
Why would they want to own the property just because they provide cleaning services?
- mmcconnell1618 8y ago
  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.

mrleiter 8y ago

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.

CM30 8y ago

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 8y ago
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.

TimJYoung 8y ago

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.

hombre_fatal 8y ago

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.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

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.