Our Ownershipless Future
ivaylopavlov.com
ivaylopavlov.com
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.
" With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting"
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.
Notwithstanding moral, ethics considerations, that's not a resilient model. At. All.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not in a good index fund. Vanguard's funds effectively own Vanguard.
edit: specifically I think it's great because I believe overall quality of life will increase due to this shift.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
most people are into these things for 60 months.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Any tips on this topic?
I.e go full circle and have all property be rented from the commons. Distribute the extracted rent as a public dividend.