Why don't we own anything anymore?
What do you own? What do you have the title deeds for? Do you have a house? A car? A phone? CDs? Games? Clothes that don’t perish within two months? Nothing endures, and what endures is not yours.
When did we decide it was fine to rent Microsoft Word? The world's most basic writing software – which already required you to purchase a license – now impossible to use legally unless you are okay with shelling out the outrageous amount of $7 a month. This number may seem insignificant, but even if Office 365 were the only subscription you decide to pay for, you would be paying $84 a year. And, of course, Microsoft graces you by granting you a $14 discount if you buy the year's license ahead. At the time Microsoft subscriptions were introduced, a single-device one-time-purchase license for the classic Office software (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) cost $140. Considering you hold on to your device on average for 5 years, the cheapest you are getting Office now is $420. Indeed, there are benefits to subscription, such as family use, regular updates, and cloud space, but these should be optional services for those who need them and not the baseline subscription. The constant "small" expenses are eating away at our incomes, and prices keep increasing without your realising.
Clearly, Microsoft’s business model is not the only one that grinds my gears. Before I cancelled my Disney+ and Amazon Prime subscriptions, along with three more streaming services, I was paying a significant monthly subscription fee that exceeded what I’d pay for cable TV with mobile app benefits. And for what? I had 2 to 3 shows I followed on each platform; paying monthly for that seems unreasonable. Especially after the quality of new shows started deteriorating – Disney's aim of making everything family-friendly plays a significant role in that, and Amazon really doesn't know how to market its shows, even to current subscribers – it simply is not worth paying the conglomerates for subpar content. Furthermore, the digitalisation of movies, TV shows, and any other relevant type of media for a rental model leads to other complications beyond losing track of your expenses.
Today, streaming services and the studios behind them have the ability to withdraw and alter content you are paying to see. Below, you’ll see an image of Samuel L. Jackson in a green room, holding what resembles a gun with reference points, beneath that photo, the end result of the green screen usage. Nothing in the room is real. As you can also see, nothing in the resulting scene (except for the hologram) is extraordinary to the extent that it requires the use of CGI; the Hulk is not in this scene. Marvel Studios could easily construct a set to film this scene on location. Why don’t they? The green screen allows them to revise scenes after the original release of movies and shows; so, if anything they placed in the frame becomes “problematic” afterwards, they can easily take it away. Of course, it can be argued that the advanced and increased use of CGI resolves some issues, such as scheduling conflicts, editing inflexibilities, etc., but it cannot be denied that the reduced physical ownership opportunities create ample room for corporations to decide what sort of media you should consume. You decide if that’s good for you. On top of the boundless ability of producers to edit the content you pay to see and expect to remain consistent, they can take your capacity to legally watch content if they deem it fruitless enough to delete as a way of cutting costs. On an unrelated note, Warner Bros also cancelled the release of multiple titles for the purpose of writing off taxes.
When was the last time you held a CD? A vinyl record? Surely, some among the readers collect black disks for better sound quality, out of special interest, or to support their favourite artists; however, I'd be speaking for the majority of people if I said we mostly rent out music. Network effects lead many of us to insist on using Spotify, a music streaming service that recently has become a caricature of itself. The shuffle algorithm is skewed in a way that resembles an echo chamber; you can no longer listen to a genuine shuffling of the music you like but, instead, a limited mix of tracks Spotify predicts you will like to hear. While its inferior sound quality is also an issue, that’s not the main point of what I’m writing here. We are paying monthly to hear music that we do not own, music that we cannot hold in our hands. Whether it be Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube, the providers can arbitrarily prevent you from listening to your favourite track because it is deemed inappropriate by any position of authority. Come to think about it, this innovation to move everything online opens up quite many opportunities to impose censorship. Today, streaming services appear relatively independent as there have not been many occurrences of government intervention and censorship imposition; however, coming from a country that could be considered authoritarian in some respects, I can tell you streaming services make it much easier for the government to prevent you from listening to certain tracks. While the example I will provide is a case of auto-censorship, it serves my point. In 2018, the top rapper in Turkey, Ezhel, was incarcerated for promoting drug use in his songs. Following this, many artists updated the songs they shared on streaming services to censor curse words, words related to drugs, etc. Since many listeners now do not purchase CDs, they were stripped of the ability to consume the original piece of media. In an age where no piece of art produced is guaranteed to remain accessible, one has to question the classification of piracy as immoral. How are we to preserve art if corporations and artists can make it so that there is no legal way to access it?
Another matter to consider is entrusting cloud service providers with our memories, documents, and everything else. Many such providers allow you to have an inadequate storage space similar to a lite version of a game you get for free. Nonetheless, if you want to trade the security and privacy of physical hard drives for the convenience of easily accessible online storage, you can pay for the service. With a hard drive, I know the files I store will remain there as long as the drive remains undamaged, and I regularly check the state of the files, which, arguably, is quite an inconvenient endeavour. This also makes cloud storage the more convenient alternative, as the files are less likely to corrupt, and the servers supporting it are better protected than the unshelled hard drive I have back home. The growing size of files, especially due to increasingly better cameras being attached to our phones making photos consist of more data, makes the 5 gigabytes of free iCloud storage pretty useless, creating a reason for us to buy additional space. While I also carelessly use it, a downside to the currently trouble-free online storage is the risk of Apple deciding to cease providing it. Think about what will happen when Google gives you a 30-day period to download all of your stored data, after which they will delete everything you've ever uploaded because you’ve stopped paying for extended Google Drive usage. What if you miss the deadline? What if there isn't a deadline to begin with due to servers collapsing? Poof. Your history is gone.
Last year, I "bought" my first online textbook. I paid book-owning money for a digital copy of my economics textbook, a digital copy to which I would have my access revoked after a certain number of months. Ideally, I would not have to use that textbook again after I'd passed the course on my first try. But what if I'd failed and had to take the exam next year? I’d have paid the now marked-up price to once again rent the book. To some extent, I understand there are upsides to renting certain services: constant updates, ease of access, reduced need for physical storage, etc. But to rent a textbook? Simply bewildering.
Renting a house, we consider normal. It used to be that lower-income groups would rent, while middle-class and higher-income earners owned their housing. Today, the middle class, if it even exists anymore, is unable to dream of owning a house. Homeownership is globally declining, and there is no hope in the near future that we access affordable housing. What’s really funny – if you could call it that; I personally feel it’s tragicomic – is that we are renting cars now. We have been renting cars for a while, but what I’m talking about does not include the renting of a car from SIXT on a holiday abroad. I’m talking about shared cars, about Free2Move and Greenwheels. It shouldn’t be impossible to own a car, but the bureaucracy and our diminishing purchasing power make sure it is immensely difficult. There are advantages to the shared ride system; an individual vehicle is, most of the time, left idle. It is, for all intents and purposes, a waste of space, and, by the same token, inefficient. Then, sharing could optimise car use, also in an environmentalist sense. Nonetheless, the manner in which we share our vehicles should be reimagined. What I’d suggest is a scheme where the users are more aware of how their money factors into the system with less incentive to profit, like a cooperative – The Mobility Factor is a good example here. The capitalist system is simply robbing the labourers – this includes 95% of you, readers – of property. I'd also like to add that I am an advocate of improved and more extensive public transport networks over individual cars and expanded highways; I wrote this part to emphasise that the current global system is not delivering on its promises.
This is not how I usually write articles. I’m not big on opinion pieces, despite one of my previous articles being wrongly classified as one for practical reasons. However, this, to me, is an issue better communicated in an essay format instead of a traditionally structured article since it allows me to go on tangents. I hate sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but this deprivation of property is not only for the purpose of directly benefiting the people you pay. Decidedly, the constant subscription fees are not the only thing your providers are taking from you. Every step you take is tracked. You are a commodity to be sold and traded. Another data point to train the brand-new targeted marketing artificial intelligence. And do you know the most humiliating part? You are worth less than a dollar. Your entire persona, as a string of code, is worth less than one dollar. Our flesh and bones and minds are exploited by our employers, by the corporations we purchase our lives from, by the software we use to remain in contact. This is an inhumane way to exist, and there is barely anything we can do about it as our systems slide back into a type of neo-feudal corporatism.
Comments