Lately I constantly hear people saying you need to buy a house as soon as possible. Right now the biggest worry for my colleagues at work is getting married and buying a home. I do not own a house yet, and my money just drains away in rent every month. I do think it is important to own something of your own before you get too old, whether that is a house, a car, or anything else. The day might come when I can no longer make money, or I might suddenly fall ill. If I do not have a safety net prepared for that exact moment, my entire life could collapse. So I am naturally trying to prepare myself as well.
But these days I genuinely feel like it is becoming harder and harder for individuals to actually own anything. This is not just a real estate problem. The very era we live in is actively erasing the concept of ownership. Paradoxically, the experience of holding something as your own is much weaker today than it was in the past. Let me show you what I actually mean.
Living In The Stream
 |
| You Don't Own Music Anymore, You Just Rent Access To It |
Think about it. In the past, if you wanted to listen to music at home, you had to buy a cassette tape or a CD. That physical object sitting on your bookshelf literally represented your taste. Later on, MP3 players appeared, but even then you purchased music files and owned them on your hard drive. But what about now. We are living in the era of streaming, not ownership. As long as you are connected to a music platform, you can swim through a near infinite ocean of music. The same thing happened with video. VHS tapes and DVDs vanished, and we just wade briefly into the vast oceans of YouTube and Netflix.
The fascinating thing is that social media works the same way. The concept of decorating your own personal space however you want is gone. Social media is now just uploading your own stuff within a prebuilt template. Instagram is the prime example, providing an almost identical space for everyone. No matter whose profile you visit, it all looks exactly the same. We're much closer to people drifting aimlessly through that standardized space than people settled safely in their own domain. In other words, we are moving further and further away from the concept of ownership.
It does not stop there. There are services where you use a car or a bicycle for a single trip, services like Airbnb where you share a house, and services where you pay a membership fee to read unlimited books. In our lives there are so many areas where ownership has been quietly replaced by temporary access.
The Era Of Access Over Assets
The futurist Jeremy Rifkin actually predicted this same phenomenon twenty six years ago. He said the main axis of the economy would shift heavily from producers making products and selling them to buyers, to providers offering services to users. I only really understood what he meant once I looked at my own monthly bank statement and counted how many subscriptions I am quietly paying for right now, from Claude to my streaming services to the tools running this very blog. He said we are transforming from a society where you hand over money and receive ownership of a product, to a society where the service provider retains ownership and simply charges people for the right to access it.
 |
| Trend Moves Faster Than You Can Ever Keep Up |
Why exactly is this happening? First of all, technology is changing far too quickly. In the past, things you bought would last a decade. Now they become obsolete in a matter of months. In this brutal speed war, owning physical goods actually becomes a burden that stops you from keeping pace with the changes.
The second reason is that information has become a far more important asset than physical material. As the software era opened up, it became possible to create new services that match the changing times without necessarily building new physical equipment. Furthermore, as social networks developed, it became remarkably easy for those holding information to utilize the dynamics within that network to generate massive wealth.
Let me give you an example. Nike makes shoes. A company like Nike owns physical materials like factories, land, and a massive headquarters building, but they also own information like design and brand image. Which of these two things actually sustains the true value of Nike? Both are obviously important, but the information is critical. To exaggerate a bit, even if Nike sold off all its real estate tomorrow, they could rebuild the company as long as they still held onto that information.
The Masters Of The Digital Empire
Modern society is built on a huge network that connects people across the entire globe. This network has been strengthened into a vastly faster and more powerful form through the internet. This is the fundamental reason why Nike can generate astronomical profits through the information known as brand image. If you keep copying and distributing that image through the network, people will naturally buy Nike products.
Franchises operate on the same principle. The defining characteristic of a franchise is that the headquarters holds the information. They possess the image and the expertise, and they simply sell access rights to the store owners. Information can be infinitely duplicated. Whether they sell it to one owner or two owners, the headquarters only needs to possess that single piece of information. This is why franchises can generate explosive profits once they cross a certain threshold.
 |
| Same Empire New Tools And You Are The Labor |
I recently saw a truly heartbreaking expression, digital colony. If colonies in the past stole land with guns and swords, modern society is essentially a world economically colonized by giant digital platform companies. The blog you are reading right now belongs to Google. We operate inside Google's territory every single day, providing them with our data to boost their profits. A blogger like me is just a hardworking laborer in the colony. I work tirelessly writing pieces like this to increase Google's revenue. Furthermore, the internet websites we mindlessly use every day run through Amazon AWS. AWS is Amazon's enormous server network, which you can compare to a railway system. Just as a train needs a railway to move, a website needs a server to run, and Amazon laid this network across the entire world. People are essentially paying a toll to use this network. Modern society revolves entirely around networks. The people who dominate this network are the true masters of our era. People all over the world make their living and spend their leisure time inside this network while paying massive direct and indirect fees.
If you are struggling to understand why your brilliant idea is not getting any traction inside this massive digital colony I highly recommend reading Why Your Great Product Is Getting Completely Ignored. It breaks down why understanding how these networks operate matters vastly more than just building something good.
Why We Stopped Wanting Things
Returning to the topic of ownership, there are three main reasons why the concept is weakening in our daily lives. First, we constantly crave replacement with the new. The reason we listen to music on our smartphones instead of bothering with an MP3 player is partly because it is convenient, but also because we want to listen to something entirely different at any given moment. We have become so accustomed to rapidly replacing things with newer versions that holding onto one thing for a long time actually makes us feel anxious now. This is not just happening because of our own choices. The sheer power of capital constantly pushes people so they never stay satisfied with a single product for long. Capital only circulates and grows when people keep consuming new things. In this process of capital rolling forward, the cycle of ownership is not just shortening. We are seeing countless cases where ownership itself is discarded entirely.
 |
| You Never Truly Own It, You Just Wait For The Next Update |
The second reason is upgrades. Would you purchase the current version of ChatGPT for a fixed price and keep it forever? Absolutely not. You know it will be upgraded to the next version in no time anyway. We are increasingly consuming services rather than products. It is not just about owning a product and being done with it. It means continuously forming a relationship with the provider and being managed by them. The most important form of management is the upgrade. Digital services in particular possess the unique characteristic of being incredibly easy to upgrade. Apple can instantly upgrade all the iPhones spread across the globe simultaneously. From this perspective, people might technically own their iPhones, but in a certain sense the iPhone is also just an admission ticket granting access to Apple's information ecosystem. What matters far more than the physical ownership itself is the right to access a constantly upgrading network.
The final reason is that companies simply refuse to sell the products anymore. As I mentioned earlier, companies holding information have absolutely no need to hand over ownership to other people. It is much like a franchise boss refusing to sell all his authority and instead only granting you the right to operate a store just like his. If you provide temporary access rights and keep collecting money, the consumer's entire life transforms into a cycle of continuous consumption.
The Freedom Of Letting Go
We live in an era where the concept of ownership is steadily weakening and everything is scattering like smoke. But one paradoxical thing is that as ownership fades, we are actually craving things that are genuinely ours more fiercely than ever. In an era where all music is streamed, there are people who go out of their way to buy vinyl records and display them in their homes. While a single tap can send a message instantly, there are people who still insist on buying fountain pens. This might just be an instinctive pull toward the materiality that is fading away in this massive wave of information and digitization.
 |
| Letting Go Is Not Losing, It Is Finally Being Light |
But do we have to read this change strictly as a tragedy? I want to look at it from a slightly different angle. Perhaps we have finally gained the freedom to escape the burdensome management that comes with ownership and focus much more intensely on the experience itself. Owning something actually means you are bound by the obligation to maintain it, fix it, and build your life around it. I actually noticed this the first time I gave up my own car and switched entirely to ride sharing and public transit. I expected to miss having something that was mine, but what I actually felt was relief, since I no longer had to think about insurance renewals, tire changes, or where to park it overnight. Of course this restriction has not fully vanished yet. We still need to own many things, and we must remain tied to many things. Above all else, we absolutely must own money.
But moving past these limitations, there is definitely a side where we are no longer bound by the specific context of physical possessions and can freely entrust ourselves to the vast information network of the world. On one hand, we must carefully manage the existential emptiness that arrives when physical possessions disappear. But on the other hand, I truly believe we can only navigate this era successfully if we learn to harness the sheer freedom of drifting without the heavy anchor of ownership.
In a world where ownership is being rapidly replaced by access, what do you feel, and what will your next move be.
For deeper reads on tech, business, and the shifting economy, follow The Techtonic for weekly breakdowns.
Latest Insight: [Why The World Is Quietly Losing Its Color]
Trending Insight: [Stop Learning and Just Start Copying in the AI Age]
Comment