[acdw]

    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.

[scottlocklin]

Yep; this future is a direct rentier society. It's a decent projection from where we are now, where the entire society is built on a mountain of debt. It's also horrifying the vision of serfs paying a hamster wheel subscription model for the basics of life. Whether funded by debt or subscription models; we're just simulating prosperity while living as serfs.

" With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting"

[erikpukinskis]

You have described the worst case well. We should fear it.

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.

[deevolution]

This is just a hunch, but I feel like ownership produces more debt than renteirship

[Juliate]

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]

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.

[dnautics]

The middle class in the us started growing in the 1860s, and it was in the 1970s that it started turning around.

[logfromblammo]

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.

[dnautics]

Another key thing happened in the 70s, Nixon closed the gold window allowing for devaluation of the dollar, which enabled government-led wholesale theft of the productivity of the labor class and direct transfer to bankers and government contractors (mostly defense), and indirect transfer to the financial sector and investment capitalists.

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.

[hammock]

It's an interesting question but I think we need more detail with supporting evidence and not just assertions.

[skybrian]

And yet, lots of people own index funds. It's more like more and more people own tiny shares of lots of different things and don't make any actual decisions about what they own. Owning some tiny fraction of Netflix doesn't let you make any decisions.

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.

[kakarot]

This is an interesting parallel to what's been happening across America (and possibly other countries) since the late 80's.

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.

[eldavido]

Discussed at length in Putnam's "Bowling Alone" under the heading "professionalization of politics".

[kakarot]

Great book, but "at length" is right. I think Putnam's message would have a lot more palatable if a lot of the supporting content was moved into a separate section and the first section presented a more streamlined argument.

[JoshTriplett]

> The decision-making gets outsourced to managers, who pay themselves more and more.

Not in a good index fund. Vanguard's funds effectively own Vanguard.

[skybrian]

I meant the management of individual businesses and the trend in CEO compensation.

[eldavido]

Bogle's book "Investment vs Speculation" discusses this point at length. He calls the world today the "double-agent society" in that there are two levels of intermediation (corporate management and investment management) between productive activity, and the ultimate owners of capital.

[deevolution]

Think about the energy demanded by Ownership. Do you think the majority of people would be able to sustain their property? Owning a house, for example, is demanding work and if you, as an individual dont have the time, motivation, commitment or know-how to sustain the property then it becomes a losing investment and a mental and physical burden. Ultimately, it's kind of wasteful. In an owenshipless society people can spend less time and energy dealing with the baggage that comes with owning something and can instead invest that time and energy into other, more productive or leisurely things. I think it's great!

edit: specifically I think it's great because I believe overall quality of life will increase due to this shift.

[rhn_mk1]

I think you missed the part where someone else is the owner. The parent stated that they're worried about a smaller and smaller group owning most everything.

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.

[acdw]

This, precisely. I rent my house right now. It's a good deal because I don't have to worry about maintenance, property taxes, etc. But it's only worth it because I rent from someone who only owns a few properties -- he's a small player, so he has time to be responsive to my needs and his other renters' needs. It's a win-win situation this way.

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.

[eldavido]

I think there's something to this.

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.

[village-idiot]

I maintain that we’ve been sliding very rapidly from a capitalistic society to a neo-feudal one. Rising inequality and companies increasingly interested in rent extraction over competition are the big giveaways.

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.

[maxxxxx]

"I maintain that we’ve been sliding very rapidly from a capitalistic society to a neo-feudal one. "

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.

[jopsen]

> It's the renting that worries me.

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.

[rvense]

Wasn't owning the means of production more about not being exploited for your labour, rather than about owning what was produced?

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.

[maxxxxx]

"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.

[scirocco]

Compare it to the cloud. Each company used to have their own DC, now they can use public cloud / service providers. Less and less companies have their own DC, and more and more pay "rent". Is this bad? Perhaps the rent frees up capital that can be spent on other things.

[secabeen]

It's putting a lot of eggs in one basket.