Beneath the headlines.
Behind the timelines, there is a story no one wants you to find.
Welcome to some unapproved thinking, where forgotten truths, buried patterns, and
invisible systems rise to the surface.
You weren't crazy, you were just early.
Let's begin.
Imagine waking up one day and realizing you don't actually own anything.
Not your house, not your car, not your phone.
Not even the photos you take or the music you listen to.
Everything around you is licensed, borrowed, or leased.
You're living in a rented world built by design, and the worst part, you chose it.
I remember when this reality hit me.
I was sitting in my home office surrounded by devices and
products that I thought I owned.
Then out of nowhere, my Kindle account started deleting books.
I had quote unquote purchased.
Poof.
Just gone vanished because somewhere in the fine print, I'd never read, Amazon
had decided I was only renting access to those books, not actually buying them.
That's when I understood this isn't a dystopian future.
It's right now they call it the sharing economy, but what it really means
is you own nothing and they own you.
The World Economic Forum didn't predict this future.
They engineered it.
Tonight we ask.
When ownership becomes access and citizens become tenants who holds the keys to your
life, this is some unapproved thinking.
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Now back to the show.
Okay, so we can all agree on one thing.
Today we live in an age where convenience has become the currency we trade for
ownership, where your access to something has totally replaced your possession of
that same thing where the subscription economy has turned every single aspect of
your life into an ongoing monthly payment.
One where they say you can cancel at any time, but can you really?
I spent decades inside the corporate systems where I could see from the
inside just how easily people will surrender, control for comfort.
Then bam, 2020 in the post pandemic world, accelerated this transformation
tenfold in one fell swoop.
We jumped across the ownership divide into digital first everything, pair all that
with contactless payments and subscription services for food, for entertainment, for
transportation, even for relationships.
Yeah.
You know what I'm talking about, right?
What once seemed like temporary shifts and adaptations quickly became the permanent
and even the preferred infrastructure, but this shift from ownership to access
wasn't simple organic market evolution.
Nope.
It was systematic social engineering that, in my eyes, is designed
to create permanent dependency.
I remember sitting in marketing meetings where we would discuss customer lifetime
value and recurring revenue streams.
We weren't just selling products, we were designing dependency on those products.
The goal was never to just have satisfied customers, but more so
to ensure they would never be so satisfied that they would stop paying.
I mean, it costs more to get a new customer.
Then to keep a current customer after all the World Economic Forum's, prediction
that you'll own nothing and be happy wasn't a forecast, it was a business plan.
When ownership becomes access, then citizens become mere tenants.
When possession becomes permission based, then freedom becomes conditional
by design when everything you need is rented from someone else, your autonomy
depends on their approval and approval I've learned can be revoked at any time
for any reason without warning or appeal.
So let me walk you through how ownership quietly transformed into access
without most of you even noticing.
Because this didn't happen overnight.
It happened gradually, step by step, convenience by convenience, until that
dependency began to feel like freedom.
Decades ago, ownership meant something real.
A house meant stability.
A car meant independence.
Owning your tools meant control over your life.
But somewhere along the way that changed.
Convenience replaced autonomy, access, replaced ownership.
We traded independence for efficiency, freedom for ease,
and choice for algorithms.
I watched this transformation from the inside of corporate meeting rooms.
The language shift was subtle but methodical.
We stopped talking about selling products and started talking
about providing services.
We stopped measuring customer satisfaction and started measuring customer retention.
The goal wasn't to give people what they wanted.
It shifted more to making sure they could never stop wanting it, whatever it was.
I think the transformation started with music, and I remember
originally thinking it was brilliant.
Those dusty old records became small, easy to carry CDs.
The CDs became quick and easy.
Digital downloads.
Those digital downloads then shifted to streaming subscriptions.
Over a very short period of time.
You went from owning physical albums forever to renting access that
disappears when you stop paying or when they decide they don't
want you to have access anymore.
The music industry somehow convinced you this was progress, unlimited access to
everything instead of limited ownership of the few things you actually wanted.
But streaming music was just the beginning.
Now that the strategy was proven to be a good one, they moved on to the
next entertainment category, movies.
Movies went from being stocked on shelves to more streaming platforms.
Yep.
Say goodbye to Blockbuster.
Then they moved on to software.
Software shifted from physical discs and were turned into monthly subscriptions.
Another goodbye to Egghead Comp USA BAS software, et cetera.
Electronic boutique, and other names.
I can no longer remember now.
Even your car could stop working if you miss payments.
Why?
Because its features are locked behind.
Digital access codes.
Codes that even you as the quote unquote owner do not have access to.
Effectively.
You have not bought your tools.
You have simply borrowed them.
The beauty of this system, from a corporate perspective at least, is that
it feels like abundance to all of us while really it's creating scarcity.
Netflix offers thousands of movies.
Yes, but you can't watch a single one of them without paying monthly.
Spotify.
Sure they have millions of songs, but the silence quickly returns.
The moment you cancel the payments.
All that abundance is just an illusion.
But the dependency, yep, that is very, very real.
Your Kindle books can be deleted remotely without your knowledge or permission.
Your apps can vanish overnight.
Your social media accounts can disappear with zero appeal processes.
So let's be honest, just in case we're not aware.
You do not own your digital life.
You are merely renting it from companies that can revoke access
at any time for any reason.
Now, I've seen some of the internal discussions about this.
They call it platform risk management, but what they really mean is how
do we maintain control over users who think they are our customers?
This subscription economy has turned every aspect of our existence
into a recurring revenue stream.
Your car, your home security, your fitness tracking, your news.
Your entertainment, your productivity tools, hell for some, even their meals,
all monthly payments that never end.
You're not buying products anymore, you're renting permission to use them.
But here's what's most disturbing about this whole operation.
The rental reality extends far beyond just digital services.
Physical ownership is being systematically eliminated through
economic pressure and regulatory capture.
Home ownership becomes impossible through inflated prices and restricted supply.
Whether that restricted supply is real or manufactured, the results are the same.
Car ownership becomes impractical through urban planning that
favors ride sharing over parking.
The sharing economy has promised efficiency and sustainability.
But what it has delivered was a world where you own nothing
and depend on everything.
Hell, dependent is the better word.
Uber has replaced car ownership.
Airbnb has replaced hotel ownership.
WeWork has replaced office ownership.
Every sharing platform has eliminated ownership while creating new forms
of dependency, creating a whole new definition of the word slavery.
Then compound that with the COVID response that accelerated all
this transformation dramatically.
Contactless payments, reduced cash usage.
Digital health passes, normalized conditional access to services.
Remote work, made physical ownership seem unnecessary.
Emergency powers became permanent infrastructure for controlling
access to basic services.
The most insidious aspect is how the system makes you grateful
for your own dispossession.
You're told that ownership is burdensome, wasteful, outdated.
Renting is presented to you as freedom from responsibility, giving you
easier access to variety and enabling participation in the modern economy.
This golden cage is effectively sold as liberation, but when you rent
everything, you control nothing.
When your access depends on approval, your freedom becomes conditional.
When ownership is replaced by permission, you become a tenant in your own life.
Tenants, my friends can be evicted.
Now let's talk about the echoes from the past, because this pattern of replacing
ownership with dependency isn't new.
Throughout history, those who understood that control comes through
ownership, have used various rental systems to manage populations.
Many have traced this pattern through centuries of social control, and the
playbook is remarkably consistent.
Old school feudalism was the OG rental economy.
Peasants worked land that they could never owned, lived in houses
that they couldn't buy, used tools they were not allowed to keep.
Everything was rented from the Lord who owned everything.
The system created complete dependency while being disguised as mutual
obligation back here in the USA.
Company towns in our industrial era honed and perfected this rental model.
I've read the corporate documents from some of these operations, and
to be honest, many of them are bone chilling in their clarity workers rented
company housing, shopped at company stores and used company currency.
They never owned anything, nothing.
Zip zero nada, which meant they could never leave.
The company controlled every aspect of their existence through the
ownership of everything they needed.
Now, let's pause a moment.
Remind ourselves of the word that should be used for someone that works or is
forced to work in a situation like this.
Then there was the sharecropping systems that kept farmers perpetually
indebted to landowners who provided the seeds, the tools, and the
housing in exchange for the crops.
The farmers work constantly, but never, ever gained any ownership,
never built any wealth, and certainly never achieved any independence.
The rental relationship insured permanent dependency back across
the ocean in the Soviet Union.
Their system literally eliminated private property entirely to control
populations because when the state owns everything citizens own, yeah,
nothing access to housing, access to transportation, access to food, and
even access to employment, depended on social and political compliance.
Ownership was 100% removed from the equation to make resistance impossible.
There are studies showing colonial systems that used rental relationships
to extract wealth from the populace while preventing its independence.
Native populations were forced to literally rent back their own
land, pay taxes on resources they had previously owned and work
for wages to buy necessities they had once provided for themselves.
How fucking crazy is that?
After all, debt slavery has always been far more effective than physical chains.
When people owe more than they can repay, they become permanently
dependent on the creditors who control their access to life's necessities.
The debt relationship creates a completely voluntary compliance with an
overwhelmingly involuntary servitude.
Think about for a moment, even today's modern credit systems
follow the exact same pattern.
Mortgages, car loans, student debt, and even credit cards
create these rental relationships that are disguised as ownership.
You think you own your house, but go ahead and miss a few of those payments.
Then you will discover who really controls your home.
I mean, the bank owns everything.
You just rent the illusion of ownership with their permission.
Of course.
This pattern really begins to reveal itself far more clearly in how
crises are used to accelerate the transition from ownership to rental.
Economic collapses force people to sell assets to survive.
Think 2008 with the bursting of the real estate bubble.
Then on top of that.
Natural disasters can come along and destroy owned property that then gets
replaced with rented alternatives.
Think Katrina.
Oh, and of course, let's not forget how wars can completely eliminate private
ownership in favor of state control.
Each and every crisis leaves behind new and improved rental
relationships that quickly are sown into a more permanent infrastructure.
Emergency housing becomes permanent public housing.
Temporary business closures become permanent platform dependencies.
Crisis responses become normal operations that eliminate ownership while expanding
those once temporary rental systems.
The historical precedent shows that rental economies aren't about
efficiency or sustainability.
Nope.
Sorry to tell you this, my friends.
They are about control.
You see, when you own nothing, then you depend on everything.
When you depend on everything, you can be so easily controlled
by anyone who controls the access to what it is you need.
Here, let me take a minute to show you the mechanics of how
ownership gets systematically replaced with rental dependency.
Because once you see this pattern, you'll recognize it everywhere.
Okay?
Like so many others, the pattern always begins with convenience
narratives that mask the construction of the dependency systems that
are being built behind the scenes.
Yeah, the usual.
Nothing to see here narrative, because real convenience always
serves the end user's interests.
Meanwhile, that shady ass manufactured convenience ultimately serves the
system's interests while only appearing to benefit the end user Like you, I've
watched this play out in boardrooms and conference rooms, streaming services,
ride sharing services, and subscription.
Everything are always marketed as the ultimate convenience, but
they then create unprecedented dependency on said convenience.
Now, don't get me wrong here.
The convenience is real.
It's the cost that is being hidden behind the curtain, like the Wizard in
Oz. The Freer trial phase establishes your dependency long before the system
goes about revealing the true costs.
Platforms offer free trials.
They offer free basic services.
They offer free access to build their user bases, and at the same
time, to eliminate the alternatives.
Once dependencies established and competitors are eliminated, the free phase
ends and bam ta-da rental payments begin.
I can remember when Gmail was completely revolutionary because it was free.
Now Google controls your email, your documents, your photos, your calendar.
Hell, if you think about it, they are neck deep in your entire
digital life, that free phase.
They did totally worked exactly as it was designed to.
Over time.
Economic pressure makes rentals seem like the only viable option.
Home prices have been inflated beyond reach.
Car ownership has been made more and more impractical through urban planning.
Physical media has been eliminated shifting us into a forced
set of digital subscriptions.
The alternatives to rental are systematically removed to make
dependency appear to be voluntary, like we ask them to do it for us.
Did you ask?
Yeah, me neither.
The subscription model turns every aspect of your life into a recurring
revenue stream that never seems to end.
And let's be honest here, they don't want it to end Instead of one time
purchases that transfers ownership of something over to you completely.
Everything has now become a set monthly payments that continue forever.
You never quite finish paying for it.
Why?
Because you are never actually buying anything that will become yours.
Then there is the fact that digital systems enable instant and even permanent
revocation of access without anyone having to go all dog, the bounty hunter,
and physically repossess the item.
Your books, your music, your movies, your software, and even
your car features can be removed remotely without warning or appeals.
The rental relationship gives the providers complete control over access
to things you thought you owned.
This sharing type of economy eliminates ownership while expanding.
Dependency.
Uber means you don't own transportation.
You rent it by the trip.
Airbnb means you don't own accommodation, you rent it by the night.
WeWork means you don't own a workspace.
Nope.
You rent it by the month.
Every sharing platform is actually a rental platform.
This type of platform monopolization ensures that rental becomes the only
option when a few companies control entire sectors, hell, entire industries.
They can eliminate ownership based alternatives and force everyone into
these slave like rental relationships.
The platforms become the landlords of entire industries,
lording over them from on high.
The most insidious aspect is how the system makes people complicit
in their own dispossession.
The users demand convenience.
They demand variety, and they demand low upfront costs.
So of course, the rental economy provides all of these things, but
all that comes with just one tiny little cost attached, and that cost
is the elimination of your ownership.
People choose this lame ass dependency because it's marketed
as freedom, as opportunity, and as the best option for them Then.
Add to that, the regulatory capture that ensures that laws begin to favor
rental systems over ownership system.
The zoning laws begin to prevent home ownership.
Transportation regulations start to lean in favor of ride sharing
over actual car ownership.
Financial regulations shift to make ownership financing more difficult
while making rental payments far easier.
The pattern extends to how alternatives get eliminated or marginalized.
Physical media disappears from stores.
Cash payments become impossible.
Ownership based businesses get regulated out of existence while rental
platforms get subsidized and protected.
The most concerning pattern is how quickly rental dependency spreads and normalizes.
What seems shocking a mere few years ago becomes not only acceptable, but preferred
through repetition and social proof.
People adapt to rental relationships the same way they adapt to
any other form of dependency.
Gradually, reluctantly, but ultimately they adapt completely.
Of course, not everyone has accepted the transformation from ownership to the realm
of rental dependency around the world.
Individuals and communities have spotted the pattern early
and chose different paths.
Some, like my family, for example, have consciously maintained
physical ownership despite social pressure and economic incentives.
Buying physical books, CDs, and DVDs, owning the cars, the
tools, and the homes outright.
Why?
Because we understand that ownership provides a level of security and autonomy
that the rental relationships can't match, and that my friends is by design.
I've met entrepreneurs who've built businesses around
ownership rather than rental.
They sell products instead of subscriptions.
Transfer ownership instead of licensing access.
And build customer relationships based on the value they can deliver instead
of building their customer's dependency on that value, their success proves
that ownership based models can and do.
Still work.
Communities have created local ownership networks that resist platform dependency,
two libraries, community gardens, cooperative ownership structures, and
even local currencies that keep wealth and true ownership within communities
they foster, rather than extracting it and delivering it to some distant platform.
Even some countries have implemented policies that protect ownership rights and
prevent this excessive rental dependency.
They've restricted foreign ownership of residential property, maintained
public ownership of essential services, and created regulations
that protect their citizens'.
Consumer ownership rights against platform revocation.
Some individuals have even developed strategies for maintaining ownership
within this rental economy.
They find and buy used items that can't be remotely disabled.
They use open source software that can't be revoked.
They even maintain cash reserves and physical assets that provide
some additional independence from digital platforms.
Some families have organized their lives around ownership
principles rather than convenience.
They homeschool to avoid educational rental systems.
They grow food to avoid agricultural dependency, and they maintain skills
and tools that provides self-sufficiency rather than platform dependency.
Alternative communities have developed economic systems based on ownership and
mutual aid rather than rental extraction.
Yeah.
Imagine that giving, instead of just taking, they demonstrate that human
cooperation doesn't require platform mediation and that ownership based
economies can be, and if you ask me, are far more satisfying and sustainable.
Researchers have documented the psychological and economic costs
of our growing rental dependency.
Their work shows that ownership provides security, autonomy, and wealth
building opportunities that rental relationships methodically eliminate.
But as I have mentioned many times before, the most important
resistance comes from the people.
Like you and me who understand that ownership is essential for freedom and
that rental dependency is a form of voluntary, even if it is forced servitude.
They recognize that convenience often comes at the cost of autonomy, and
that true security requires ownership of one's own essential resources.
These outliers demonstrate that the transformation from ownership to rental
isn't inevitable or even necessary.
Every person who maintains ownership, every community that
resists platform dependency.
Every business that transfers rather than rents helps preserve alternatives
to that very rental servitude.
Understanding the systematic replacement of ownership with rental dependency
should completely change how you evaluate all those quote unquote
convenience offers, those subscription services and the relationship between
their access and your freedom.
Every subscription offer then becomes a question worth
examining far more carefully.
When companies offer to make your life easier through rental relationships,
you should start asking what you lose in autonomy and what they gain in control.
The convenience often, if not always, masks the construction of dependency
on their product or service.
The phrase you'll own, nothing and be happy becomes a
warning rather than a promise.
Real happiness comes from security and autonomy.
Rental dependency provides neither.
It does, however, provide convenience, but only in exchange
for control over your life.
One little piece at a time.
Until, poof, it's no longer yours.
The array of platform services out there take on new significance when
you understand how they eliminate your ownership while creating your dependency.
Every app that replaces ownership.
Every service that substitutes access for possession, every platform that
mediates relationships creates new forms of control over your life.
The importance of physical ownership becomes clear when you realize just how
easily digital access can be revoked.
Cash, physical books owned tools and tangible assets provide security and
autonomy that rental relationships methodically pick away at until
they eliminate them entirely.
In that sense, economic choices become political choices when you understand
how rental systems concentrate power.
While dispersing dependency, every purchase decision becomes a choice
between supporting the ownership based model or giving into the
rental based economic model.
The value of self-sufficiency increases when you recognize how completely rental
dependency can gain control of your life.
Skills, tools and resources that provide independence become more valuable
than any of those convenient access things you have zero control over.
So once again, pattern recognition becomes more important than
individual service evaluation when the same rental model appears across
different industries simultaneously.
Recognizing the pattern helps you understand that you're experiencing
systematic social engineering rather than just a simple market evolution.
Most importantly, you realize that ownership isn't just
about possessing things.
It's about maintaining autonomy and security in a world that is increasingly
demanding, dependency, the choice between ownership and rental is often a choice
between your freedom and their control.
But don't get me wrong here.
The goal is not to reject all convenience or avoid all
rental relationships entirely.
The goal is to understand the trade-offs involved and to maintain enough ownership
so that you preserve your autonomy and your security when those rental systems
fail, or worse yet become coercive, they turned your ownership into a burden
and their rental model into liberation.
They convinced you that possessing things was wasteful while accessing
everything was far more efficient.
They made dependency feel like freedom and control.
Feel like convenience.
I've watched this transformation from corporate conference rooms to
family living rooms and have seen how the same techniques we use to
create customer loyalty got scaled up to create societal dependency.
The playbook is ancient, but the application is modern.
But when you own nothing, you can control the same amount.
Nothing when everything you need is rented from someone else, your
life depends on their availability, pricing, approval, and access.
Then when access replaces ownership, citizens become tenants
and tenants can be evicted.
The rental reality isn't about sharing or sustainability or even efficiency.
It's about creating a population that depends completely on systems they
don't control that are managed by people they didn't elect according to rules
they didn't agree to and can't change.
Your Kindle books can be deleted remotely.
Your streaming music disappears when you stop paying or when the artist bucks the
system, your car features get disabled.
When you miss payments, your social media account vanishes without appeal.
You thought you were buying convenience?
Nope.
You were actually renting permission to just live your life.
The World Economic Forum's vision of owning nothing and
being happy is not a prediction.
It's a prescription.
They didn't forecast this future.
They engineered it.
Every subscription service, every sharing platform, every access based
business model moves us closer to a world where ownership is eliminated
and dependency is all encompassing.
But here's what they can't rent from you.
Your awareness.
Once you see that the rental economy is designed to create this
dependency, you can't unsee it.
Once you understand that ownership equals freedom, you can
choose to own rather than rent.
Once you recognize the cage, you can refuse to enter it
or simply step out of it.
The official story is that the rental economy provides convenience,
it provides variety, and it provides sustainability, but.
The real story is that it provides control.
It fosters dependency and creates servitude disguised as progress.
Ownership is not a burden.
No, it's freedom.
Rental is not liberation.
Hell no.
It's a leash.
The choice between owning and renting is the choice between
autonomy and dependency.
Between security and vulnerability, and between citizenship and tenancy,
they want you to own nothing so they can control everything.
So the question is.
Are you ready to own your life again?
Tracy out
if this story didn't sit right with you.
Good.
You are not here to be comforted.
You are here to see what others overlook.
Thanks for exploring some unapproved thinking.
Learn more@someunapprovedthinking.com.
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