Rental Culture as Slavery
You may listen to the podcast version of this essay here.
Dear privacy seekers,
You may have noticed—or maybe not—the slow encroachment of rental culture into our lives. Maybe you even heard the World Economic Forum’s recent vision of the future: that “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.” Of course, there’s always an owner somewhere down the line, and the owner holds all of the power. The WEF just doesn’t want you to be the owner. We’ll discuss the importance of ownership for privacy and freedom in a moment. First, indulge me with a test about how much you actually own. Ask yourself the following:
Do you own your movies? OR do you rent them via Netflix and Disney+ and other subscription services?
Do you own your Bitcoin? OR does Coinbase own them for you?
Do you own your digital files? OR do you trust them to services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or iCloud?
Do you own your email domain address? OR do you rely on Gmail or ProtonMail for your address?
Do you own your video games? OR do you “buy” them from Steam, the PlayStation Store, or some subscription service?
Do you own your house? OR are you afraid to not pay your property taxes and test that theory?
Do you own your operating system? OR do you use Windows 10 and macOS?
Do you own your software? OR do you use subscriptions with comforting titles like “Adobe Creative Cloud” and “Office 365”?
Do you own your money and assets? Or do you trust them to a bank?
Do you own your DNA? OR did you ship it out to a heritage company promising to tell you where you came from?
Perhaps I’ve made my point. “But,” you might say, “isn’t renting awfully convenient?” No doubt. When you offload ownership to a third-party they can specialize in owning it and take that terrible burden off of you. When you are a renter you don’t have to backup your files: Dropbox worries about that for you. You don’t have to find a place to store your cash: your bank does that for you. You don’t have to go to a shop and pick up a physical disc movie: the Internet takes care of that for you. Everywhere you look a barrage of services promises to take the sting out of ownership. They dress themselves up in euphemistic phrases like “software as a service” (SAAS), “custodial accounts,” “Digital Edition,” “subscriptions,” and “the Cloud.” The propaganda is slick and the consequences serious. Rental culture is devastating for privacy and freedom and deserves our full attention.
To speak basically: the problem with renting is that you do not have ownership. When you rent something it belongs to someone else. They can restrict your access, change their terms, or even take it away from you. In many cases the real owner will also monitor the service and see what you’re doing, access your files, and even change them. Then they can use “your” data in all kinds of ways. Renting is a serious problem for privacy seekers.
Let me offer some examples in case you’re still have trouble picturing the rental miasma that envelops us today. Most people don’t even think about it. Consider this. If you have an email address with “gmail.com” at the end of it, then you rent this service from Google. Let’s say you’re a serious privacy advocate using VPNs and virtual operating systems and Google gets suspicious of your login. They lock you out of your account and demand you send proof of ownership to get back in. The kinds of “proof” required to get back into accounts is typically ridiculous and can send you in a catch-22 circle with no resolution in sight. And you definitely don’t want to send government ID to confirm an account. In other words, when you have a @gmail.com or a @protonmail.com email domain, you rent that address, that service, that inbox, and those messages. If the service shuts down, or shuts you down, then that’s it: you’ve lost your privilege to use them.
Getting locked out is becoming increasingly common. A client of mine was recently locked out of PayPal when the company overnight started demanding two-factor authentication; my client’s phone service did not accept these messages, and PayPal support told him that he would never see his money again if he could not receive a two-factor message.
To be fair, modern banking has increasingly blurred the line between owning and renting. Around 90% of money in the world exists as numbers on a screen, and most banks are fractional-reserve, which means they only keep a tiny percentage of the money you give them in cash. If everyone asked for their money at once, almost no one would get it back. During one such crisis in Cyprus the government shut down ATMs, stole money from the wealthy to pay some debts, and then instituted limits on how much could be taken out in the following months. Try telling Cypriots that they owned the money they held in their bank accounts. The more banks become tools of the state and the more they become digitally dependent, the more abstract your “ownership” of the money you see on your computer screen becomes. Do you own the number of currency units in your checking account? The stocks attached to your online brokerage? The Bitcoin held in your Coinbase account? Not exactly.
It should be pretty clear how this works with finances and with real estate. But the more devious evolution of rental culture has shown up in the form of “software as a service” and so-called digital ownership. Some companies like Adobe Photoshop don’t even allow you to have an independently-functioning offline version anymore, much less a physical disc. Instead they prefer to sell something called Adobe Creative Cloud, which of course requires online access and which means Adobe can see—maybe even own—the things you make. Or consider the restrictions that Apple places on iTunes purchases; they can only be played on other Apple devices. That’s hardly what I would call ownership. Similarly, Microsoft Office today is a digital-only product called Office 365 (notice the clever naming) and Microsoft has said that they may “close your Microsoft account” if they detect you breaking one of their numerous rules on any of their platforms—from Xbox Live to Skype—which now includes “offensive language.” Whatever that means. Presumably if you type something that constitutes offensive language on your Office 365 account you could be booted from the service. Look it up if you doubt me. With Microsoft Office 365 you can see clearly how renting a service destroys ownership and privacy. Renting means that the owner can scan your use, determine if you break their increasingly vague and politicized terms of service, and revoke your access. Privacy and ownership are dead when you rent.
Notice the bigger picture as well. Companies like Google and Amazon realized years ago that if they invested in huge server farms that they could eventually host a majority of the Internet. Now Amazon hosts an enormous percentage of the web’s traffic; earlier this year they kicked out the Facebook-alternative Parler essentially overnight because that’s the way the political whims of the culture were moving. As regards the owners of the world: make sure you are one of them.
The language of renting is seductive. It will tell you that it is cheaper than buying. But anyone that has leased a modem from an internet company will tell you the benefits end pretty quickly. Rental propaganda will tell you that it is more convenient. But is there anything convenient about being locked out of your account because a photo of your young son playing in the pool triggered a child abuse scanning bot? When the final tallies are counted, rental services are not cheap, not convenient, and not certainly not private.
So what can you do about it?
Become more aware of the rental culture around you. Train yourself to be skeptical and to always ask the fundamental questions. “Who is the owner?” is a question I ask myself about everything in the world. Do you rent an apartment? Who owns it and what are you rights as a renter? Do you keep your Bitcoin in a custodial account: that is, in the custody of someone else? Why would a company allow you to do that? Do you find it difficult to buy disks of video games and movies anymore? Why do you think that is happening and what will be the consequences years down the road? Why do we have property taxes? Question everything and you’ll eventually track down the real owner of the thing you use. Knowledge is power.
The next step of the battle is simply to own more things and to avoid rental services. It’s in your power to have more cash in person or on your property instead of trusting it to a bank or a PayPal account; the same goes for precious metals and other commodities. And if you think about it, your fiat currency is simply a rental from the government. The Indian prime minister proved this in 2016 when he revoked the majority of currency units in the country and caused Indians to scramble to trade them in for the “new model.” Own physical disks of video games and films whenever you can instead of having “digital ownership” or playing them via a subscription service. Own your Bitcoin in a non-custodial wallet instead of through an account such as Coinbase. Spend a few euro on a large hard drive or learn to use your own Nextcloud server instead of saving all of your files to Dropbox. Try to get solar panels up and a well instead of giving away your information and ownership of the physical world to a utilities company. These are just a handful of ideas.
For software, you may think you can’t own it because it is digital, and that’s a smart way to think, but it’s not exactly the case. Owning a piece of software means that the current version of it is yours to do what you want with: share it, change it, keep it like that forever. The Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) movement encourages software that can be downloaded to your computer with no strings attached. This is ownership as far as software goes. FOSS is all around. Instead of Microsoft Office, Office 365, and Pages, use LibreOffice. Instead of Photoshop, use GIMP. Instead of Adobe Premier, use Kdenlive. Instead of macOS or Windows 10, use Linux Mint. Instead of buying songs on iTunes, buy mp3 copies somewhere else—or a physical CD—that you can actually transfer where you want. Learn how to host your own email service or, at minimum, buy a domain email address through a domain service and funnel it through ProtonMail. If ProtonMail ever kicked you out you could tell your domain service to send your emails elsewhere. Don’t buy a product that doesn’t allow you to repair it: that’s a clear sign you don’t own the thing. Consult my privacy guide for more ideas about digital ownership.
As a final note, let’s discuss torrenting. For hundreds of millions of Russians, Indians, and others who don’t have access to digital payments or online marketplaces, torrenting gets them a copy of something digital that they can do what they want with. They own the thing. Someone like Edward Snowden, who is not able to use financial services either—and presumably won’t be able to for a long time—would have to rely on torrenting to acquire online items as well. I’m not advocating that you torrent copyrighted files—in some places sharing copyrighted files is considered legal theft—but I’m explaining how a clever group of people in dire need have been able to turn rental culture into something that can be owned. Rental culture is here to stay, and you should become aware of it, fight it, and seek to own the things in your life as best you can. Your privacy depends on it.
Yours in peace and privacy,
Gabriel Custodiet
https://watchmanprivacy.com