The Death of Ownership

If the internet went down today, how much of your life would still exist? Not your music or your movies. They live on servers somewhere, rented by the month. Even your ebooks would vanish into the cloud, their pages sealed behind subscriptions and DRM locks. Work wouldn’t survive either; Microsoft can’t validate your licence, Adobe can’t find your files. The video games you bought would hang in limbo. Your phone would feel suddenly hollow, full of icons leading nowhere; photos you can’t access, notes that won’t sync. You could always go for a drive, though even that isn’t simple anymore. The car unlocks, but warms and navigates only through additional costs. One lost signal and the world falls still.

I mean I’m obviously exaggerating. I’m sure you’ve downloaded your favourite Spotify playlists to listen to offline, and you can still drive your car even if you haven’t unlocked heated seats. But when exactly did this shift happen, and how did we allow it? At some point we started paying more for things and owning less of them. What began as a promise of convenience has quietly become a form of dependency. We no longer buy, we no longer own, we just borrow, indefinitely.

For most of the twentieth century, ownership was the norm. You bought something, a car, a CD, a phone, and it was yours until it broke. And when it broke, you decided whether it was worth fixing. Then came the digital age, and everything physical began to vanish. Somewhere between those steps we stopped noticing the trade we were making.

The change didn’t arrive in one clean revolution. It happened by degrees, each one plausible, efficient, and hard to argue against. Telephone lines, cable TV, electricity; the first subscriptions were tangible and essential. Then the internet arrived, and connection itself went digital. Once access became invisible, ownership lost its anchor.

The 2000s sealed the deal. Napster showed that digital media could be copied infinitely, and Spotify proved it could be leased legally. In 2013, Adobe’s Creative Cloud marked the symbolic death of product ownership. You no longer bought Photoshop; you rented it, with the charming bonus that cancelling early cost hundreds in “termination fees.” Microsoft followed, and so even the tools of work became rented space.

When I was a kid you bought Microsoft Office in a shop, and it came on a disc. You paid about £120, installed it, and used it for years, often until the computer itself gave up. You could skip Office 2010, wait for 2013, make the decision on your own terms. Office 365 changed all that. Now you pay every month for the privilege of opening your own documents. The same software costs around £80 a year, or £6.99 a month. In five years you’ve spent more than triple the old retail price, and you own nothing. Stop paying and you lose access. That single shift captures the psychology of subscription culture; we feel less pain upfront but more loss in the long run.

And it’s not just software. Whole cultures have shifted. Music used to be expensive. I’d save up for a CD, rip it to iTunes, swap it with a friend or sell it second-hand. There was a ritual to it. Your collection said something about you. Now everything is everywhere, all the time, and somehow it feels like less.

Gaming went the same way, and it’s only getting worse. You can still “buy” digital titles, but only as long as the servers stay alive. When Nintendo closed its 3DS and Wii U stores, whole libraries disappeared overnight, games people had paid for simply vanished. The next generation of consoles might not even have the option of disc drives. Even the home has joined in. A Ring doorbell can cost £180, yet you’ll pay another £3.49 a month just to view or store your own footage. A Peloton bike starts at around £1,300, but the screen is useless without a £39 monthly membership.

I know it’s not all cynical. The subscription model lowers barriers, spreads cost, keeps things updated. Students can use tools their parents couldn’t afford. Artists can access entire libraries of sound and footage instantly. Streaming democratised culture. The problem isn’t the model, it’s that there’s no off-ramp. What began as flexibility has hardened into dependence. Try leaving one of these ecosystems and you’ll find your files locked, your playlists gone, your workflow broken. Signing up takes seconds, but cancelling is a maze. The illusion of affordability hides the long tail of payment. You spend years renting the same thing you once bought outright. The business model is built on our inattention.

The legal language has changed too. When you “buy” a film on Amazon, you’re not really buying it — you’re licensing it for as long as Amazon keeps it available. There have already been cases of users losing access to their “purchased” libraries when studios pulled titles and Amazon shrugged, because technically, you never owned it. The law now treats us not as owners but as perpetual licensees, temporary guests in digital rooms we once called home.

And maybe that sounds dramatic, maybe this is giving Black Mirror, but is it such a wild idea? Imagine a world where your fridge requires a subscription to reorder groceries, your car disables itself if the payment fails, your smart home locks you out when the servers go down. It’s not science fiction, it’s just the logical conclusion of a system that’s learned how to monetise access itself.

Lately, something’s shifting. Vinyl sales are higher than CDs again. Print books never died, despite every prediction. The Right-to-Repair movement is gaining ground. People are hacking old iPods, buying mechanical watches, shooting on film. It’s not nostalgia, it’s resistance. Physical ownership has become countercultural.

Still, rebelling against the trend (buying physical books, collecting vinyl, repairing old gadgets) is a privilege. Ownership now costs more than renting. It takes space, time, and money to preserve things. So while owning has become a kind of protest, it’s one that’s only available to people who can afford to opt out. The very idea of permanence is slowly becoming a class marker.

The death of ownership was never just about economics, it was about forgetting the satisfaction of something lasting. Maybe permanence will be the next radical idea. Maybe one day the truly futuristic act won’t be to subscribe, but to own.