No need to wait for 2030 for owning nothing, it's already here

3 years ago (or 2 years? dunno, I’m too boomer for that) the New World Order, I mean World Economic Forum (which never has anything to do with economics) released this very controversial video saying “by 2030, you’ll own nothing and be happy” with a soyboy giving a creepy as fuck laugh at it.
Of course there’s more like living in a pod, 3D printed organs, eating zi bugz, and all that, but since this is a technology focused blog, I’ll focus on just the you’ll own nothing and be happy aspect.

People seem legit concerned about it, but I will tell you one thing, it’s already here.
In fact, it has been here long before the announcement!
One example I gave on SNS about the whole Pokemon storage thing:

GameFreak 2003: “You can store more Pokemon than before on your GameCube and still have full ownership over them thanks to Pokemon Box.”

GameFreak 2013: “Here’s a revolutionary new product: store more Pokemon on our computer, I mean The Cloud, at the sacrifice your ownership over them for an annual fee thanks to Pokemon Bank.”

GameFreak 2020: “Yea it’s the exact same product as before, but this time you can store all your Pokemon on our computer, I mean The Cloud, have no ownership over them anymore, because WE decide in which games they are usable now TEEHEE!! Oh yea, and you will pay us monthly for that thanks to Pokemon Home.”

Back in the old days, the more you paid the better off you were.
Nowadays, the LESS you pay, the better off you are!
But this is what “you’ll own nothing and be happy” by Satan Klaus ultimately means; you pay for stuff you don’t have.

Other examples I bring up extremely often are related to the internet.
20 years ago everyone with an online presence owned their own website where they could say whatever they wanted, likewise there was no shortage of self hosted communities, setting them all up was simple, running them was easy, and there was no worry of censorship or governments and/or corporations collecting everybody’s data behind their backs.
And of course tech illiterate doomers will try to lecture me how the internet has been all about data harvesting from the very beginning, but I’ve actually seen the internet way before that was the case first hand, so you can’t tell me otherwise!
But Ryo-chan, why would you accuse him of being tech illiterate? Well, he said so himself.

Today however, all communities are on Discuck, all websoytes are behind Cuckflare, all main activities exist on soycial media, all email goes through Big Email, all servers are on AWS, all shopping happens on Amazon, so all of this is already under somebody else’s control!
But give it another few years, and it’s all going to fall down, the only survivors will be those of us who insisted on actually having full control over our online properties.
Those of us run our own XMPP, IRC, and/or Mumble servers, email servers, web servers, darknet mirrors (or darknet only servers for those of us who want actual full control), webshops, Fedi instances, and so on.

Oh yea, back to gaming, 20 years ago we had the concept for online gaming of hosting dedicated servers.
Everyone could play games uncensored, without having to worry about too much trouble makers.
Now that gaming servers are all centralized, we have to deal with being reported by fucking retards, lag, being banned from places we’re paying for, spammers, cheaters, and all other bullcrap.
So unless you insist on playing the classic Runescape, WoW, and Unreal Tournament games, or otherwise play alternatives like Minetest instead of Minecraft, we no longer own our gaming servers.

And I will stay at gaming, because there’s just so much to talk about when it comes to losing ownership.
Remember the games you bought 20 years ago?
How do you buy them today?
In the past we bought physical copies, now it’s all digital.
With the exception of Nintendo consoles, even if you buy physical copies and put that disc into your console or PC, you’ll still download and install the digital version anyway, so the physical copy effectively got reduced to just a trophy, because the moment the devs take the file or server down, even with that disc you won’t be able to play that game anymore in the future, and it’s a matter of time before they take it offline considering the size of games these days.
And even though you can technically make offline copies of games you bought from Steam, I wouldn’t blindly trust that neither, simply because some of the more famous games might come with DRM (which is malware) which not only makes it unplayable on Linux, it literally treats you as a criminal too.
And this is exactly why piracy is on the raise.
And unlike taxation, piracy is not theft.

Goolag’s Stadia went a step further by even making your gaymes exist on their computer, I mean The Cloud only, this whole concept was already doomed to fail from the get go, and the only devs who supported it are the most greedy motherfuckers, which should tell a lot already on what they think of their own customers, it’s a great way for all the rest of us to basically filter out the trash.
And as expected, it got added to the Goolag graveyard.

And finally for the gaming segment, DLC.
This meme should explain it all.

How about computers?
Are you running Linux or BSD?
Then you own your computer.
Do you run WinDOS, macOS, iOS, or Android?
The your computer owns you.