The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad. The problem with our recent trend is that we aren't getting communal ownership in return; we're getting nothing but convenience.

Silicon Valley has morphed and commercialized the term "sharing". You aren't "sharing" when you use Uber or AirBnB; you aren't pooling resources when you use Netflix or Amazon Books. You're renting. You're renting from a centralized company which outsources the generation of actual value to others, and pays them as little as possible. You aren't shifting your dependence from yourself to a community, but from yourself to a company that wants nothing more than to make money.

To me, this isn't isolated loners. It's the first real community I've ever known. The first one I've ever actually felt like I was a part of, where I was always welcome and could always rely on finding people like me.

I understand that some people dislike this shift. It's easy to see where it might be inconvenient for local communities that used to depend on coercing membership to exist. It used to be easy to erase those who were alone in the crowd.

You're absolutely right. We didn't get a Global Village. Instead, we have a network of Global Villages. They are many and diverse and offer genuine community to everyone in ways that the old approach no longer did. This is beautiful and terrible - it's a shift from surviving to thriving.

We finally get to see that there's an option other than ghettos run by the tyranny of geography.

why would anyone entertain let alone engage opposing viewpoints when it's much more comfortable to just retreat to a place with common similar beliefs. Make no mistake Hn is an echo chamber as well.

People want to be in a place with common similar beliefs - this isn't a bad thing, its human nature. Its far safer to be around people you know don't like to eat people like you.

The main argument seems to be that because we're not having forced arguments and considerations in meatspace, mano-a-mano, we're not challenged enough. I'd argue we're extremely challenged nowadays, but most of the difficulty is in finding how to deal with the new stage upon with the game is set. Its like arguing that we've lost the ability to form up a cavalry line because of the airplane. You're right in a way, but its irrelevant. The game is changing, and everyone is scrambling to figure out what the new meta is.

In meatspace social pressure exists unlike on the internet. An example is racist/misogynist jokes are not acceptable in most IRL contexts (especially those that are being logged/recorded permanently as is the case on the majority of the modern web) whereas on the internet it's not only discouraged but it's actually a great way to build a following quickly.

The internet is fundamentally changing how we communicate, ingest news, and share information.

The argument is that before safe spaces and echo chambers online, individuals that aim to engage general public with their message in any meaningful context are forced to compromise their extreme views. In my view Alex Jones wouldn't be a nationally recognized name before the internet, at best he'd be able to get influence over 30 or so of his local conspiracy theorists. No publication would print his views, because of how large a portion of the population they would alienate and anger. I'd argue this pressure is a net positive and having it removed online is leading us down a dark path.

That is my point and what is changing, as people figure out how to interact in the platform. In Oklahoma yesterday nearly all local news outlets reported on a group of adults threatening violence (or to have their children/grandchildren commit violence) on a 12 year old transgender girl. They did that on Facebook, and their names are out there along with their identities. People are moving towards more identifiable or at least moderated spaces, because frankly most people don’t want to interact on a platform that’s main feature is they allow anyone to say anything with no consequences.

Alex Jones may not exist if it weren’t for the internet, but the backlash to views like his is real as public spaces on the internet figure out how to deal with bad actors.

But in the original "community", you wouldn't actually be exposed to opposing viewpoints all that often either. You actively had to seek them out too. Ancestor comment pointed out that community was required for survival. Once survival and security is guaranteed, then you can start thinking about self-actualisation, which is a different kind of community.

> when it's much more comfortable to just retreat to a place with common similar beliefs

This is an age-old argument, but taking a new form. Of course people like just doing what's comfortable; we've just replaced the 5 hours of broadcast TV a day with 5 hours of mindless social media refreshing. It's only a minority that actively seek to challenge themselves.

I mean, "more comfortable to just retreat to a place with common similar beliefs" is a good theory. But it is hardly the only one I can think of. Off the top of my head I also have:

1) Wealth is being eroded by the response to the '08 crisis leaving known-bad cultures to thrive in the lending industry. Social fabric starts to unravel due to lack of wealth creation.

2) Academics have had a long history of being in tension with democratic ideals. Famously, right when they came up with the idea of 'academies' Socrates was executed by a jury trial. More recently, communism had strong support in academic circles of Europe. We've massively increased the exposure of people to the university culture in the last 1-2 generations. Maybe technocrat leanings are leaking out? Technocrats don't compromise well on social issues, they believe there is a best answer.

Basically, the problem might not be algorithms and search bubbles, even though this is a forum that knows a lot about algorithms and search bubbles.

You bring up very good points.

> Technocrats don't compromise well on social issues, they believe there is a best answer.

You are absolutely correct. Algorithms and search bubbles are just symptoms not the disease. Elite untouchable tech giants with no oversight molding human thought and behavior to increase their bottom line and power with a 'move fast a break things' attitude in regards to the any social or ethical implications - that's the disease.

The rule that seems to be working itself out is this: people can pursue any interest they want, but we have social contracts when those interests interact with other people. Groups converge and have little friction when many people share at least some of the values, so you get things like HN, reddit, etc, but not unmoderated.

Alternately, by removing yourself from your community you failed to give them examples that would've broadened their horizons.

Like, this is one form of problem with today's filter bubbles--they help polarize communities by preventing the natural mechanisms of discovery and compromise that are required for groups of humans to coexist in meatspace.

People weren't unenlightened because LGBT people were hiding, LGBT people were hiding because of a fear of violence and ostracization. Only when it became unacceptable to be violent towards people did they change, and that's a slow process. Only then can you effect any change. There are braver people than I who stayed in those situations, but most of them were also a lot better at fitting in with the community in the first place.

The only way to get to people like that is to hurt them, either physically, mentally, economically or socially. That's what we're doing as a collective by changing norms so that it's no longer considered acceptable to beat people up for being <insert whichever unique attribute you want>.

Doing that will result in conflicts. Sometimes those conflicts will escalate into violent ones. As a single person it's often not viable to proceed into that territory alone, and so it's better to widthdraw from that society.

For every MLK there were hundreds of lynchings. You can’t lead with no followers.

With that said, a more charitable reading might be that the person was noting the power of representation and role models to inspire.

That said, as all things, there's a balance. The Internet is a great tool for bringing people virtually close together and spreading ideas. Sharing those ideas is a great way to enhance your local community.

> tyranny of geography

Haha. We're a long way from being omnipresent so you better get used to having neighbors. ;-)

You're very right! Sharing ideas to enhance your local community can be incredibly valuable and rewarding! However, some people occasionally find that their local communities do not always uniformly and enthusiastically welcome the ideas they want to share. Some people, faced with such experiences and fears, might consider that analog and digital communities offer different tradeoffs.

It depends. I find the fact that people can isolate themselves into communities where it's very easy to censor out any possible dissenters and dissenting opinions to be pretty damn damaging to our society.

That can be said about every development ever. But it being more easy / efficient can bring out existing systems out of balance at some point, once counter-acting forces are overwhelmed... especially if those don't improve (as fast).

> reach out to other communities and individuals and make them feel welcome.

That doesn't seem to be a winning strategy in current US politics. And the shared consensus seems to be eroding fast. I understand there are a lot of additional problems (like the shitty two party voting system) feeding into that, even strengthening each other. But finding a shared consensus seems absolutely necessary when living with other people in the same city/country/planet at a time were we can dramatically effect each others lives.

There are lots of different parties between different constituencies that are incentivized to sow discord between them. I'm not sure any olive branches that are offered are even seen by the other side given all the blades flying about.

Yet, is it possible that this isn't remotely new? Is it possible that digital communities enable people to find communities where they are not pushed out, instead of being coerced into ones where they are? And that perhaps many people have had the experience not of isolating themselves in dangerous and damaging ways, but of being isolated by the people who are supposed to be their community?

You're absolute right about the danger. It's just possible that there might be some room for subtlety here.

I believe that our tendency to view unpopular beliefs a stain upon a person's immutable character is a more fundamental (as in, earlier in the causal chain) cause of the damage to society you describe.

What makes it "our" society? I've never felt like a part of it.

Until that, the current virtual "communities" seem like a poor substitute for actual communities, long-term. Yes, you get to meet like-minded people (or more precisely, one aspect of the personalities of some like-minded people), however what you can actually do with them is tightly restricted to the online sphere. No common activities, no parties, no activism outside the internet, no dating. No differing viewpoints. No even knowing who you are talking with.

This seems like a poor substitute to (non-coerced) physical communities.

Like most things, I suspect it may be best regarded as a tradeoff. Is presenting as your idealized in a restricted environment more or less harmful to society than being unable to present as anything that vaguely resembles yourself in a less restricted environment?

There might not one answer that's right for everyone.

People who think like you do, who will never challenge you about anything important, or expose you to uncomfortable ideas or opinions, or cause you to question your assumptions about the world.

This seems to be true of most squishies, no matter how they connect.

Communities built around what they love are usually good, but what if what you love is terrible?

https://imgur.com/GripW3M

We have the law to regulate what is acceptable or unacceptable - almost all laws are there to regulate person-to-person interactions. If what you love requires murdering someone, we already call that out. If what you love involves playing "I Will Survive" with a kazoo, we don't call you out unless you have a very loud kazoo and people are trying to sleep.

Laws and social pressure are also a moderating force. Forcing 2 people that are very opposed to have a forced interaction about the things they are opposed on probably results in quite a few bar fights - more often than not though they leave.

If the lack of general empathy and over-demonization of the "other" is a problem, well, try being a person of color in the 50s or before. If anything interactions have gotten better, except for those who need to have everyone look and act like them in order to function.

Perhaps this was true in the days prior to the internet, but it certainly isn’t the case now. In fact, social pressures in the online sphere can be the opposite of a moderating force. In the analysis of the online culture wars, many authors have pointed out how the alt right bursting into the mainstream was in many ways a response to the societal pressure to conform to ever increasing (and at times, absurd) rules of a radical “PC culture”.

As a disclaimer, this isn’t to justify the alt right movement or to condemn political correctness wholesale. But the point is that societal pressure is not moderating anything. On the contrary, the internet has allowed people to simply retreat from the parts of society that previously may have pressured them into moderation, and instead to enclose themselves in the parts of society that not only accept their radical culture, but encourage it.

> If the lack of general empathy and over-demonization of the "other" is a problem, well, try being a person of color in the 50s or before.

And yet the rights of racial minorities still made massive strides in absence of the internet. Many of the commenters here have made arguments that along the lines of “a gay person would never have found acceptance without the geographical boundary breaking communities of the internet”, and frankly, I’m not sure that is true. The changing attitudes towards LGBT persons isn’t any more radical than many of the other social revolutions that have taken place without the internet.

It's possible that this kind of conformity might be best treated as something other than a universally positive force.

I don't see anything you've stated as mutually exclusive to the previous comment.

I point out what I perceive as dismissive because I think there are important aspects of human character that 'tyrannical' circumstances help to shape, enabling us to learn patience and tolerance of opposing views.

It's how we ultimately achieve error correction in culture and progress as a society, and it's not clear to me that an option for people to utterly extinguish all of that from one's environment is an upgrade.

I should rephrase: this is the first experience I've had of what is commonly described as "community". I hope that clarifies matters. I am not describing a community encountered as an artifact. I am describing the experience of being a member of a community. I hope this helps! Do let me know if I can help clarify more.

The comment to which I was responding took a very narrow view of what defines a community. The definition offered is one that would have been obvious to an illiterate serf a thousand years ago - people nearby they have no choice but to cooperate with for basic survival. For the most part, you had two choices: membership or death. And membership meant conforming.

Some might consider such a choice coercive. Such a person might even consider the circumstances that require that choice tyrannical.

I have offered a much more expansive one, where a person can be a member of multiple communities non-exclusively in a way that allows them to find communities that suit them. This formulation, unfortunately, can be seen as dismissive of the value of the communities of the past.

This is a very understandable viewpoint. After all, the expansive definition would seem to do away with the basic tenants of the narrow one. Yet, it's perhaps possible that this view could become even more correct than it already is! There's absolutely value in what even the narrowest of definitions would consider a community. They teach the value of belonging, of collaboration, and of many hands making light work. It just might be worth considering that there could be other lessons to be learned in this world that might not be fully captured there.

After all, humans are not TCP/IP. Capital-T Truth is not always easy to come by. There are still people in this world who consider (for example) failing to say the right ritual words at the right ritual time every day to be a grievous error in need of correction.

In a world where the obvious truths of the past are today's errors to be progressed beyond, we are presented with the wonderful opportunity to let endless forms of community bloom most beautiful. That we might learn from this glorious array what can be progressed beyond and how.

Though I understand if some would prefer not to.

Thank you very much, from the bottom of my heart, for the opportunity to engage.

It seems as though we are illuminating more nuance of the varied interaction and outcome of communal constructs.

I find what you've elaborated to be true and insightful, and reminds me that our perspective can always miss significant factors that may determine our outlook to be optimistic or pessimistic.

I wonder if what the aforementioned comment suggested is still unresolved; would some or all of us lose incentive and/or mechanisms that temper and shape our proclivity to compromise and coexist despite still unaltered and conflicting values and behaviors?

If it's true that the range and resolution of possible human values and behavior has grown considerably, with new nuance blooming all the time, it would seem to follow that there are new lines along which to fracture as well. Though not necessarily in a unique way never overcome before.

Would some of us lose the pressure to conform? Yes. And I think this is all to the better.

Ultimately, I think that conformity is what this entire conversation is all about. I do not value conformity and I reject the notion that forcing people to conform is a societal gain.

Apologies, but I don't agree that's nearly sufficient enough an "ontology", in the philosophical sense if you will, of community. You are involved in a community the moment you hear someone screaming out for help nearby; you are involved in a community when you're one of those scmucks stuck communicating to work in a packed trainer in the morning, you're involved in a community when you respond to the presence of minorities or certain of other races in a manner which may make them uncomfortable (100% not alleging a thing btw, most certainly not the point right now); you clearly join a community when you join the military, but you have, for better or for worse, shockingly few rights and freedoms therein.

My point is that, for human beings, we are by definition, as social animals, involved in a community some way, some how, because we inherently respond to one another's presence, even when that response is indifference (perhaps in the face of someone screaming out for help nearby). This is almost, for myself, the entire lesson of watching Mister Rogers (if you're an America, I don't know if you are).

Choosing a community for yourself, therefore, shouldn't be a reprieve, relief, or, worse case, a retreat from those other communities you're involved in, like your neighborhood or family. We all may have run into that person who appeared to us to be way too chatty and friendly in some public space that we were constrained to, say, the train; they're just answering to their involvement in a different way.

Have you stopped to consider the unintended consequences of this? Mainly, that you become so comfortable with lack of adversity and diversity (of ideas, etc.) that when the time comes to leave the bubble you're unprepared. You don't have the tools and mindset to adjust to those who are unlike you.

Yes. It's nice to find others similar to you. But just the same, there's also value in being an island and still being capable of interacting with strangers.

It's a terrifying thing. You've described the experience many have upon moving out of a small town in the Midwest. A good friend is having the same experience now when she looks to move away from the Bay Area.

Not everyone is happy, plenty of people were and are misfits to particular bubbles they were born into.

There are communities where you pick the people who are associated with, and communities where you don't get to do that (or do it as much).

The internet gives you huge control over picking communities that think/have interests exactly like yours (and that's exactly what the parent was mentioning to like about the internet communities).

In real life communities that are not e.g. a chess club, but more like neighborhood, school, etc, you are forced to live with, and deal with, all kinds of people, not just the one you chose to. At best, you can move to a different location, but you still don't have the control to pinpoint and seggregate interests the internet gives you.

However, is it perhaps possible that I may have explicitly considered this kind of purely physical analog community? Maybe that I could have even been thinking explicitly about such examples when commenting that all kinds of communities are echo chambers?

One of the common characteristics of communities is that they enforce norms on the people who are their members. Physical neighborhoods and cities and schools are not different in this way. They are echo chambers too, generally reinforcing a distilled version of regional thinking, and the main lesson they teach tends to be how to bite your tongue.

The big difference between these analog communities and most digital ones is that in the case of the latter, a person can generally search for communities with amenable norms.

You're completely right! Communities of interest are very different from non-optional analog communities. It's just worth considering that despite this major difference, it may not significantly affect their echo chamber nature.

The "thing that is happening" is a sort of etherealization of property. One underlying cause is that the bits of "property" themselves are digital/ethereal. Books, songs, films... They are no longer physical, and the economic norms around them are changing to reflect that. In conjunction, I think the cultural impact of consuming more digital goods (and probably a million other things) is that people are used to this type of economy. They want the same for their car, bike, etc.

I would call uber a step passed renting, or an extreme form renting. Leasing has already been the norm for a while, along with financing that is indistinguishable from leasing.

The "handful of corporations" part is... more of a consequence, I think. Etherealization/digitization is proving to be very centralization (or winner-take-most) friendly. There are a bunch of drivers to this though. One big reason is centralization of wealth. Big piles of money need big investments to go into. Uber could raise money on better terms than an "uber-for-aukland," adjusting for scale. $1 of profit/revenue/DAU is simply worth less than 1/100th of $100 in profit, on the "speculative investment" market.

I agree on your main points. There is a danger of becoming more of a "rentier" economy. If this trend continues (projecting trends is always speculative) we could end up with more property/wealth in corporate hands, and private individuals will only have liabilities and consumption.

The big elephant in this room is the same elephant that stomped through pyramid rooms 5,000 years ago: real estate, or "land" as it was once known. This is the big ticket item, and represents most of the wealth ordinary people own if they own anything. Cars, CDs and such just don't add up to much value, not anymore.

Up until this point in history having cash was all you needed to complete a transaction. Now you have to maintain your status as a “good” consumer, under the threat that you will be defacto excluded from a part of society by an algorithm. At which time you lose access to the platform as well as all your previous purchases.

There are also companies who are commoditising digital reputation. So a single, private, company will be able to effectively turn you into a pariah.

Amen. What grind my gears even more is when governments adopt that novspeak and promote the uberization of entire sectors under the guise of "sharing resources".

It's not necessarily bad, but it is a major change to share something among thousands of people or millions of people vs. just among family and friends.

Saying that the people sharing are a "community" makes it sound wonderful, but it's actually a large group of people that may have interests very different from yours. Decisions need to be made and it's hard to get consensus among a lot of people, so you are basically talking about a government of some kind, along with all the conflicts that creates.

Private ownership is not particularly convenient, but it has a very interesting relationship with freedom that we should not cast away lightly.

Renting is an accurate descriptor of Netflix or Kindle (and Google Play movies actually does have "rent" on the label of the button when you want to rent a movie). And I can see what you mean from the perspective of the guest or rider, but not from the perspective of the host or driver.

I would argue that you're still renting from Uber and AirBnB, who are just outsourcing their labor and properties to others. Companies like this - I'm looking at you, Facebook - like to claim that they're only impartial platforms, but the reality is that they gain an enormous amount of power over both sides; stealthily, because they hide behind that image.

They're just the early middlemen of budding industries that, in an optimistic future, will not even need middlemen.

Only problem is that this/these sort of project(s) would entail an enormous amount of energy and effort to develop. And then you'd also need to ensure you have sufficient marketing clout so it doesn't just lay dormant. And then in the end it's a completely decentralized system. The idea of a creator sitting around skimming money off every transaction is not really part of this picture.

So it's not really the most enticing of projects to take on. Big investment, minimal personal reward. On the other hand, I think it will happen - eventually. We just need another Tim Berners-Lee type individual. Except preferably one that happens to be a brilliant engineer, salesperson, and billionaire.

They are not “sharing” anything in the sense that people normally understand the word. Money is exchanged for services, as normal. The only thing they do differently is evade regulations and taxes.

Channel control is.

Thought experiment:

There are two channels. One airs very compelling content (the king), but is low quality. The other has tepid content, but is excellent quality.

Which do you use?

Over time, I have asked this of a ton of people and have A/B tested it a few times in my home. Originally about legacy, broadcast media and choices I did not understand.

Compelling is the majority answer people give. And yes, that varies, but not so much as to make the discussion moot.

Yet, what we see is majority tepid, regardless of production and delivery quality. Secondly, peak quality is rare. Choice comes before that. Broadcast wants multiple streams more than fewer, better ones. Almost every time.

Channel control is king. Competition gets balanced to avoid mass tune outs.

Anyone doing all compelling, goid quality, few to no ADS will win big, costing others a lot.

Watch Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and the legacy media sorting all that out right now.

That's control over channel.

IMO it's still terrible if there is effectively only one product option. A democratic decision is just as bad as a shareholder one if it's choosing to favor a majority group over the minority (2 wolves and 1 sheep voting for dinner choices).

>outsources the generation of actual value to others

If you don't think there is value in the network, feedback mechanisms, and simplicity of using Lyft/Uber/whatever, you have completely missed why they are popular. Cabs would still dominate and would have been as popular as Lyft and Uber are now if all of the value was generated by drivers with cars. I think you probably meant to say 'outsourcing the labor' to others, which is completely different and companies have been doing that for centuries.

Labor != Value. I can go dig ditches in a yard for 10 years and not create any value.

Yep, and for you to report them when they scam you on rides and lie about broken credit card machines. But alas, most cab companies don't have this so you turn to the apps that do provide it.

That, however, does not mean that their network affects are worth their externalities as any individual company could provide services in a city where you knew the price up front, but did not rely on their global network effects

In my opinion, the added value with Uber at an airport is knowing the price up front. That's not always possible with whatever driver is first in line at the taxi stand.

Well that really depends on a) whether someone (including you) wants or needs ditches (farming irrigation? undertaker? dog hiding bone?) and b) the amount of time required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. If someone really wants a ton of ditches, and you can dig faster and deeper than anyone else, is your labor more valuable? As programmers we should hope so.

I don't mean to sidetrack the conversation but let's not make sweeping statements of fact without thinking about them!

You just proved the point though. It's not about how much labor was expended. If we are irrigating and I spend 20 hours digging a ditch by hand and someone spends 10 minutes using heavy machinery, they both produced the same value. Labor is independent of value.

>If someone really wants a ton of ditches, and you can dig faster and deeper than anyone else, is your labor more valuable?

Only if time and depth are a factor. It's the result that has value to the purchaser, not the labor. If said company could hire someone for half the price that does it in twice the time while still meeting the company's deadline, your labor is definitely not more valuable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

A bunch of people independently operating their cars to give rides with no common means to find them, schedule them, and pay them makes them almost completely useless. The network is the only thing making them useful to consumers.

It's like claiming Google is only valuable because it has websites to crawl.

That is not what pathseeker said. You said (and pathseeker agreed) that the network is only valuable because there are people in it to do the labor. Pathseeker also said that having people willing and able to do the work is only valuable with a network to organize them and connect them to the people who need work done. You're both right. The people and the network are both contributing, and they both have value. Neither would be valuable on its own.

but often the network gets a disproportionaly large share of the reward (i.e., the extraction of value is higher on the network side vs the labour side). This is the same as the capital vs labour argument - one without the other isn't going to produce value, but the capital side is able to extract a higher value than the labour side.

Saying capital is relatively scarce compared to labor is flat out false. Look at the last 10 years or so. Venture Captial has been flush just about anywhere you look.

Capital is not money, but rather durable goods which contribute to more efficient production. It is the networks which are the capital here. Money can be used to buy capital, but only if someone goes to the trouble of designing that capital first. There is plenty of available labor looking for productive work to do, just as there are plenty of VCs searching for ventures likely enough to succeed to justify the investment. It is a lot easier to find people able to do whatever work is required than it is to find the right capital (networks) to organize them and enabled them to do the right work productively.

Both capital and labor are needed. The networks receive a greater portion of the reward because they are more scarce than labor as well as contributing more to overall productivity.

Add: I also feel this is why new home sales is such an important metric to judge the momentum of the US economy, lots of new home sales means lots of new home-wares. You buy or build a house you also buy a refrigerator, microwave, carpet, furniture etc. Mostly on credit. If we truly become a communal society the cycle is broken, the same people who said "no new house and no new car, I'll just save my cash" now earn less 5 years later because there are many fewer things sold and the interconnected supply chain stalls.

Not every industry has to survive forever. Can the telegraph industry survive the ~0% of sales it had before? Cars just aren't that useful in densely populated areas. The US will have to move away from personal vehicle transport and to mass transport/walking/cycling.

But on a corporate level oligopoly would be better. A few corporations dominating an entire market segment.

An example is Microsoft with Netscape. Microsoft was sued with anti-trust laws not because IE or Windows owned the entire market, but because Windows gave Microsoft a privileged place in the web-browser market that they abused.

Besides, a for profit service can create a community just as well as a communal repartition of it. It adds another risk to the community, of the service provider going bad, but it's not some overwhelming factor that makes all other irrelevant. Like it or not, you are sharing stuff when you rent them, the resource pooling is present (more or less present, depending on the renting modality), people are coming together (or not, depending on how it's shared), and there is social development just like with a communal resource.

The problem of Uber|etc and Netflix|etc is much more on how they do the renting than on they actually renting things.

There is some related problem you didn't point, in that once people start pooling some resource they didn't use fully, they should become more wealthy. We are not seeing this, so is it that the pooling isn't efficient or is it because people are being forced into pooling them by poverty? Either way, it's a problem.

Europe has been doing a great job of picking up our slack lately, but there's only so much they can do. Most of these companies are based in America, and most of the world's market is in Asia. There's a ceiling on how much the EU can fine companies before it's easier to just stop operating there. I'm sure those numbers have been crunched and that they're walking that line.

> I'm sure those numbers have been crunched and that they're walking that line.

A large company is not going to leave a market because it doesn't want to comply with regulation, esp. one the size of the US, the EU, or China.

They would if it became unprofitable, between the fines and the costs of compliance. Google was recently fined $5 billion; that's a significant chunk of their annual revenue, of which Europe is probably a minority. Add onto that the cost of updating for GDPR, and the EU is pushing about as hard as they can afford to.

I'm not saying this is a reason for Europe not to take a strong position. I'm just saying their leverage is finite, and less than that of the U.S. government.

I might be an outlier. I make a deliberate effort to own instead of rent. My commute is enormous because I moved to a place I can afford to own a house, rather than be beholden to some landlord whose interests are not aligned with my own. I’ve never leased a car because I value the ability to repair and upgrade it myself. I don’t rely on streaming services for media, which could one day disappear without replacements. I do my own taxes. I don’t even eat at restaurants often. I feel that relying on services is risky coupling, unnecessarily involving another party in my success/outcome/enjoyment of the product. If I have the MP4 on my hard drive, Netflix can’t wake up one day and decide I can’t watch it anymore. I’ll only (grudgingly) subscribe to a service if there is no other realistic option, such as with Internet service.

I've owned VHS's, they're worthless I've owned houses - that I had to short sell I've owned DVD's - they're worthless I've owned Books - they're worthless

What is the value of owning over just paying to enjoy access?

I like spotify because i can sync music to my phone to play offline - but "owning" all this music is worthless... I had a HUGE cd collection growing up but they were all stolen one day. Owning was worthless..

It seems we're substituting "ownership" with control. There are landlords that let you "control" your house - paint it, update it, customize to your liking - without having to own it yourself. This is a win-win since you get the benefit of fix annual costs whereas owning the place you could be liable for so much more.

heck, Everything i "own" actually owns "me" and burdens me with costs... but i can cancel spotify/netflix/hulu and re-sub later. I like the flexibility of our new model. I get the 4k version without having to "Re-own", i get higher bitrate songs without having to re-encode or re-buy, i get more quality content because i'm paying the producer - not a middleman distribution.

I honestly find this unbelievable and amazing. You have never rewatched a video, or re-read a book? You've never lent a movie or a book to a friend? You've never used a movie or a book to job your memory and spark a conversation with someone?

There is value in all of those things to me, not to mention the value of being able to watch a movie or read a book whenever I want, regardless of my current state of subscription to netflix/hulu/xfinity/cbs/amazon prime/hbonow/etc.

Having these physical DVDs or whatever really is a very mild burden, but even that mild burden is larger than the mild benefit provided, people just like having their DVDs on their shelf because of the intrinsic value of owning "stuff".

Have I rewatched every video I own enough times to offset the cost of renting it for each time I've watched it? Overwhelmingly "no". Not even close. Rentals of even new things are a couple bucks, DVDs are often $20 or more. I'm quite free to lend stuff out too, but it's still <1 on average and even if you include "every lend == the full cost to buy it on launch day" I'm still in the negative. Most people I've run into who would be interested already have it or have already watched it.

Add in that the stuff I do rewatch is relatively old and rent-able for dirt cheap, and it's even more "no". There are a literal handful I'd buy, that's it.

Same pattern with books, except that odds are pretty good that the library has a copy of it :) And even slightly not-super-famous books are pretty likely to be new to people I lend to because there are so many. (technical books are another matter, they're frequently not in libraries, but there too I've only reread a couple that are meaty enough to actually justify more than one pass)

---

Books I still keep buying, especially since much of what I read for fun is somewhat old and available for extremely cheap. But I haven't bought a movie in... a decade? And I feel zero desire to do so.

I'm not sure re-watching or re-reading anything is really limited or granted by owning...

Lets take netflix for example. If there is something on netflix that i want a friend to see and they don't have netflix, i can just bring my phone/tablet over to their house and cast the show to the TV and watch it there or they can pay a few bucks and watch the entire series in a month.

I don't have to collect anything, store anything, remember who borrowed what and quite honestly there is enough content on a few select services that i don't need them all and i'm quite content in having so much new stuff to enjoy that the need for having a favorite to watch over and over is sort of history for me.

I watched the shit out of goonies as a kid becasue it was only 1 of 5 movies our entire family could own. Had we had on-demand everything that habit would have been a non starter for me. That doesn't mean i don't love goonies to this day and that i won't ever re-watch it but i may only re-watch it when it makes a round again on netflix and magically shows up as available - and i think that kind of experience to me is much better than feeling i owe myself to watch it because i'm moving it, storing it, seeing it, shelving it and having it occupy my life in some way.

If we can ignore ethics for a moment, piracy still provides a superior product than rentals because pirated objects don't lock you into particular ecosystems nor does it prohibit you from using the product in any way.

Given the choice, I don't want to have to buy an apple, android, or windows phone/tablet just to download movies to watch while camping or something. I would rather have the freedom to do whatever I want with the things I paid for.

For example, i don't buy from itunes or google store if they restrict me to those marketplaces. But i do subscribe to netflix and hulu because they don't give a crap where i login from.

piracy isn't ownership either... even if i pirate shit, i have to provide a service akin to that netflix provides to be able to watch it on my tablet/tv/phone or on the road

Amazon Kindle doesn't own the content of the books to be able to censure them, they can't legally censor or edit books that weren't censored or edited by the writer/publisher.

Also, there are dozens of ebook stores - a vast competitive market to choose from - not to mention many libraries have ebooks and print books available and interlibrary loans are awesome to get things you want even if not available locally.

Now, services like Kindle or Steam deciding to revoke access to prior purchases is a potential Big Problem...but as of yet, it remains just that: potential. And at least in theory, there are government agencies that are charged with protecting against abusive behavior towards consumers (obviously actual results there are somewhat mixed).

But economic incentives might push the renting model to become the main - or even only - model to use many goods and services in the future. Similarly, trends about the number of service providers seem to point towards consolidation as well.

So if those trends hold true, we might at some point have Megacorp Inc. offering Living-As-A-Service. And then we would have a problem.

"Bird and Lime deactivate scooter services in Santa Monica for a day in protest"

...unless they somehow pissed off Amazon and lost their account. Or the publisher/auther pissed off Amazon and got taken down. Or...

Different strokes I guess?

Likewise, a book's value is not in the paper and binding, but the content of the writing. I concede that I have an attachment to the exact copies of my favorite books, but I don't feel like I should. The important things are the what I take with me from reading, not the physical books themselves.

I'm tired of consumerism, I'm tired of articles complaining about the change of paradigms since the baby-boomer generation. I'm not going to consume media in the same way a middle class worker from the 70's or 80's did. A subscription service lets me listen to any song I can think of on a whim while driving in my car, not limited to the selection of CD's I can jam into a binder. If the apocalypse hits and Amazon Web Services goes down I'll start buying CDs again.

In renting, when you are done with the item, you terminate, yielding access and recouping none of the money. In ownership, when you are done with the item, you sell, yielding access and recouping some money.

High-end hobbyist equipment such as camera lenses and woodworking tools are great things to own; they offer great enjoyment, tend to retain value, and you can typically find a buyer if and when you want to sell.

Things that are difficult to sell and poor at retaining their value are good things to rent.

I've heard compelling arguments for both Renting and Owning of Houses and Cars and it really comes down to circumstances, but it's always good to own something you can use and sell if the need arises.

But you do not control anything any more with those companies. They can revoke your accesses, they can ban you from using their services for any reason, they can change the terms of services, the offers, the rates, whenever they wish.

Unlike you, I would say you lost the control which came implicitly with ownership, and did not regain another form of control. At least not as much, far from that.

Historically everything from the ownership society has died - everything. Do you still buy betamax players? lazerdisc players? minidisc or walkmans? no...

When the hell have you ever been banned from netflix? If the price goes up, i'll just cancel the service. I don't "collect" netflix shows or have any desire to do anything to feel complete so a change of terms of service, rates, offers or even content doesn't matter to me. I only buy the service because it affords what I want and if that stops, i'll choose a different service.

Historically and basing the future on the explosive growth of current trends, our options are ONLY increasing. There are networks just for science documentaries. I paid 25 bucks with one service to watch probably 200 documentaries over 5 months that i could have NEVER experienced anywhere else and would i want to own them? never... but guess what. in a few years as new content is produced and i can pay another 25-30 bucks and re-binge a bunch of stuff and if this service goes out there are already competing services.

I have more control, more flexibility, more content, more freedom of choice, more freedom of how i can consume, more ways to download, stream, watch, play than i've ever had in my life.

Netflix works on my tv, phone, tablet, computer, Xbox, it works on chrome, safari, edge, firefox.

How can you not see how democratizing this is? I'm so glad I don't have to wait 3 years for disney to "unlock their content warehouse and have a special release of a movie that cam out 10 years ago for the great low price of 99.99" - we're you around for those days?

Better example: It's extremely frustrating to be in the middle of an intense movie and have your internet become flaky or go out completely at that moment. On the other hand, nothing would have stopped you finishing that movie if you owned it, save perhaps a power outage.

Granted, movie watching isn't important enough for me personally that I find owning movies worth the costs, as I'm sure is the case for most people, but for some it very well might be—it just depends on your priorities. For instance, when I commuted to work (about an hour each way), I didn't use Spotify because I didn't want my music listening on the train to be at the mercy of my mobile connection.

I mean, I get where you were going, but this statement is incorrect. I'm willing to bet that you consume a lot of content that you didn't get directly from the people that produced it.

To your other points I largely agree. I have a giant box of cd's that I move with me from residence to residence, but never open. At this point it's really more of a burden, far outweighing the value I might get out of it someday if I ever decide to finally open it back up.

Just keep them long enough, one day some hipster will come out and claim that "vintage" technology has something more than modern technology... Just like what happened with vinil disks /s

For example, I recently went through several lists of underrated (i.e. not the megahits like Ghostbusters or Indiana Jones) movies from the 80s and 90s and I'm hunting them down and watching them. Of the seven movies I watched this past couple of weeks (About Last Night, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Nothing But Trouble, Other People's Money, The Wrong Guy, Top Secret, Used Cars), ZERO of them can be found on Netflix or Hulu. Five of them can be rented individually from Amazon Prime at $4 a pop, but aren't included in their prime subscription that I already pay ~$100 a year for. That's the full extent of how you can get access to these movies from subscription services. I could have just stuck with what subscription services offer, but if it's not something new the selection gets increasingly worse and worse.

Is that what you want the future to be like? Where these movies might as well have disappeared off the face of the earth because no one can get ahold of them anymore? Because that's the direction we're starting to go in with more and more things going digital only and subscription only.

I used to work in the video game industry, but I have almost nothing to show for it outside of some trailers on Youtube, because almost all of those games were released on digital channels and are no longer available to download. I had two games on the Wii Shop and the Wii Shop is now closed and the company is defunct, so those games are gone. Another on Xbox Live for 360, and a couple of Xbox Indie Games that you can't get anymore because they killed the service. The only game you can still get is Neverland Card Battles on the PSP, and that's because it was released as a physical game.

You can still also play my Flash games I did before I got into the industry, at least until browsers kill Flash off entirely. There was a whole thread on HN recently about how we're about to lose a whole decade of culture from Flash and how one guy is trying to preserve it as best as he can.

Not being able to own the media (even if only in digital form) sucks, because companies can't be trusted to always remain solvent, always have license agreements in place, and always care about keeping all the content available for people to get. If you don't care about the content, then you probably don't care that you only get some access to some stuff some of the time, but for those that care about the time and energy that creators put in and want to experience and share those things with people that may have missed it the first time around or whole new generations of people, this current trend is terrible.

That's actually one reason why I shifted gears and started designing board games the past few years. I have perfectly good and playable copies of board games that are 60 years old now, decades after the companies have gone out of business. I won't have to go through extra effort to make sure that people can still have access to my board games long after I'm dead.

Pretty much. Most of the time I am more than happy to watch something on the current rotation of Netflix/Amazon/HBO. It doesn't work when you're trying to seek out something specific, but the streaming world works better when you let the content come to you. I certainly don't want to fill my home with plastic discs of movies and if I ever want to watch something specific I can almost always pay to stream it. If it's not available as a rental I can just watch another movie. There is more content than anyone can ever watch, if it's not accessible to me I feel no need to go out of my way.

It's sort of like having a very well done company cafeteria (a la Google) vs going out to a restaurant. I may not get exactly what I want every day, but it's good food without having to go anywhere and at an unbeatable price. I'll probably choose that over a restaurant 9/10 times.

This means that you'll have a higher quality median (note, not mean) experience at the cost of experiencing any true outliers. The best way it's been put to me is the follows:

* (AI/ML/Algorithmic Recommendation) = 8/10 products you will like, none you'll love or hate

* (Serendipitous Searching) = 5 products you will guaranteed like, 1 you will hate, 1 you will absolutely love

By only having access to the current rotation on Netflix/Amazon/HBO you cannot find the 'diamonds in the rough' that suit your taste.

An issue where the incremental benefits to one individual may have negative externalities throughout the society as a whole,

You and I (but not various other folks on this thread) place a lot of value on not avoiding hassle, and a pleasantly low albeit non-zero price for a reasonable subset of the output of Hollywood.

People who are deeply invested in being able to apply their own personal filter on what media is available seem less satisfied.

I know other people who play out the same disagreement for comedy and music.

For some reason not for dance. Where’s the cheap version of Netflix for the ballet?

Maybe somewhere on YouTube; I refuse to use YouTube so I wouldn’t know.

But I don't think this is a good idea for the world to become like this as a whole. The more things are centralized (stream from one server as opposed to living in a bunch of locations all over the world), the easier it is for parts of our culture to disappear.

The artifacts we find from thousands of years ago are a super tiny handful of many, many, many more that existed (perhaps not exact copies, but the same types of things), and we have lost who knows how knowledge and cultural artifacts from the past, in particular the ancient past, due to things like libraries and museums getting burned down or destroyed, statues being removed, massive wars fought, etc.

Even in our own lifetimes there have been the Taliban that have destroyed ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan[1], ISIS destroying artifacts in Iraq museums[2], and looters destroying or stealing artifacts from a Cairo museum while the Arab Spring was underway[3]. Along with many, many other examples[4].

We collectively have the capability to have exact or near-exact copies of all sorts of documents, art, video, audio, etc. The more people that hang on to these things, the more future generations benefit from it. And the more we can benefit from the archival actions of others now.

But again, it doesn't require that everyone do it, or even for each person to try to have a copy of literally everything that exists. Just that enough people own copies of the things they love and share them with people as much as they can, helps insure the survival of our cultural heritage.

BTW, I found an interesting site that chronicles all the various types of media that are known to have existed but are now lost. It's called LostMediaWiki, if you're curious. I was surprised how long the list was just for video games, which aren't that old as a medium.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Mosul_Museum_ar...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-12442863

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_heritage

So I don’t agree it’s worse for society.

I do think it would be nice if game producers would put their code and assets in escrow, so once the platform they were built for goes away, and the producer decides to not invest in a succesor platform, the assets/code could be released to the public.

That is the base that Richard Stallman created for the open source movement. You should own your own hardware, and the only way of fulfilling that is to own the software that makes it run. And I also thought that this is common sense at least for the past generation of developers. I am not so sure how much the message has been lost, but it is not so strong as it used to be.

Yep. I know a guy that hang with him for a while and Stallman behaviour was already off. That was years ago.

But the original idea it is still relevant today. It is important to detach the message from the messenger.

> Thinking back, it's like we forgot our rights aren't guaranteed and didn't need to be protected or even considered at those levels.

Yes. I think that the success of the open source movement makes it commercially important and the message got diluted. There was a lot of pushback against LGPL and GPL licenses at that time.

Nowadays people contribute to projects that any company can take on and convert to a closed product. Just put some effort in some improvements - a nicer interface and some documentation - and the freemium version will overtake the free version. GPL was designed to make that move impossible unless the original company owned all the code, as then it can change the license whenever they want.

Edit:I needed to be clearer, I know fusion isn't electron, but I've had no luck at all using it offline. Very rarely will it work. And unless things changed in the last 6 months, the Github desktop app can't commit locally without an internet connection.

This is false, at least in the way you're thinking. Electron apps are written with web technologies, yes, but they generally don't load their UI via the web; all HTML/CSS/JS lives locally on your machine. I don't use the GitHub app, but if it's true that it can't commit without an internet connection, that's just bad design, as opposed to something inherent with Electron.

Wait, what? Why?

I understand the need here and would humbly suggest trying to support development of FreeCAD for this reason. - FreeCAD Dev

I understand what you mean, but RMS is very against "open source": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Yes. That is true for most things. Eat fatty and sugar-rich food, have pleasure now pay it later. Drink a lot of alcohol, have fun now pay the consequences later. Burn fossil fuels have cheap energy now have catastrophic consequences later. Spend all money now, not have savings in the future.

You are prioritizing current convenience against future consequences. That is a very human thing to do.

Most of the complaints around big companies seem to be around things they might do (e.g. Amazon could gain monopoly power and raise prices to exorbitant levels) but haven't yet done, and could easily end up never doing.

I think you and the author conflated ownership of "stuff" with ownership of--or a stake in--society. All of the things you listed as owning versus the not-owning (whether it's called renting or leasing or subscribing) are trade-offs you made because you value the concept of ownership of stuff over the opposite.

My view is different: I want ownership of society; I want to be a full participant in society, regardless of the actual state of being of the physical and electronic objects around me. This is why, for example, I give money to local journalists on Patreon, and why I deliberately live in a smaller place in a large city where I can pay taxes to a well-funded library system. This is the type of "ownership" I value.

Other things I do, like ride mass transit, subscribe to Spotify, and pay my city electric bill (I wasn't aware that buying electricity from my municipality impacted my "ownership" of anything, as the author claims), are all things I do because I find them to be more efficient or more useful to me. There are things I unequivocally own, like records or my treasured collection of baseball cards, that have value to me beyond my simple possession of them. There are some things I own, like my residence, where ownership has been more of a burden to me than a non-ownership method would have. It's all about balance.

(One last question: Could you clarify "I do my own taxes?" What is it that doing taxes yourself, presumably by pen and calculator, gains over downloading a product like TaxAct and saving the PDF of the result?)

The general principle I failed to articulate is that all other things being equal, I value Self Reliance over Interdependence.

There are varying levels of interdependence though, maybe I can take a stab at ranking them from least objectionable/risky to most.

1. Dependence on friends and family: largely acceptable in my view

2. Dependence on local community, groups, churches, etc.

3. Dependence on local government, public transport, libraries, etc.

4. Dependence on state/national government

5. Dependence on local businesses

6. Dependence on remote/global businesses

You might notice that the ranking is also ordered by how accountable (at least in theory) they are to you in terms of their actions, where businesses tend to be the least accountable. You can’t vote them out or alter their bad behavior, and their interests least align with yours.

EDIT

Also, I don’t see how paying a corporation for a Spotify subscription gives me any kind of “stake in society”.

Local businesses will often be more sensitive to their customers than local governments. National governments will be even less sensitive.

In GENERAL, it seems like it takes a lot more money and resources nowadays to do this, relative to other benefits you can have. In Media, having a wall of $19.99 blue-rays and an apple music full of albums is going to cost you a lot more given how must people consume media (a lot, and constantly). The cost to get that permanence is like an order of magnitude over more or less the same content with subscription services + rentals.

I tend to think of it like this - if netflix takes a show off that I watch constantly, I might buy the series online. If Netflix as a whole goes down along with all the other streaming services, then the whole internet and society is probably down, and I suddenly don't care about all the media I'd be consuming, because there's bigger stuff happening in the world.

Of course, "disconnecting" is probably undervalued - I'm just old enough to remember the time when offline was the default for media. Not having to deal with the engagement machine and autoplay was a bit of a blessing.

What if Netflix bans you from using their service?

If you're talking about small ticket items, this seems true, but it certainly doesn't hold for more consequential expenditures like real estate or even cars.

And:

> rather than be beholden to some landlord whose interests are not aligned with my own

It sounds like you're now beholden to a situation that's misaligned with your interests. You've traded one kind of serfdom for another.

I live in Austin, and I'm tired of hearing how traffic bad is from people who decided to buy a 3,500 sq foot home 40 miles outside of town and complain about "traffic" driving in.

we have a pretty messed up view of "owning" something without realizing that "owning" doesn't mean much other than "being owned by..." that big commute owns YOU

I'm not trying to say how you should or shouldn't feel. I did lots of commuting over the years and I too said the same things you said...

but now that I'm 42, now that my kids are older and now that life seems to be going by faster and faster, I super regret spending years of my life behind the wheel rather than doing what I really wanted to do.

That bigger house wasn't worth it, the bigger tv wasn't worth it, the bigger commute wasn't worth it.

I had no time for my wife, my friends, my kids, my hobbies. I didn't go kayaking, biking or running as much as I wish...

I thought my commute time was my time, but it was "alone time" but not necessarily objectively "me" time - i was still upset at the traffic, delays, weather, people everywhere and no one talking, everyone just mindlessly going places while being jerks and i had to use books/music to escape...

only to go home to pay a big mortgage, stay up late to have that hour of time, get up early to try and have more time. Before long i was spending all my mental energy trying to justify it all and it became overwhelming.

Today, I live 6 miles from work, a 15 minute drive in worst of traffic. I'm home, i'm not mad, i can still listen to music/audio books but more importantly i'm there - i don't mind driving home to pickup kids to take them to scouts or off to music - because i didn't just spend 1.2 hours commuting. my rage is less, i'm there more, i'm more present and i have time for hobbies/friends/family and ME

The only other me-time I have is getting up at 05:30 to go for a run, which is magnitudes less pleasant than sitting on a bus.

So, as you say, everyone's opinion of commuting time differs. For me it is a highlight of the day.

Now my morning run is me time - I run where I want to run, I wave to people, I smile, I pet the random dog that runs up to me, I smell the fresh air, I sense the warmth of summer, the coolness of fall and the crispness of winter. I feel the sun on my back, the wind on my face. I can listen to music, I can listen to an audiobook - my mind is clear - think the most and remember the most when i'm out on my jog.

When I commuted to work, it was so mindless sometimes I forgot how I even got from point a to b. On the bus or the train or sitting in my car, I wasn't there with nature, I wasn't there in mind/body/spirit. I was kept busy by stuff I didn't really pay attention to because it was all a distraction from the commute that I lied to myself was what mattered as me time.

at 5:30 in the morning - there is a good chance you will see the stars set and the sunrise - the birds chirp. You run - you start feeling better, you feel healthier, you feel more alive. You get back home and that coffee tastes better, that shower feels better. YOur muscles ache less and less as you do it.

That commute - unless you happen to be lucky enough to be bush pilot flying the mountains of Alaska to get to work or a park ranger driving thorugh a national park to get to work usually doesn't offer what we take foregranted but forget what life should be about.

When I lived in PA i had to commute 1.5 hours each way and i too swore to myself how good that "me time" was...

figure 253 working days a year, in one year I spend 759 hours just getting back and forth to work - not including all the extra time, bad days, slow days or working late, or having to come in early or use my free time to study, answer alerts/pages or stay ahead of tech/services/requirements that is a lot of time. Really put into perspective when you realize 750 hours is essentially 19 weeks of man hours of worka year. I couldn't name a book, or learn anything new or remember a damn thing that happened during those commuting days - but i could remember how bad traffic was, what time every school got out and how often i ran across the same asshole on the way to work or home and what frequency life sucked because of holidays/events/activities going on.

i guess my point is, if you can enjoy it, by all means enjoy it, but don't do what i did and fool yourself into enjoying it without realizing you weren't getting out of it what you perceived you were.

Its kind of a shame we're good at convincing ourselves something like a jog, where we're alone in nature with mind, body and spirit is "bad" but in the hustle and bustle of senseless rush to get to work or get back home - we see that as a me time. (not saying this is how you feel, but how i perceive the quirks of our society)

Also, lets not forget, if you had a 10 minute commute to work your run may be at 7:30 instead of 5:30 or it could be at 5:30 pm instead of 5:30 a.m which may be more enjoyable for you. Or you could go fishing before/after work or just spend an hour at starbucks enjoying a coffee rather than sitting in traffic by choice.

The first year i stopped commuting i started going fishing at a small pond on my way to work. I'd just keep a collapsable rod in my car and some lures. I got good at catching large mouth bass and crappy and i got to see the bats, birds, fish, deer and that 45 minutes of fishing before work was the best healing for my spirit i could ever ask for. Thats mother fucking ME time right there!

If you want to talk about "convincing ourselves", I look at some of my co-workers who live in tiny apartments that don't even have fully functioning kitchens, for the sake of being a few blocks from work. They talk about how great it is to have a short commute and seem oblivious to the fact that they've chosen lives slightly better than those of Chinese factory workers, only the company doesn't pay for the exorbitant rent on the tiny pods they're living in or all the meals they have to order from delivery services because they only have a mini-fridge and a microwave.

You're not an outlier if you live in the USA. You might be part of the problem. "Drive till you qualify" is peak consumerism.

I succumbed and buy music and movies online because that battle is already lost; I'm not going to commit to maintaining VHS, DVD etc players forever and obsolescence is built into the format. Hell there are probably people with laserdiscs that they can’t play anymore.

But I still buy physical books because they are a real thing.

The most bizarre statement is when he says "The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system." It's pretty obvious to me that a deliberate and intentional effort has been made to ensure that only people who own a lot of property have any voice in the system; to flip that relationship around and make it a moral statement is frankly a little scary. People really think like this?

Look, what Americans need is to spend more time with their friends, their children, their spouses, their families. Not to spend time collecting fancy cars or other hollow pursuits. This is a lunatic point of view.

That's not true. The reason why property ownership was required to vote is because in a democracy, the founders knew that if the majority of voters didn't have property then they would eventually just vote to take away the property of others. But they also knew that if the majority of people didn't own property then the government would also fail. So their solution was to only allow property owners to vote, but to make it easy and basically free for all citizens to become a property owners, and to heavily incentivize them to do so.

Early American democracy only worked because there was basically an unlimited amount of free land to give way. And to the extent that it still works, it's because technology and intellectual property have replaced land as the primary sources of capital.

American democracy is designed around broad-based capital ownership, not broad-based ownership of stupid shit you don't need. This is why this article doesn't make sense, because it would be far better for democracy if e.g. the average American owned $20,000 worth of Uber stock rather than $20,000 worth of car. Stock is capital, whereas a personal car isn't.

It's technically true. It's clear that the original law of the land assumed that only landowners had a stake in running things.

I didn't get the impression that the author claimed this was a moral truth. Rather, I thought he was saying that the resulting culture made the country prosperous and productive. As more and more groups started owning things, they became enfranchised into the system.

The Roman Republic had a rule that to serve in the army you had to be a landowning Roman citizen (with a minimum-value requirement for the property). Largely for this reason: if you owned land, you had a stake, something to fight for.

It didn't work out so well, because -- and it's up to you if you see parallels here -- the Roman Republic was also incredibly corrupt, and its wealthy/powerful classes used every trick they could come up with to commandeer productive land, leaving Rome in a situation where there weren't enough eligible citizens to form a useful army.

The further, and longer-lasting, consequence was that Gaius Marius reformed the system, creating essentially a standing force of professional soldiers, rather than a landowners' militia that had to be re-recruited and re-trained for every war. This was a big boost to Rome's military capability, but also resulted in soldiers having loyalty to their general (who would pay/reward them) rather than to Rome. And that played a part in the eventual change from Republic to Empire.

So do keep in mind that a "rights for property owners" system can in theory expand rights as more people gain property. But can also reduce them and concentrate power as unscrupulous people work the system to accumulate property in their hands instead of others' hands.

This is such an important sentence. People high in the chain need to understand, that exploiting and hoarding every dollar from those at the bottom will only lead to one thing. And as history shows, first victims of rising of the masses are the people highest in the chain of an old system.

Does this take mortgages into consideration?

To understand the point of the author you need to look back, deeply back, at the history of human society. For most of human history, most people did not own any property. In a feudal society, for example, a few lords owned everything, and everyone else worked for them and owned nothing.

The "American experiment" was radical in that it placed the individual at the center of governance. The U.S. system of government is "built up" from citizen consent, not "pushed down" from a divinely-granted right of hereditary rule.

In order for this system to work, citizens must own property. Otherwise, they don't have the resources to collectively enact change. The Bill of Rights presumes citizens who have the resources to speak, associate, petition, etc. That's why it is worded to constrain the government's power, not worded to grants things to citizens.

The fundamental idea behind American democracy is that Americans have the means to pursue their goals and to influence each other.

This is why it was so much easier for early U.S. citizens to found churches and corporations than it was in Europe. European churches and corporations were top-down, and therefore few and conservative. U.S. organizations were bottom-up, and therefore many, diverse, and innovative.

So... that's why property ownership is at the heart of American democracy.

But what about:

> deliberate and intentional effort has been made to ensure that only people who own a lot of property have any voice in the system

There's actually a lot of evidence against this, for example the entire labor and environmental movements. Collective citizen action has worked a lot of change to the U.S. over the years, and I predict it will continue to do so.

All that said, I think it's a pretty far reach to claim that the American experiment is at risk because a few people don't want to buy CD's or cars anymore. People still like money and things! The real estate market is not drying up. There's plenty of property being owned and desired by Americans.

I think that lack of money is a bigger issue. Over 40 million people in the U.S. live below the poverty line! I think that's a much bigger problem for American "stake in the game" than whether someone who has disposable income decides to spend it on a Kindle instead of books.

IDK why there has to be something deeper.

>public park's pristine full-courts

I mean there's only so many courts maybe you don't want to play with other people you just want to take shots, and it's convenient.

>Neither does it shed any light on the sad way in which suburban dads build rickety basement bars

They do it to hang out with their friends. Same way you order a pizza and eat it at home instead of at the restaurant. What are you after the pizza or "being at a restaurant". For most people it's the pizza. The phenomenon of rickety basement bars as you call them is just people hanging out at home drinking cheaper beer at a home built bar. They get some of that "I'm out of the house" vibe while getting all the "hanging out with my friends" that they really want.

I don't know what else you are implying could be operating here. So I'll have to assume you just hate improvised home bars.

When I hang out with the same friends at their rickety basement bars more of them show up and we're all very engaged, we talk or play games and I drink more moderately. I'm only out $14 for a 12 pack and if I overdo myself I can just crash on the couch for a bit.

Personally I find the basement bar more fulfilling.

Go to a better one.

Second, maintaining these kinds of hierarchies does not happen as the result of some kind of natural process. It requires violence.

Yes I know this is going to be a controversial question. I'm genuinely interested in what people's opinions are.

Your second sentence is no argument, just a claim. I counter-claim that I do have that right. So it seems to be a stalemate with respect to claims.

Good decisions FOR THEM.

> Each of these changes is beneficial, yet I worry that Americans are, slowly but surely, losing their connection to the idea of private ownership. The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.

Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport.

What gives you a stake is your net worth -- whether in a bank account, investments, land, a house, a company, or several.

And being able to rent services instead of buy permanent goods is an economic gain, allowing you to deploy your savings in a more targeted way toward whatever really matters the most to you.

If we want to be nervous, let's investigate inequality of net worth and the policies that lead to that -- and not be distracted by something totally irrelevant like whether I buy or license my books.

You're correct, but it does at least give you some agency independent of the system. If you own a DRM-free mp3, you can listen to that song every day for the rest of your life if you want to. Whereas if you just have a Spotify subscription, a record company can decide to pull the track whenever they please (which usually happens across all streaming services at once), and then it's just gone.

The tradeoffs are debatable, but they exist.

If one record company pulls a track, so be it. That track will simply be out of my rotation. If I happen to be listening to popular music and I really want to hear the song, it is probably available other places. If I can't find it, so be it: I'll listen to something else and soon forget about that song. No big deal. In the end, I'm still dependent on the record company making it available in some way or another.

As an example I enjoy games and my Steam account likely now is 'worth' some thousands of dollars that I should be able to sell at some depreciated rate. Except it's not, and I cannot. As I'm effectively renting access to these products instead of actually 'buying' them, my account is worth exactly $0. I could try to sell it nonetheless, but it would be unlawful. If I was instead able to actually own these games, my little hobby would still have cost me money, but I'd be able to recoup a substantial portion of it at a later date -- or perhaps even work to monetize "my" games in some way, again within the confines of the law.

This is sort of a microcosm of what causes wealth inequality. A more typical example would be a poor individual spending decades paying rent each month that is simply subtracted from his net worth. A wealthier individual might be paying off a mortgage on a property that eventually begin to earn money for him, or at the minimum provide him a residence with no rent due other than that which the government demands. It's interesting to consider this aspect of the migration to cities. People move into these extremely dense areas where they're obligated to rent homes which, due to high demand, consume a very large chunk of their earnings - and then at the end of the days, weeks, years, decades, they have absolutely 0 to show for what will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for most people.

I don't think a bank account applies here. If I have a large bank account but no other ties to the community, I have no real skin in the game as it applies to community proceedings. I'll vote however and if I make mistakes I will leave with no losses.

'Property and stakes' in the context of American history and feudalism means land, not doodads. It's so many banal platitudes. Tyler is a smart guy but some of the stuff he writes and says is just...bad.

The connection between hard work and wealth is also rather more attenuated than your simple ideal suggests.

I'd love to agree with you and rewarding work is very important, but in our current society outcomes seem mostly determined by starting conditions. People born into poor household that cannot offer good parenting & education are expected to "work way harder" to achieve a similarly happy life than people who spawned lucky. That's fine to some degree, but should be kept under control. Once enough people feel the system isn't fair and rigged against them will they burn it to the ground.