Ownership is financial security. Rich people don’t lease land--they buy it. Houses. Vacation houses. Yachts. Private jets. Artworks. Those are “investments”, to show a bank you’ve got money. (rich people then borrow money, for spending cash, rather than sell their asset investments; when they die, there are tax loopholes that clear their debt, bc their assets clearly showed they were “good for it”, the physical assets get passed on to the kids through estate, and millions/billions of dollars worth of those assets go untouched by income or capital gains taxes. it’s referred to as “buy, borrow, die”, if you want to look up better explanations. Republicans are trying to kill estate taxes, too, so the rich never have to pay for anything, at all, ever.)
The rich want what little everyone else has left. ALL the land. ALL the real estate. Everything of any physical value. In exchange for leasing you a house you cannot personalize, that you can be evicted from, at any time, for someone who’ll pay more. For a car you lease for three years, that’s designed to start breaking down in two. For furniture you’ll be financially penalized for ruining, if your cat scratches it or you spill a drink. You won’t be allowed to repair any of these things, to avoid penalty fees, because you don’t own them.
Phones are already becoming abandonware, five years or fewer from being made, because selling you a new one every year makes more money than just updating the OS to include functioning on older models.
You need to own something. You can’t get a loan without collateral, unless you’re a multi-millionaire. An owned car is collateral. A house. Stocks and market investments. $50,000 cash in your bank account is not enough to borrow $1M for a house in soaring housing markets. And who among us has $50K sitting untouched in a bank, to begin with?
The “owning nothing” future is a scam, to not only take what wealth the common person has left to pass on to their families, but to control the lives of you and your descendants, through money. If you want a home at all, they’ll tell you where you’re going to work. If you want food this month, you’d better show up, without fail. You won’t ever see the money for it. They’ll just change a number that doesn’t really exist, in a computer, and extend your subscriptions for you. Getting fired will literally mean losing everything you have, instantly.
It’s the return a nobility class that owns everything, and the serfs living in poverty, given a pittance of food and shelter to tending the nobility’s cash generators. There is no way out of this serfdom; you’re either born into a rich family, or you live and die in poverty.
Or... we the 99% band together and fucking fight back against the 1% making life so miserable. It’s obscene that so few can can exploit so many.
Start by saying no to buying anything with a subscription that would fuck with your daily life, if that subscription were to run out. Including fucking Nest and Ring devices that the Texas state government has been accessing remotely to turn off citizens’ air conditioning, in 100F+ heat, so rich people, hotels, & retail don’t have to experience any “interruption of service” since the electricity draw is too much for Texas’ shitty power grid.
Also, support “Right to Repair” legislation. It doesn’t solve every problem of the subscription-based world, but it’s a huge start to ending built-in obsolescence, that such a world would greatly rely on.
blakekathryn
prguitarman
janainaart
vaporwave
turnnoffyourmind
stormborns
dededos
