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.