Because Owning is So Passe
The age of owning is dead. It began with the death of slavery when some people woke up one day a long time ago and thought the idea of owning another human being is unacceptable.
Then while some parts of the world still practice the tradition of men owning their wives, others began spreading this preposterous thought of women standing as equals to men. So despite their inability to take on the corporate world as anything more than typists, they were reluctantly given the opportunity. The results? Oprah Winfrey, Marissa Meyers and Park Geun-hye.
There was a time not so long ago, which some living fossils can relate to, when consumers often buy physical things like books and music cassettes and movie DVDs. Yes, they came in clunky black boxes filled with brown rolled-up plastic tapes that wind itself back and forth projecting ultra low resolution pictures in 10 frames per second to your giant-sized CRT television. All that in the definition of technicolor.
Those days are gone. Our kids will no longer know what the 'Save' button on our Microsoft Word is because they will no longer understand what it means to actually store information into something physical like a floppy disk.
Some time ten years ago a giant meteor that looks like a half-eaten white apple dropped out of the sky and killed all the dinosaurs. Well, the dinosaurs were already dying from many other technological illnesses but that meteor cut their last life line.
Today everything is rented. Your slave is rented for a price and human rights laws attached. Your wives are rented for a price and conditions stated in a piece of paper and witnessed by families and friends. Your house is built on a land rented from the government. The government is renting the country from its people, subject to many agreement clauses. You rent money from banks with an interest, and those monies are in fact rented from you by the banks with less interest.
Movies, music and books will become rented too. Well there has always been a model like this, but now it's for real. The process of buying something and owning it for consumption will in a few years become completely obsolete. By the time our kids become fathers or mothers, the word 'owning' will no longer be in the dictionary. They won't own cars because they will no longer require private transportation vehicles. Or maybe because someone will create a teleportation technology.
Why is this trend becoming more apparent, you ask? The simple answer is that the majority of the world is getting poorer. The unequal distribution of income attributed by crony capitalism practiced worldwide will soon take its toll. And what happens when the poor gets too poor to buy the things sold by the rich? We rent.
How many of those Blu Ray movies did you actually watched more than once? How many books did you read more than once? While some have the luxury of a huge book shelf and DVD rack tucked somewhere in your study, we normal people see better use for that section of the room with 3 4K TVs and a Logitech G25 with seats. A 7.1 digital surround would be a much desired addition.
The point is we are at the age where houses are becoming smaller because our income is not growing as quickly as the inflation rate. As a result we are quickly becoming poorer and are being forced to change our consumption patterns.
Buying an HD movie from the store will cost me RM 60 or close. Buying it from iTunes Store will cost RM 45. Renting it from iTunes Store for 3 days will cost RM 15. And since I won't ever watch most of the movies more than once, I'll just loop it a million times for the next 3 days and be done with it for the rest of my life.
I saw Rock Corner selling an Explosions in the Sky album for almost RM 100. If you know post-rock, you also know they never release albums with 16 songs because that's just too mainstream. RM 100/5 songs = RM 20 per song. iTunes sell the album for US$ 9.99, which is RM 30. For RM 15 a month on Spotify, I get to download that album and any other album legitimately for no extra charge.
Yes there are limitations to subscriptions, but one can never get more of something without losing something else. As the world converts to a new world of subscription, how will you consume your life?
