Great News For Those of Us Who Don't Love Being Corporate Slaves
Have we finally reached the end of all this SaaS nonsense?
Let’s start with a quick re-cap on humanity’s economic history:
First the powerful monopolized all the common land as “private property” and continue to enforce these “rights” with the threat of force.
Post WWII capitalists with power advantages started monopolizing more resources through compounding, leaving millions destitute and billions struggling on the economic hamster wheel to out-earn ever-rising costs.
Now we enter the elitist World Economic Forum’s next stage in their plan for your life, and I quote: “You will own nothing and be happy.”
Rent-seekers now monopolize everything — the factories and offices, the houses and condos, the hardware and software, now furniture and technology, and soon cars — and you toil to overpay for all of it.
You overpay for the factories by letting your corporate overlords suppress your wages in order to flay a profit margin off your work.
You massively overpay rent or mortgage interest thanks to human shelter being turned into a parasitic investment product.
You wildly overpay for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products like Bill Gates’s wretched Word ($3,355.20 over a working career) or Adobe’s Creative Cloud ($25,435.20 over a working career.)
I call it Subscription Serfdom.
Houses used to cost 2–3X the annual income of a single median earner, but now that land-lorders have financialized houses as investment products, inflation-adjusted real-term prices have more than tripled and will continue to get multiples more expensive for the rest of our lives… which, ironically, jacks mortgage payments and property taxes and home insurance, which pushes more people into the rent trap. (How convenient for the deca-trillion-dollar hedge funds looking for tenants to milk.)
Once the technocrats crack self-driving cars, expect them to Airbnb (read: ruin) the car market, as suddenly every vehicle is now a business running 24/7 to taxi people around for maximal real-time profits.
Now that they monopolize all the resources, corporations will continue to price-test how much they can squeeze from you. If you thought $3 for a single hashbrown from McDonald’s was insane, wait until Wendys’ horrific new surge pricing becomes common practice with every single business.
(Don’t let people try to gaslight you by saying “It’s just supply and demand” and “The free market knows best” — corporations only get these sorts of pricing powers once they’ve achieved massive levels of supply-control… and politician-control.)
Remember your future:
You will rent the things you need.
You will pay top dollar at all times, thanks to AI pricing algorithms.
In case you’re wondering, this isn’t what capitalism’s founding father, Adam Smith, had in mind for his fancy new economic system.
He dreamed of a free market — that is, a market free from rent-seeking parasites like monopolists, for-profit banksters, and for-profit land-lorders.
[Rent-seeking is evil, but don’t get too judgey—if you haven’t divested of stocks and bonds that reap rents off the work of others, you’re complicit.]
Today, the vampires (banks, landlords, insurers, shareholders) are bleeding the real working productive economy dry, one monthly payment at a time.
Luckily, one tech company is pushing back.
Own-it-for-life again
37Signals is a good-weird company by today’s low standards:
They don’t have any investors or a board of directors or plans to sell.
They don’t sell customer data or even run targeted advertising.
They were remote when remote was unthinkable (and they’re pro-sleep.)
They invented the open-source framework that powers Shopify, Coinbase, GitHub, Airbnb, Kickstarter, Square, Twitch, and a bajillion other sites.
Their CEO, Jason Fried, literally re-wrote how millions of people work.
Like I said, good-weird.
Now they’ve launched a new company called ONCE, and its stated mission is to wreck the pay-every-month-forever-monopoly-model and usher in the post-SaaS era:
Their first product is called Campfire, which is a challenger to Slack, which is basically an over-hyped and impossibly overpriced office chat program.
I hope they absolutely destroy Slack, which can cost companies tens of thousands of dollars per year for a few lines of code.
After Slack, I hope they savage Salesforce, Zoom, and the Canadian income tax software cartel.
Then pillage Microsoft.
Then annihilate Adobe.
(Jason Fried, please do Final Draft as well — millions of screenwriters might just give you an Oscar for saving them a billion.)
I hope other leaders are inspired by 37Signals and bring the anti-subscription-serfdom model to their industries.
We need someone to blow up for-profit land-lording.
We need someone to nuke for-profit banking.
We need $10 cell phones with pay-for-usage-only anti-contracts.
We need houses that cost 2–3X the annual median income of a single earner again.
We need people to start businesses to drive down prices, not price-test the ceiling.
To do that, the rent-seekers must be eradicated.
Once the cement shoes get jackhammered off, the people can finally rise and breathe.
If we want real growth in human well-being, we need to economically undermine the very people who keep the people chained in serfdom.
Corporations want to own everything and rent it back to you at top dollar, wasting your health and time and creative energy so that a few hyper-elites can do stupid narcissistic stuff like throw $120 million pre-wedding parties.
Aren’t you surely worth more?
We need widespread stewardship, not centralized ownership.