Meet Your Laptop and Printer's New Landlord
Meet Your Laptop and Printer's New Landlord
Welcome to the hellish world of subscription serfdom
I don’t see many ads.
That’s because I live in a small Victorian town with no billboards, I don’t own a cell phone, and I have a fortress of ad blockers to keep me safe from the ballistic battery of unending ads.
There are so few sources of ads in my life that on the rare occasion my wife and I watch something on TV while visiting family, we drive my mother-in-law crazy by commenting in real-time about all the emotional and psychological manipulation.
As Seth Godin said: “All marketers are liars.”
Occasionally, though, an online ad somehow sneaks through my filters, which means I pay it particularly close attention.
Here’s what I recently saw:
As we discussed earlier this month, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a giant corporatist scam — the monopolization of software ownership in order to reap perpetual rents.
Now, a company called HardSoft Computers (🤮) wants to do the same thing with hardware.
Devices-as-a-Service (Daas) means you never actually get to own your laptop, desktop, phone, or tablet… you just get to pay weekly or monthly to rent it forever.
As we’ve discussed countless times before, every time a product gets turned into an investment product, prices skyrocket.
And it makes sense — if an investor can sell you a laptop for $1,000, or they can rent it to you for $99/month for three years, they’ll make triple the money.
When products become rentable, prices inevitably rise.
Which creates a doom loop.
Prices rise → fewer people can afford to buy outright → more demand for renting → rent prices rise → buy prices rise → repeat.
HardSoft isn’t the only company that wants to make you a renter for life
Hewlett Packard (remember them?) is getting in on the rent-seeking device-leasing game, too.
Now, they’re monopolizing printers and offering “printer subscriptions.”
I told you years ago this would happen.
Netflix and the other streamers monopolize cultural content and don’t allow people to own their favorite movies anymore — you have to pay for life.
Spotify is killing the ability to own music.
Toyota, Mercedes, and others are making you pay monthly to use some of the features in your own car.
HardSoft and HP want to financialize devices.
Land-lorders and Airbnb have obviously already financialized shelter and have sent housing costs (and homelessness) soaring.
Friends, THIS WILL NOT STOP IN OUR LIFETIME UNTIL WE STOP IT.
There is coming a day when corporations will monopolize all global resources and everyday people will have no choice but to slave night and day to rent everything:
You will rent your house
You will rent your transportation
You will rent your furniture including mattresses
You will rent your appliances
You will rent your devices
You will rent your shoes
As the elitist World Economic Forum predicts:
You will own nothing and you will be happy.
And do you know what’s really crazy?
The rich think this is awesome!
The rich love renting
Elon Musk famously only rents penthouses and mansions.
Actresses on the Oscar red carpet famously rent jewelry.
The rich love to rent luxury cars, yachts, and jets.
The rich even want to rent art.
They find dubiously legal ways to write off these leases as business expenses and jump from product to product to product while using the short-term savings to hoard more income-producing assets.
But what works for jet-setting playboys and rootless billionaire wanderers isn’t what works for the actual wealth-creating working class.
Particularly those tied to jobs with physical locations.
The rich are trying to sell the poor on the narrative that they, too, shouldn’t want to own anything.
But then there’s the quiet truth they don’t say out loud:
The rich are renting from themselves.
Because the rich are the shareholder class.
They’re the beneficiaries of all that rent money.
They own the hedge funds that hoard millions of rental properties.
They own Mercedes stock and HP and HardSoft and all the other rent-seeking vampires out there.
As we’ve previously discussed, Queen Elizabeth II once owned a company that hoarded furniture and rented it to poor people.
These people are sociopaths, and while they personally rent and engineer a system that is slowly but surely forcing everyone else to rent, they’re ultimately paying rent to themselves and getting a taxpayer-funded tax write-off for doing so.
Hoarding assets isn’t new
It’s called feudalism.
The rich and powerful monopolized all the resources to the point that the weak and poor had no choice but to sell themselves into generational slavery — charmingly re-branded by the parasitic inbred British aristocracy as “serfdom”—in order to survive.
We’re entering the great reset to serfdom.
Prices will continue to rise.
People will have no choice but to rent products.
Financialized products skyrocket in price as investors swoop in.
Rental prices rise until they eclipse the previous purchase price.
Wonder why the next generation feels hopeless?
Yesterday my son and I were at the grocery store and the twenty-something checkout girl looked exhausted. I asked her how she was doing.
“I’m exhausted. I worked all day Saturday, all day Sunday, and I’m working full-time all week plus as much overtime as they’ll give me.”
“What are you saving for?” I asked.
“Saving? I’m just trying to afford the cost of living. Rent is ruining my life.”
“What’s your escape plan?”
She sighed and almost teared up. “I honestly don’t know.”
The sad truth is that the asset-monopolizing parasite shareholder class sees her and you and I as serfs to be milked for rents until the day we are no longer economically viable.
And the new subscription serfdom economy is just getting started.
Take five minutes right now to put down all your devices and distractions and ask yourself:
How can humanity reverse this hellish course?
Which laws and taxes would need to be implemented to de-incentivize this sort of evil behavior?
Which leaders and parties would actually stand up for the people and get this done?
In what ways am I profiting from the current system?
What is my role in creating the world I want to live in?