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You will own nothing

We are all familiar with the phrase "you will own nothing and be happy".

It is often used as the signature of a looming new world order where all the power and control is centralised in the hands of a few and where the population at large is engineered into a state of subservience and passivity.

There are countless click-seekers on YouTube and other forms of social media that regularly leverage this phrase to get advertising dollars in their pockets but the reality is that there is some validity to what's being said.

Increasingly, we don't actually "own" the stuff we buy and although we may have physical posession of something, it is the manufacturer who continues to dictate exactly how, when and even "if" we can use that product.

The "right to repair" movement is a great example of just how customers are simply paying for a "right to posess" and not a right to own when they buy a lot of stuff these days. Some companies refused to provide spare parts or the information needed to repair their expensive products, thus putting users at the mercy of their own extortionate service charges or simply being forced to consign stuff to the garbage pile for the lack of what could be a 15-minute fix.

Now there's another problem...

With the rise of computerisation, a growing number of things we buy are no longer stand-alone devices.

Quite often, even something as simple as a security camera or wrist-worn health tracker becomes highly dependent on cloud-based services provided by the manufacturer.

This means that if/when the manufacturer decides that it's no longer profitable to keep running the servers that enable the product's functionality, those devices simply stop working.

If the company doesn't actually stop the service then they'll likely start charging an arm and a leg for that back-end, even though you bought a product that had no advertised extra charges associated with its use. It's a bait and switch.

We've seen a whole bunch of stuff being effectively "bricked" by its manufacturer of late -- leaving people forced to consign previously useful devices to the e-waste pile.

Surely these manufacturers should be required to either guarantee a level of back-end service for a predefined number of years, thus giving purchasers some surety, or they should be forced to make the devices such that the address of the server can be changed by the owner.

Now that most people have full-time internet connections, the concept of self-hosting a server to provide those lost server functions would make sense and vastly extend the working life of these orphaned products.

Surely, even if only to protect the environment from the rapidly rising tide of e-waste, manufacturers should be required by law to hand over the back-end code and build in the ability for self-hosted back-end services on all such devices, in the event that those cloud services are discontinued.

Amazon is currently one of the worst offenders and have recently announced that yet another product you may have recently purchased is headed for the waste bin. I doubt this will be the last such bricking we see from Amazon, as they undertake an agressive cost-cutting program to boost profits.

Hopefully someone will do some IP sniffing and build some code so that people can self-host the missing services -- although if they do, I would not put it past Amazon to sue for copyright infringement (all in the name of boosting profits of course).

The only way for consumers to push back against this trend towards manufacturers bricking unprofitable devices is to say "no" to such things. Don't buy anything that is reliant on cloud-based functionality unless the code for that functionality is held in escrow by a third party that will release it if the manufacturer shuts it down or goes out of business.

Ultimately it is the consumer that has the power but sadly, I fear that we're already seeing the era of passivity unfold before our very eyes and most folk won't be smart or brave enough to take a stand on this issue.

Will you?

Carpe Diem folks!

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