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Dr Mike Yeadon's avatar

Sounds like a prison regime. No one owns that chipped plate & bent fork, so nobody takes any care of it.

How about a foot file. Is that leased? What is owned? Underwear? Anything?

I’m perfectly willing to use and own fewer things. That’s my preference rather than to borrow everything.

I have (or rather, had) a hobby of fixing things, from old machinery to decorating houses. In 1980, virtually no one hired a decorator. You did the best job you could or you left it as it was. We had many “ DIY stores”. Some people owned an increasing set of tools they knew how to use & maintain. I was one of those people.

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John Carter's avatar

They dearly want this sort of neo-feudal subscription model for everything (as you note, the irony of critiquing this model on Substack is obvious). Networked robotics certainly makes it technically feasible.

I wonder, though. At the same time, there are other, countervailing trends that will probably work against this. 3D printing, for example, will ultimately make it possible for individual households to manufacture a wide array of items from basic feedstocks. Insofar as the raw materials can be acquired locally or even simply recycled, that provides an impressive level of independence from extended supply chains.

Smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and other blockchain technologies can make transactions possible without the need of a centralized authority.

Solar power generation can make houses relatively energy independent, or at the very least less dependent on the grid.

Home gardens, particularly advanced ecologies such as permaculture and aquaculture, can generate a high number of calories from relatively small real estate footprints.

I could easily see two parallel societies emerging over the coming decades. One a hyper-controlled, surveilled, urban environment where everyone lives in pods, eats bugs, minds their social credit scores, owns nothing, and pretends to be happy about it (lest that reflect poorly on their social credit scores).

The other an ungovernable hinterland of armed rural communities that produce everything they need for themselves, confederate together in loose, nimble networks for mutual trade and defense, and pay absolutely no attention to the regulations of the urban technocrats.

I don't kid myself that the technocrats will be particularly happy about that situation. My assumption is that developments in military technology (especially the force-multiplying offensive capabilities of drone warfare) will prove to be an effective barrier to hard power even as 3D printing, blockchain, etc., serve as a bulwark against globalist soft power.

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