May 16, 2022·edited May 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
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.
Borrow a pan? Ick! But notice the lack of 'joie de vivre'. It's not just a pan to people who derive satisfaction and joy from cooking. My mother is a master cook and baker. All self-taught. I learned there are so many specific types of pans, pots, dishes etc. as well as knives and so on to properly prepare a meal. We love our crepe and pasta makers. My daughter is 17 and has been using them for a couple of years now and there's VALUE in that kind of activity.
If you view food as just a function to fill up your stomach, then by all means, live like a hobo like Ida without happiness - she's not happy by the way. But to those of us who see food as a central feature in our lives (I'm of Mediterranean heritage), this is a hard pass.
my better half spends time in african war-zones providing medical assistance. she was telling me how they have no electricity, plumbing, or proper buildings there and I - perhaps a little obtusely - asked her why ever not? can't the guys there organize themselves?? her response was that no-one wanted to invest time or energy in making stuff because it just gets taken from them by the bad guys. Property ownership & rights are fundamental to civilization.
I hear you. It can be hard to leave things behind when they have sentimental value, especially.
This is one of the things that makes wealth accumulation hard for Xers and Millenialls, too. Moving every few years means that we have to solve the couch problem every few years. It's a significant expense that doesn't get talked about much.
You don't have to let them. We all know people who are way too invested in acquisitiveness. As I retired I've been downsizing, but that doesn't mean I want to live like a hobo. I've just been focused on owning things I need and use, with a few sentimental exceptions.
funny was just thinking today, Mike, about how I love our misshappen silverware and plate collection...that is a great distinction between the castes...!best from the chipped and stained end Portland Oregon
it’s actually very psychologically rewarding, the satisfaction from ‘do-it-yourself’ projects... no surprise they quit, minimized teaching kids auto shop, woodworking, sewing, ag, etc. in high school... as the skills, aptitude, lessons make the individual more independent.
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.
Read the Ida Auken piece in Forbes. She says exactly this, describing her hypothetical future, as a lament:
"My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages."
People arriving from radically different starting points see the possibility for parallel societies, but they code them differently. "Little self-supplying communities," how horrible!
Yep. They know that's the obvious play, and while I'm sure they've thought of lots of ways of trying to make it as difficult as possible - trying to price people out of owning land is right up there - they probably also know that it isn't something that can really be stopped.
Note also how little attention she devoted to the matter. "Little self-supplying communities". Oh? And how does that work? What's life like, there? And how do those communities relate to the urban environments, and to one another? She makes them sound like sleepy little hippie communes, when the truth is probably more like a global federation of tribes, armed to the teeth with cheap but very effective weaponry, fiercely jealous of their independence, and not at all disposed to look kindly on outside interference in their affairs. One can imagine the human pomeranians inhabiting the pod-stacks regarding them with nervous apprehension, the barbarians just belong the electronic gates, growing more numerous and intractable by the day....
At which point the tribes retaliate with distributed precision done strikes that cripple essential infrastructure. Think the attack on Saudi oil refineries a few years ago. Cheap, highly effective, and almost impossible to defend against. Especially for a highly centralized economic system.
Meanwhile, how many bombs does NATO need to drop to wipe out all those little villages? And since each one is self sufficient in the essentials, the massive redundancy built into the distributed economy means that bombing runs don't cripple them - they just piss them off. It's sticking one's dick into a hornet nest.
"Little self-supplying communities" sounds great to me. Surely there is an alternative that would allow that without all the militaristic claptrap.(I do realize the argument that the technocrats would not want to allow such an affront to exist, but still…)
Ha! I remember an econ class where the professor said, "Everybody's business is nobody's business." That frying pan delivered on-demand to your front door will be dirty and worn out. Anything you cook in it will stick like dog shit on a shoe. We're trying to go back to a communal system but forgetting the downfalls. It's like driving around in circles.
I still buy hard copy books, music CDs, and movies on DVD because I want to own them. Getting hard to find space for all that stuff though. Also, I think, like most big changes, younger people are going to find it easier to “subscribe” rather than buy. Likely because that’s all they are going to be able to afford. And lastly, I agree that ownership also helps one be more self sufficient. That’s why I think the property tax is so evil.
I download eBooks from a bunch of different places: Gutenberg, PirateBay, and so forth. I also know how to convert Amazon stuff to other formats that are tamper-proof.
You don't need a hard-copy to have a tamper-proof copy. (And I don't rely on the electricity grid, so I'm good if the lights go out for everyone else).
Someone does, of course, own that pasta maker. And that bicycle. And that apartment where you get thrown out of bed when they need to flip it over to make a conference room.
Just not you. Ever.
I think about that when I walk in my garden and my pastures and tend my livestock. I would view them all very differently if they could be confiscated from me, even temporarily, at a moment's notice at the whim of someone I cannot ever engage.
I guess I'd be one of the people in those abandoned 19th century villages (why 19th century? What happened to all the 20th century buildings?) in the "own nothing" story.
SAAS. It is not a coincidence that this started with software companies. Our elitist billionaires who caught a very lucky break to amass their wealth now believe that they know what is best for you. In fact, they know better than you do. Imagine that? In my wildest dreams I would never pretend to know what is best for any person other than myself. Unfortunately, this is a very effective business model that has been carried over from business to personal. Of course the leftist, elitist want to be's, hop right on this bandwagon. Some people like to cook and take personal pride in ownership. In fact, I would say that describes most people over 40. However, we have raised our kids (not all but probably most) to be lazy and entitled. Why cook, why mow the lawn ... you can have your food delivered and the lawn is now a rental. That gives me more time to stare at my phone. This does not end well.
May 16, 2022·edited May 16, 2022Liked by Chris Bray
Widespread ownership of productive capital, or wealth that produces, has declined to dangerous levels. When a man owns his land, his tools, his workshop, his life is full of risk. He annually faces ruin because when things fall down they often land on him. Debt is a sword with two edges. If he can't leverage his productive assets he can't manage them efficiently. If he is unwise or unlucky debt ruins him.
The property settlement following the West's emergence from feudalism developed a stout subject, later citizen, who had a deep interest, even investment, in self government. Hapless was the man who went broke, but not hopeless. There were ladders out of the holes. Ladders a man could climb with his arms and legs. There is great resilience in simplicity. A man's labor was always heavily dependent on his manual labor.
The Judeo-Christian weltanschauung kept property in perspective. Coveting your neighbor's stuff was a sin. Stealing it was a no no. An idea that man was more than matter. He had a spirit that was supposed to rule over the material. There was always the temptation to create a Manichean dichotomy where the spirit was good and the material was bad. No property AND no spirit is a prison filled with nihilist.
A merely material man that rejects the stewardship of property is not going to find life has never been better. He will find himself descending into a living hell.
I was recently in DC and decided to rent one of the electric scooters that were lying around all over the place. Most were out of juice or broken. Then when I found one it cost me $30 for like 20 minutes? People treat those things like junk, which they soon become.
Now I'm torn. I was so close to becoming a founding member. I want that warm and fuzzy feeling so bad. If you write a book do we get our own copy or are we going to share?
This Auken nutjob falls off the WEF "Own Nothing" turnip cart at the start of para 4...
>>> "Sometimes I use ***my*** bike when I go to see some of my friends."
So Auken hires frying pans, but has her own bike.
Just goes to show, these fucking knuckleheads do not have the cognitive chops to construct an internally-consistent narrative.
(Not for nothin': nobody gets to use MY Tefal Ingenio nest of pots and frypans. Not even The Lovely)
Like all WEF Stooges, Ida Auken needs to be prevented from holding any government or senior-bureaucratic role, EVER.
Those WEF Stooges who currently hold such roles - Macron, Ardern, Trudeau, BoJo - must be rooted out and expropriated, on the basis that their current salaries (and entitlements) have been obtained fraudulently... in that they failed to disclose that the actual objective of their incumbency was to further a set of anti-democratic aims dictated by a bunch of Eurotrash.
As the 'old fsrt' here, may I once more invite you to read "Brave New World" written in 1939. That is where all of the sheeple that have escaped their covid destiny so far, are running toward. This is just the next iteration. It will be averted, but the sheeple will be so proud of escaping the axe they will prance about, bragging of their foresight and cunning and welcome "just a tiniest bit of extra love and care from the Party" and that's the way it was/is and shall be until ???
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.
Yeah, I don't own a lot of stuff, and I don't want to. I like to travel light. But not this way!
Borrow a pan? Ick! But notice the lack of 'joie de vivre'. It's not just a pan to people who derive satisfaction and joy from cooking. My mother is a master cook and baker. All self-taught. I learned there are so many specific types of pans, pots, dishes etc. as well as knives and so on to properly prepare a meal. We love our crepe and pasta makers. My daughter is 17 and has been using them for a couple of years now and there's VALUE in that kind of activity.
If you view food as just a function to fill up your stomach, then by all means, live like a hobo like Ida without happiness - she's not happy by the way. But to those of us who see food as a central feature in our lives (I'm of Mediterranean heritage), this is a hard pass.
For cooks, I see your tools are every bit as important to the art & work as my mechanical & woodworking tools were.
my better half spends time in african war-zones providing medical assistance. she was telling me how they have no electricity, plumbing, or proper buildings there and I - perhaps a little obtusely - asked her why ever not? can't the guys there organize themselves?? her response was that no-one wanted to invest time or energy in making stuff because it just gets taken from them by the bad guys. Property ownership & rights are fundamental to civilization.
As Tyler Durden said, the things you own end up owning you.
But the people who own the stuff you use own you even more.
I’m not sure he’s right.
I’ve left everything I own behind in UK.
As I don’t expect to return, I’ve sold or given away everything, except two 1977 motorcycles, one I’ve owned since 1978.
The guy I gave my tools too burst into tears & said he’d look after them for me. So I misted up, too.
I try not to think about it all. It took decades to assemble but in the end, you go & it doesn’t. So this is just by way of getting used to it.
I hear you. It can be hard to leave things behind when they have sentimental value, especially.
This is one of the things that makes wealth accumulation hard for Xers and Millenialls, too. Moving every few years means that we have to solve the couch problem every few years. It's a significant expense that doesn't get talked about much.
"the things you own end up owning you"
You don't have to let them. We all know people who are way too invested in acquisitiveness. As I retired I've been downsizing, but that doesn't mean I want to live like a hobo. I've just been focused on owning things I need and use, with a few sentimental exceptions.
This is the best approach.
funny was just thinking today, Mike, about how I love our misshappen silverware and plate collection...that is a great distinction between the castes...!best from the chipped and stained end Portland Oregon
it’s actually very psychologically rewarding, the satisfaction from ‘do-it-yourself’ projects... no surprise they quit, minimized teaching kids auto shop, woodworking, sewing, ag, etc. in high school... as the skills, aptitude, lessons make the individual more independent.
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.
Read the Ida Auken piece in Forbes. She says exactly this, describing her hypothetical future, as a lament:
"My biggest concern is all the people who do not live in our city. Those we lost on the way. Those who decided that it became too much, all this technology. Those who felt obsolete and useless when robots and AI took over big parts of our jobs. Those who got upset with the political system and turned against it. They live different kind of lives outside of the city. Some have formed little self-supplying communities. Others just stayed in the empty and abandoned houses in small 19th century villages."
People arriving from radically different starting points see the possibility for parallel societies, but they code them differently. "Little self-supplying communities," how horrible!
Yep. They know that's the obvious play, and while I'm sure they've thought of lots of ways of trying to make it as difficult as possible - trying to price people out of owning land is right up there - they probably also know that it isn't something that can really be stopped.
Note also how little attention she devoted to the matter. "Little self-supplying communities". Oh? And how does that work? What's life like, there? And how do those communities relate to the urban environments, and to one another? She makes them sound like sleepy little hippie communes, when the truth is probably more like a global federation of tribes, armed to the teeth with cheap but very effective weaponry, fiercely jealous of their independence, and not at all disposed to look kindly on outside interference in their affairs. One can imagine the human pomeranians inhabiting the pod-stacks regarding them with nervous apprehension, the barbarians just belong the electronic gates, growing more numerous and intractable by the day....
Sounds awesome to me.
Right up until NATO drops the bomb on them...
At which point the tribes retaliate with distributed precision done strikes that cripple essential infrastructure. Think the attack on Saudi oil refineries a few years ago. Cheap, highly effective, and almost impossible to defend against. Especially for a highly centralized economic system.
Meanwhile, how many bombs does NATO need to drop to wipe out all those little villages? And since each one is self sufficient in the essentials, the massive redundancy built into the distributed economy means that bombing runs don't cripple them - they just piss them off. It's sticking one's dick into a hornet nest.
"Little self-supplying communities" sounds great to me. Surely there is an alternative that would allow that without all the militaristic claptrap.(I do realize the argument that the technocrats would not want to allow such an affront to exist, but still…)
As the saying goes, if you want peace....
Morlocks and Eloi
Was inspired by this topic to write up my thoughts on military technology and social change:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/how-weaponry-organises-society
Ha! I remember an econ class where the professor said, "Everybody's business is nobody's business." That frying pan delivered on-demand to your front door will be dirty and worn out. Anything you cook in it will stick like dog shit on a shoe. We're trying to go back to a communal system but forgetting the downfalls. It's like driving around in circles.
I still buy hard copy books, music CDs, and movies on DVD because I want to own them. Getting hard to find space for all that stuff though. Also, I think, like most big changes, younger people are going to find it easier to “subscribe” rather than buy. Likely because that’s all they are going to be able to afford. And lastly, I agree that ownership also helps one be more self sufficient. That’s why I think the property tax is so evil.
I still buy hard copy media because I fear losing access to it or waking up one day to discover the words have been changed.
Me too. I need the physical objects.
I download eBooks from a bunch of different places: Gutenberg, PirateBay, and so forth. I also know how to convert Amazon stuff to other formats that are tamper-proof.
You don't need a hard-copy to have a tamper-proof copy. (And I don't rely on the electricity grid, so I'm good if the lights go out for everyone else).
Someone does, of course, own that pasta maker. And that bicycle. And that apartment where you get thrown out of bed when they need to flip it over to make a conference room.
Just not you. Ever.
I think about that when I walk in my garden and my pastures and tend my livestock. I would view them all very differently if they could be confiscated from me, even temporarily, at a moment's notice at the whim of someone I cannot ever engage.
I guess I'd be one of the people in those abandoned 19th century villages (why 19th century? What happened to all the 20th century buildings?) in the "own nothing" story.
SAAS. It is not a coincidence that this started with software companies. Our elitist billionaires who caught a very lucky break to amass their wealth now believe that they know what is best for you. In fact, they know better than you do. Imagine that? In my wildest dreams I would never pretend to know what is best for any person other than myself. Unfortunately, this is a very effective business model that has been carried over from business to personal. Of course the leftist, elitist want to be's, hop right on this bandwagon. Some people like to cook and take personal pride in ownership. In fact, I would say that describes most people over 40. However, we have raised our kids (not all but probably most) to be lazy and entitled. Why cook, why mow the lawn ... you can have your food delivered and the lawn is now a rental. That gives me more time to stare at my phone. This does not end well.
Thanks Chris, outstanding article as always.
Widespread ownership of productive capital, or wealth that produces, has declined to dangerous levels. When a man owns his land, his tools, his workshop, his life is full of risk. He annually faces ruin because when things fall down they often land on him. Debt is a sword with two edges. If he can't leverage his productive assets he can't manage them efficiently. If he is unwise or unlucky debt ruins him.
The property settlement following the West's emergence from feudalism developed a stout subject, later citizen, who had a deep interest, even investment, in self government. Hapless was the man who went broke, but not hopeless. There were ladders out of the holes. Ladders a man could climb with his arms and legs. There is great resilience in simplicity. A man's labor was always heavily dependent on his manual labor.
The Judeo-Christian weltanschauung kept property in perspective. Coveting your neighbor's stuff was a sin. Stealing it was a no no. An idea that man was more than matter. He had a spirit that was supposed to rule over the material. There was always the temptation to create a Manichean dichotomy where the spirit was good and the material was bad. No property AND no spirit is a prison filled with nihilist.
A merely material man that rejects the stewardship of property is not going to find life has never been better. He will find himself descending into a living hell.
If her eyes looked any blanker, they would just be holes...
Indeed. Very strange.
They are not focused, one looks to be....'glass'. Swear.
I was recently in DC and decided to rent one of the electric scooters that were lying around all over the place. Most were out of juice or broken. Then when I found one it cost me $30 for like 20 minutes? People treat those things like junk, which they soon become.
When I still lived in NYC, Citibank was as proud of its collaboration with the city on Citibikes as a 6-year old with a loose tooth.
They were pieces of shit that were routinely stolen and destroyed and the POS systems were constantly hacked.
Shocking! (Not at all.)
The last time I was in DC I rented a rowboat and went out on the Potomac for hours-absolutely glorious. However, that was in 1993.
That's the big bonus of renting everything, when it's your turn, it's crap right out of the box. 👍 Sounds fun, huh?
Denmark (and Sweden) have plenty of social problems they should be sorting out. WEF is a dangerous communist organisation.
Now I'm torn. I was so close to becoming a founding member. I want that warm and fuzzy feeling so bad. If you write a book do we get our own copy or are we going to share?
You will receive a signed copy of the book, but the signature will rotate on a rental basis.
Can I also rent a "Tell Me How This Ends" coffee mug?
I'm willing to share it with everybody and stuff.
This Auken nutjob falls off the WEF "Own Nothing" turnip cart at the start of para 4...
>>> "Sometimes I use ***my*** bike when I go to see some of my friends."
So Auken hires frying pans, but has her own bike.
Just goes to show, these fucking knuckleheads do not have the cognitive chops to construct an internally-consistent narrative.
(Not for nothin': nobody gets to use MY Tefal Ingenio nest of pots and frypans. Not even The Lovely)
Like all WEF Stooges, Ida Auken needs to be prevented from holding any government or senior-bureaucratic role, EVER.
Those WEF Stooges who currently hold such roles - Macron, Ardern, Trudeau, BoJo - must be rooted out and expropriated, on the basis that their current salaries (and entitlements) have been obtained fraudulently... in that they failed to disclose that the actual objective of their incumbency was to further a set of anti-democratic aims dictated by a bunch of Eurotrash.
Good catch! Very selfish of this monster to own "her" bike!
"dekulaked" i.e. de-Christianified
As the 'old fsrt' here, may I once more invite you to read "Brave New World" written in 1939. That is where all of the sheeple that have escaped their covid destiny so far, are running toward. This is just the next iteration. It will be averted, but the sheeple will be so proud of escaping the axe they will prance about, bragging of their foresight and cunning and welcome "just a tiniest bit of extra love and care from the Party" and that's the way it was/is and shall be until ???
This is why there is a First and Second Amendment.
Humans fundamentally hate sharing. It’s the only thing GC that’s saving us now.
just had a 6 yr old tell me that she doesn’t like sharing... uhoh.