Try this. Look at what you paid for this month and ask what you own.
The music: rented. The software: rented. The movie you "bought" online: a license that can be revoked. The heated seats in some cars: a subscription. The tractor a farmer bought outright: locked, until the manufacturer's technician arrives.
What's the pattern?
I wrote in Radical Next that private property is considered by many scholars to be the cornerstone of civilization. It came with agriculture: settle, fence, own. And it expanded, eventually, to ideas, as intellectual property.
Now it's contracting again, for most of us, in a way that's almost invisible. Access is replacing ownership. Sometimes that's liberating. I lived a year off-grid with two outfits and I'm not sentimental about stuff. Owning less is often freedom.
But there's a difference between choosing to own less and being denied the option. When the thing you bought can be switched off, repaired only by its maker, or deleted from your library because a licensing deal expired, you didn't buy it. You rented it with extra steps.
The fight over this is already on. Right-to-repair laws are passing state by state. Farmers sued for the right to fix their own equipment. The pattern is the same one we've seen with every new form of property: the technology gets ahead, the rules catch up, and in between, whoever controls the terms controls the person.
What should leaders do now?
So, three things.
If you sell things: be honest about what the customer gets. "Buy" should mean own. If it means rent, say rent. The brands caught blurring that line will pay for it in trust.
If you buy things, for yourself or a company: ask what happens when the vendor disappears. Can you keep it? Fix it? Export it? If not, price that risk.
And support the rules that keep the choice open. Access is a fine model. Access with no alternative is a trap.
Ownership is being rewritten for the next era. Make sure you're in the room, not just on the terms of service.
What did you pay for this month that you couldn't take with you if the company vanished?
Related: When your customer is a bot, what is a brand?
- Sam Rad, Radical Next (2025), on private property and intellectual property.
- Right-to-repair legislation in U.S. states (e.g., New York Digital Fair Repair Act, 2022; Colorado agricultural equipment law, 2023).
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