You’ll Own Everything and Be Happy

You were never meant to rent your life. It’s time to build and own it!

“You’ll own nothing and be happy.”

Depending on who you ask, it was either a bold prediction, a dystopian warning, or one of the worst marketing lines ever written. First made infamous by the World Economic Forum, it captured something many were already feeling — a quiet sense that the world was slipping out of reach.

For a generation priced out of home ownership, carrying record debt, and renting their tools, their time, and often their peace of mind, it wasn’t just a slogan. It was an insult.

Because the problem isn’t owning nothing.
It’s being told you’ll like it.

We’re no longer customers; we’re subscribers to life. The software we use to work, the cars we drive, the devices in our pockets — all leased back to us in exchange for control we no longer hold.

I pay Microsoft every year for Word and Excel. Not for AI copilots or cloud features — just to keep using the same tools I’ve used for a decade. What was once a one-off purchase is now an annual fee. Miss a payment and you lose access. That isn’t innovation; it’s dependency.

Apple plays the same game. The iPhone upgrade cycle convinces us we’re “owning” our device when we’re really just renting a moment of status. Trade it in, pay again, start over. Ownership becomes performance.

Even cars are now caught in the subscription trap. BMW and Audi lock heated seats behind paywalls. The hardware’s there — you’ve just got to rent the warmth. You don’t buy a car anymore; you buy permission to use it.

And that’s the real story.
It’s not just inconvenient. It’s systemic.

Cory Doctorow has a word for it — enshittification — the natural life cycle of digital platforms.

They begin by delighting users: open, creative, community-minded. Then the focus shifts to advertisers and data brokers. And once dominance is secure, they squeeze both sides for every drop of value. Everyone loses except the platform.

It’s happening everywhere now — slowly, visibly.

Ownership has been redefined, not as empowerment but as liability.
We’re encouraged not to buy but to subscribe; not to own but to rent; not to install but to “access,” for as long as the licence lasts.

True ownership, by contrast, is sovereignty. It’s the right to decide when to upgrade, not being nudged or forced into it. It’s choosing tools that endure instead of cycling through built-in obsolescence. It’s the freedom to step away from the “new” without penalty.

When something is yours, you decide when it changes. That matters.

Because in today’s techno-feudal order, we don’t own our tools, our data, or even our digital selves. We rent them back — often at interest — from lords in lanyards who’ve never built anything with their own hands.

It’s a system that looks efficient on paper but is quietly corrosive.
And yet, it isn’t irreversible.

There’s a better model waiting — one built from the ground up, not handed down.
And this is what that could look like:

What They Took From Us

Ownership, as we once understood it, has been turned on its head.

Homes are no longer homes; they’re investment vehicles. What was once the foundation of family life has become a speculative asset, traded by corporations that treat shelter as yield. In many cities, owning a home isn’t just difficult — it’s structurally out of reach.

Jobs no longer offer stability either. They rent our attention by the hour, but even that’s conditional. One algorithm change, one policy shift, and you’re expendable. Contracts are short, benefits are optional, and the work itself feels more like a subscription — we pay in time and energy simply to stay connected.

The commons have gone the same way. Land, water, energy, public transport, education, health — they’ve drifted from shared inheritance to private portfolio. You don’t own your power, your data, or even your right to repair. Each has been fenced off behind licences, DRM, and terms of service. Life has become something you rent back, one feature at a time.

And all the while, it’s sold to us as progress — that frictionless convenience justifies the cost, that shareholder value will somehow trickle down into wellbeing.

But there’s a hidden toll. This model keeps the population in a low-grade state of alert — never fully safe, never fully settled. When your rent, utilities, or food costs can spike overnight, how do you ever relax into a sense of agency?

This isn’t about utopia, or getting everything for free. It’s about designing the essentials — housing, energy, infrastructure — around people, not profit. Because while these remain privatised, they are structurally extractive. They exist to serve balance sheets, not citizens.

And that’s the quiet tragedy: we’ve stopped being citizens at all.
We’ve become tenants of life.

Perhaps it’s time we stopped accepting that.

What Ownership Could Look Like

What if ownership itself could be reimagined?
Not as a zero-sum contest — mine versus yours — but as stewardship: a balance of care, agency, and contribution.

Ownership isn’t the problem.
Extractive ownership is — the kind that hoards, dominates, or withholds. True ownership is rooted in place, people, and purpose. It builds rather than drains.

Imagine turning eighteen and being granted a small piece of land. Not as charity, but as a rite of passage — a space to steward for life. You could build a home on it, or join a housing co-op and fold your plot into a shared project in return for a well-made apartment. You wouldn’t pay market rent, just contribute to construction and upkeep.

It’s not fantasy.
Vancouver’s community land trusts already do this — creating non-market housing designed for intergenerational stability, not speculation.

And imagine if that land weren’t bound by outdated zoning laws.

Tokyo’s light-touch zoning has produced a living urban patchwork: street-level shops, maker studios, homes above workshops, cafés opening into courtyards. Instead of sterile zones, you get organic neighbourhoods. When land use is flexible, life becomes flexible. You see a need, you meet it. You want to teach, you open your door. You want to make, you build.

You don’t own the land itself — you steward it.
You own what you create. And when you pass, your next of kin has first refusal: take it on and release their own, or let it return to the commons for reassignment.

Stewardship, not speculation.
That’s the shift.

Now imagine the commons — water, energy, food systems, transport, even internet infrastructure — held in community ownership rather than corporate control. Operated by citizen cooperatives, with councils providing oversight and open accountability.

Not a token ballot every five years, but active, digital democracy: local referenda when needed, community vetoes where warranted, transparent decision-making. Estonia and Switzerland already show how it can work.

You’d still pay for these services — fairly, because they’d be designed around people, not profit.

Enterprise wouldn’t vanish; it would strengthen. With decentralised manufacturing and small-scale replicators, production could return to the local level. Instead of importing low-value goods, communities could design, make, and sell within their own micro-economies.

Every business would operate under a local licence — not as red tape, but as accountability. If a company became exploitative or damaging, the community could withdraw its licence. That’s not bureaucracy; it’s responsibility.

This is a culture built on contribution over extraction — a form of localism born from care, not isolation.

Because ownership was never just about possession. It’s about participation.

And this isn’t theory. It’s already happening in small experiments and forward-thinking towns — places where people stopped waiting for permission.

To own in this sense doesn’t mean rejecting technology or heading off-grid. It means designing systems that serve human beings first — not algorithms, not quarterly targets, not distant shareholders.

It means agency.
And it means that what you build, what you give, and what you leave behind, still matters.

Self-Governing Communities

Let’s zoom out.

Picture a region made up of smaller, self-governing communities — around 150,000 people each. Big enough for diversity, innovation, and economic depth, yet still small enough for social coherence and mutual accountability. Each would hold its own commons, manage its own services, and develop a cultural rhythm shaped by the people who live there.

Within these communities, healthcare, education, and transport wouldn’t be remote bureaucracies or outsourced contracts. They’d be run by the people who actually use them — teachers, nurses, drivers, administrators — professionals rooted in place and informed by the context of those they serve. When you live among the people you serve, incentives change: efficiency isn’t about cutting corners; it’s about keeping trust.

Every business — from local cafés to software firms to delivery cooperatives — would operate under a community licence. The purpose isn’t restriction but alignment. The licence affirms that enterprise exists within, not above, its social environment.

If a company exploits its workers, pollutes its surroundings, or behaves in bad faith, the community can suspend or withdraw that licence. It’s not bureaucracy for its own sake; it’s civic hygiene — a mechanism that keeps markets compatible with ethics.

That’s what sovereignty could look like in practice: not slogans about independence, but everyday accountability built into the system’s design.

Private enterprise wouldn’t vanish under this model. It would evolve.
Extractive structures — where profit is siphoned off to distant shareholders — would give way to regenerative ones, where value circulates locally.

A technology company, for instance, could partner with manufacturers in each territory to assemble laptops or phones on-site. That approach creates jobs, sustains skills, and ensures taxes are paid where the work happens — not parked in offshore ledgers.

The principle isn’t punitive taxation. It’s reciprocity — a fair contribution in exchange for access to shared infrastructure, public services, and local talent. The economy becomes a living ecosystem again, where success feeds back into the soil that produced it.

Governance would follow the same logic. Instead of democracy reduced to a five-year pantomime of slogans and polling days, participation becomes continuous — a normal part of civic life. Inspired by Estonia’s digital democracy and Switzerland’s frequent referenda, citizens could propose, vote on, and track decisions in real time. Accountability wouldn’t depend on trust; it would be coded into the design.

And crucially, this wouldn’t pave the way for centralised Digital IDs or the machinery of social credit. The model relies on digital authentication, not surveillance — the same principle as your online banking app, where verification happens locally, privately, and securely. It’s identity confirmed without identity traded.

Gibraltar already offers a glimpse of what this looks like in practice. While not a full self-governing community in this sense, its small scale and partial autonomy give it unusual resilience. In April 2025, when most of Spain suffered a national blackout, Gibraltar stayed online. Power, data, and public services continued uninterrupted — not through luck, but through systems built close to home and designed for the territory’s own needs.

This is governance by design: not the inheritance of broken institutions, nor the rule of technocrats, but human-scale communities capable of meeting their own needs and shaping their own future.

Contribution Over Extraction

In a healthy ecosystem, everything gives something back.
Trees don’t hoard sunlight; rivers don’t invoice the valleys they nourish. Nature circulates value — and that’s what keeps it alive.

What if our economy worked the same way?
What if the guiding question shifted from how much can I take? to what can I give — and still thrive?

This isn’t about self-denial. You can still earn well, travel, and build something remarkable. But success doesn’t need to come at the cost of someone else’s stability or dignity.

When value circulates, systems strengthen. They become healthier, more resilient, more human. When value is hoarded, they decay. Soil dries out. Water stagnates. Trust erodes.

We feel this in our bodies and our towns — in that quiet brittleness beneath modern life. It isn’t that people are broken. It’s that the systems we live in were never built to nourish us.

Maybe it’s time to build ones that do.

How We Regain Our Sovereignty

This isn’t a call to revolution. No barricades. No palaces to storm.
It’s about building something new — in parallel.

Change doesn’t require collapse. It requires permission — or the courage to act without waiting for it.

All it takes is one government, one territory, to say yes.
Grant a plot of land. Let us pilot a Self-Governing Community.
Keep it within national law, but designate it as a special economic zone — one with its own tax model, local licensing, and stewardship of the commons.

We don’t need subsidies; only the space to prove it works.

Let us build our own water systems, grow our food, and power our homes from sun and sea. Let us manage our own data, elect our own councils, and license enterprises that reflect our values.

No coercion. No ideology. We’ll attract, not extract.
And when people come — because they will — we’ll build a better life together.

When a community grows beyond 150,000 people, it won’t centralise power; it will replicate. Another plot, another council, another rhythm. In a hundred years there could be hundreds; in two hundred, thousands — each rooted in its own culture and land, yet connected by a shared ethic of contribution, agency, and care.

Perhaps we don’t need to own everything.
But we do need to own this moment — and plant the seed of what comes next.