There's No Rain on the Internet
A good friend of mine just made an observation:
“We don’t have profit seeking capitalists anymore. They had a moral compass. Usually a fucked one but they had one. Now we have rent-seeking post-capitalists.”
If you ask anyone around my age or a bit younger (at least, one who wasn’t born with a silver spoon massaging their gums) which category of human they hate the most, they’ll probably answer landlords. See, most of us still rent the roofs over our heads. I don’t need to go into detail about all this because, frankly, there’s a million articles and videos on how the housing crisis and cost of living has fucked pretty much anyone who’s a millennial or younger.
Like many people my age, I still haemorrhage money renting each week, money that doesn’t buy me anything tangible, it merely keeps the rain off my head while the owner of the shoebox I live gets richer.
Different cultures have different names for the kind of people whose income is primarily or exclusively by owning property and charging others to use it. Here in Australia, for instance, we call them absolute fucking shitcunts.
Now, that’s bad enough, but something else began to occur to me.
The Information Superhighway
There’s been a lot of discussions lately about how the internet has changed. I’m not just talking about terms like enshittification, but about the fundamental nature of the internet. Cultural critics (by which I mean “YouTubers”) are posting videos like “Why the Internet Sucks Now” or “The Future is here, and it sucks”.
What they’re (rightly) complaining about is that we went from web sites and the internet generally being a distributed and personal thing, to corporate walled gardens.
There’s been a similar shift in video game development, with a move towards what in the industry we call (while the bile rises in our stomachs) “Games-As-A-Service”. Regardless of the game’s initial cost, it’s essentially a term for games that update regularly and hope that its player-base spend more money regularly on whatever the new content being added provides.
What I’m getting at is this:
A simpler, more holistic way to think of the way the world has shifted for the worse in the past few decades is this: not only have the cuntiest of people, landlords, increased in number and power…but in jealousy of their general awfulness and money-making potential almost every other capitalist sort has become a landlord too.
Can’t sell a product online? Make it free and then squeeze money out of people any way you can while they occupy that space.
Every digital business is a rent-seeker now. Whether it’s producing locked-in walled-garden smartphone ecosystems or luring people into a free online service before the process of clamping a vice to their wallets begins, it all comes down to this: charging you (or otherwise obtaining money from you) by letting you occupy spaces they control.
Don’t Rent What You Don’t Need To
I’m not standing behind a podium saying all this like it’s some sage wisdom that nobody’s ever thought of before. I’m mostly scribbling it down on this Sunday morning to make this point:
Think of how much you fucking hate landlords.
Unlike the meatspace, where having a roof to keep the rain off your head is required and where most of us have little choice but to rent… there’s no excuse for that online.
If you’re able, get the fuck off bullshit corporate platforms seeking rent from you as early and as often as you’re able. Before their disgusting corporate fangs get too deep into your flesh.
(This post may partly have been inspired in part by some goings-on on one of the current twitter clones.)