The Rented Life
Imagine a world where you don’t own anything. Everything you use, your house, car, laptop, mobile phone, and even your pets are rented! This ain’t some sci-fi story from an episode of Black Mirror, this is the new “reality”. The inevitable future.
Major corporations, worldwide are experiencing slowdowns in business growth. Consumption of their products has plateaued. They are simply, not selling “stuff” at the same rate as they used to. Why? Partly, this is due to us a human race, having reached the brink of what is possible to humanly consume. But mostly, this has to do with the fact that the targeted consumers of these products have already bought their fill of necessities and they won't consider buying more until what they already have “expires”!
So how do businesses work around this? They make more innovative, expensive, limited edition, exclusive stuff. They deliberately legacy-fi and expire tech. Look at the new iPhones for example, they are the most expensive mass-produced personal communicating devices in all of human history to date, but they don’t happen to have a headphone jack, just so Apple can pave the way for Air-Pods.
But even this won't cut it, everything has its limits and so does innovation, no matter how many billions they pour into R&D, major corporations are finding it difficult to entice buyers to upgrade, year on year.
The solution: Subscriptions!!!
Although the concept of renting a house is not foreign, due to the high costs of real estate, a car is something we usually take for granted. Due to depreciation, anyone with an average income in the west can afford a decent functional vehicle; although this may not be the case elsewhere in the world. That being said, in the not so distant future, Automobile manufacturers like Jaguar, Mercedes, and Volvo, are considering offering their products as a service, pay as you go packages if you will with an annual tiered subscription cost. As a result of this, you will never really own a car, customizations are merely surface depth charades, offered as mass market packages or easy fit add-ons. On the upside though, you will never have to bother about servicing or maintaining your vehicle ever again!
This is part of a larger trend being adopted by major hardware manufacturers, all over the world. It is all about increasing a customer LTV, or life time value. In a regular transaction, ownership of an asset is transferred. In the subscription model, a customer will never own the asset in question, it is just a commodity loaned by the manufacturer, for a monthly fee. For all intents and purposes, it never will be an asset. Today, this is happening for cars, imagine this happening for all your electronics, household appliances, clothes, etc. etc…. You will never own anything! no assets! Not even the money you earn will be yours. Remember in the age of digital, all currency will be virtual, whatever you think own, will be a reference to a record in some database, or electronic wallet somewhere in the universe that is the virtual world.
So yes, it will be a rented life. A virtual life, governed partly or entirely by trillion/billion dollar businesses! Will it be a good one? Of course, it will be. It is the future. But the question remains to be answered… are we living life the way we want? or are we just living a lie? are we just pawns living the life someone imagined for us? Is this all a giant computer simulation?
I think your guess is as good as mine.