One of our Lizard-lords once said that in the future,
You’ll own nothing and be happy about it.
Some men see other men only as a thing to be ruled. Some men, somewhere along the way got the idea that the world was something to steal; that they are the farmers and we are the cattle. They promise to feed us, give us safe stables, while we provide the milk, and are fattened for the slaughter. For, they preach, it is a known fact and well accepted by all the great minds that cattle are not capable of farming, of owning their own estate. For slaves have no right to be self-ruled free men.
What’s all this then: Digital Sovereignty is the concept that your tech exists for you, and not that you exist for the technology. Your hardware is that, your hardware. You shouldn’t have pay rent to use it. Your software (and here is the true rub) is actually your software, and you shouldn’t have to pay rent to use it. This is the thesis of digital sovereignty. Own your own technological estate.
It’s been quite some time we’ve had these computers; they’ve really taken over the world. As they’ve grown, their power has grown, and their ubiquitous presence. The plumber now finds his next leaky pipe, not from the paper, not from the herald, but from the computer. Your car is now more computer than car; some even have started dating their computers (and we are told by the Japanese not to notice or judge). But with all this computing, some of us have started to feel that we are the computed.
All these services are tracking our thoughts and actions. Apparently I must log into my car. We are pushed onto endless subscriptions, to run software we cannot own on hardware that is supposedly ours, yet we cannot modify without legal consequence; we are locked out of our own devices, unable to install what is ours by divine right, what is withheld from us for “safety”.
My wife and I went to buy a cat from a breeder. We went to buy a cat. As in the cat would move from the possession of the seller to our possession. Well, the breeder and I apparently don’t share the same dictionary. She pulls the contract: terms upon terms! Should we decide to sell the cat, we must sell to her first! Should she think that we are bad owners, she may repossess the cat back with no refund! She had visitation rights to the cat. Should she sue us for violation of the contract (solely upon her discretion, of course), we must pay all her legal fees. When we say buy, we mean ownership; when she say buy, she means she’ll issue a temporary license to access the cat which may be revoked at any time at her discretion.
Sovereignty is the ability to do what one wants with one’s property, not being subject to the will of another. Now, I’m no godless pagan warlock — we are all subject to the law of God, and will stand at the judgement. But these sellers got it in their heads along the way that commerce is to be done according to the standard of a divorced crazy cat woman, and we all must stand before the judgment seat of ${LIZARD_CORPORATION}.
Rented Tools
From the counsels of eternity past, when our first fathers fought the giants, it’s been debated whether one must cut costs, or increase costs to increase revenue. The baker bakes less when his buns have less to pay for. But if he must bake, he ought to invest in equipment to bake more when he bakes: more bake; less time. But if the equipment which he purchases cannot be purchased, but rented, then he truly can never stop baking, because he must now bake to pay for baking!
If he was born to bake — and only bake: if he should sleep and live in his bakery, it is then good and right that he only profits enough to pay for his act of baking. But should he ever desire to spend a day not baking, perhaps to take a wife, to help his neighbor, to preach the Gospel, to ride a bike: he finds that he cannot leave; he is chained to his kitchen.
When one must rent the tools of production, one is enslaved to the specific realm of production for which the tools are rented. If one cannot simply buy a rake to rake the leaves, but must rent the rake at a monthly rate, one cannot simply rake his leaves. One must go from house to house, knocking on doors of the neighbors, and offer 50%-off our leaf-raking special. One must put all the yards into our new CRM, and hopefully make enough in the fall to sustain us until the next busy season, lest the reaper come and take away the rake and the house together.
Imagine with me — and it is difficult, I admit — a life where you owned your possessions, your castle, your car, your computer, your software, your clothing, your cattle, your fields. Such freedom! Not freedom for the life of the sluggard, but a life to reap and plow, to serve God and love one’s neighbor.
“Oh” but you may be thinking “in this utopian vision you have, you have forgotten one thing, property tax!” Yes, it is hard to imagine a world where the government does not treat its citizens as tenants, to rent the land which they supposedly own. Let us deal with one set of overlords at a time. First the unelected.
Ownership of your tools leads to more discretionary time, which is true wealth, more freedom1.
Rented Software
Software is the primary battleground of digital sovereignty. Our Computers are at the root of it. Now computers at root are information systems, they are tools for the recording data and processing of that data according to preset instructions; this even holds true for A.I.. The instructions written to run that data must be written by someone or something, viz. software developers.
Software, generally must be maintained, (though the necessary maintenance, in closed systems, is widely overestimated). The unrelenting desire/need for greater profits incentivizes companies to design products that bring recurring revenue. A buyer who walks away with a permanent product is not forced into future purchases for future use. A subscriber doesn’t walk away with a product, but with a license to temporarily access something he doesn’t own. The subscriber is dependent upon the provider for continued use of what they have already paid for. This is what these companies desire: permanent dependence.
“Buying” and “selling” presupposes the reality of ownership. Subscription companies frequently use terms like “buy” and “sell” during the transaction, but in the terms of service, those terms are redefined so as to accord with the mind of divorced-cat-woman. What they provide is not a product, it’s a plantation.
It is understandable for people to protect their intellectual property, and software developers should be paid for their work. Workers are worthy of their wages. No one may be compelled to work for free. But the model adopted by most software companies forces a purchase of work today to also include an obligation for purchases of future work in order to continue to use the work purchased today. That is, they offer no way to purchase a one-off job, or a finished and completed product which the buyer is responsible to maintain and keep. But instead, as the provider continues to endlessly update their product, that work is forced onto the buyer, and the buyer has no means of preserving access to their past purchases without continuing to pay the provider indefinitely.
Take for example, the modern XBOX and Playstation game library subscriptions. It may seem on the surface to be a benefit to the buyer, to only have to pay $20 to access 1,000 of video games, but the economic reality is that it is a bad deal. Instead of paying $60 once to receive a physical piece of media, which can be played infinitely, so long as the buyer stewards it well, rather, the buyer must continue to deal with the seller forever, even as the seller is free to change their terms however they please, or to add and remove content from the library at will. The buyer has transient, fleeting, temporary access to the content they thought they owned. I have video games, console and disk, which my parents purchased for me as a child. My children will be able to play these game. But anyone who has dealt with a provider through a subscription library will eventually lose access to what they purchased, while having payed an order of magnitude more for it.
Where is the honest transaction where the seller provides property to the buyer, and relinquishes all claims to that property upon the transaction? Many companies today do not offer any path to ownership at all. The only terms of business are terms of dependence.
As an example of a software company which does respect ownership, I give you Ableton, who sells the digital audio workstation software Ableton live. The company sells a finished version of a software at a set price. The buyer pays for that software; the buyer can use that software forever. It is upon the buyer to maintain the environment fit to run that software. Ableton makes future revenues by creating addons and other offerings to their users, as well as selling updates. If the purchaser desires to get the update, they can pay for it as well. If they are content with their current holdings, they do not upgrade. It’s a clean, honest and ethical transaction. Would that there were more companies like this.
Open Source
Businesses today need not live with this. The good news is that so many people desire free and open software that they have created it for themselves; or they have a business model where they give the software away for free, and make the money some other way. Many have designed a system to escape the plantations and were gracious enough to the rest of us to release it into the wild.
And the good thing is, once a software is written and released to the world, it is permanently known; it cannot be retracted. Tools like CRM’s, Accounting Software, Project Management Softwares, are basicaly solved problems. The code to run these programs is known and available. One only needs the technical skill to do it.
For whatever motivation there be behind the development of so many open source projects (again, people should be paid for their labor) the naked truth is that tons of programs exist, with known and open code, which can be launched and run in a private environment with no external dependencies. And when it’s yours, you can do whatever you want with it. You can tweak it, modify it, but usually, you can simply use it and enjoy the utility which it provides to bake your bread and make your gold. Praise the Lord.
More on this in coming essays.
Allen Weiss’ definition↩︎