The Great Surrender: Everything-as-a-Service
I’ll start with a disclaimer: This isn’t about Netflix replacing Blockbuster – and that’s a beautiful story, but for another day – or Spotify replacing the weekly trip to the Record store.
This is about something more fundamental and perhaps, even sinister. It’s about a quiet transfer of control over our cultural memory and daily experiences to a concentrated group of digital gatekeepers.
Who remembers those times when our photo albums remained unchanged unless we chose to modify them. Record collections played the same versions and lyrics to songs year after year. You bought a book and it actually sat on your shelf indefinitely – immune to retroactive edits or sudden disappearances.
We actually owned objects that were fragments of our cultural history – literally ‘frozen’ in time.
Today, however, we’re more comfortable with streaming these choices – and our consciousness by extension. Our music playlists can change suddenly and even without our knowledge. E-books can be modified or even removed from our devices altogether. Cloud-stored photos could theoretically vanish with a server mishap or a simple corporate decision. More cars on the road today are also increasingly dependent on remote servers and subscription-based services to enable them function fully. Just the other day, as I got to start my vehicle, a warning message came on the dashboard alerting me, a software update to version.x.x had ‘successfully updated’ – erm, who let you do that sir/ma’am? It’d be a losing battle for me to try to ring up the manufacturer to ask why and how so I just let it be!
We’re progressively transforming into renters in our own digital lives.
On a more sombre note, this shift carries profound implications. By trading ownership for easy accessibility, we don’t just lose objects, we also lose our autonomy over our cultural and personal narratives. Who controls the version of the digital books we read? Who decides which episodes of a streaming show should remain available? Who determines if our smart home devices should continue to function as advertised? Who decides whether to ‘cancel’ an artist and erase their ‘art’ from your digital smart collection?
The other side of this argument isn’t lost on me, i.e. the convenience of “everything-as-a-service” is certainly seductive: why maintain a personal library when you can access millions of books instantly? Why own a car when you can summon one at will only when you need it?
But with each surrender of ownership, we are literally handing over a piece of our independence to corporations whose priorities may not always align with preserving our cultural heritage or protecting personal agency. Not to mention the potential for reality itself to become fluid when content can be modified remotely and ever so easily. The book you read yesterday might not be the same today. The documentary you watched last month might disappear entirely. The family photos you stored in the cloud might be compressed, altered, or even lost with a terms-of-service update.
Does truth then become a matter of perspective and not the immutable fact it’s always been?
We’re not just renting products anymore. We’re renting reality and perhaps even life itself. This isn’t a call to reject progress or retreat to purely physical possessions. It’s more a wake up call and a plea for a more conscious consumption in an increasingly subscription-based age. We need to think more critically about what we’re willing to rent versus own, what deserves permanent storage versus temporary access, and most importantly, who we trust with the keys to our cultural and personal heritage.
How do we develop a new framework for digital ownership, i.e. one that preserves the convenience of subscription services while protecting our right to maintain permanent and unchangeable versions of the content that shapes our lives and societies. Why, you might ask. Because the alternative is a more scary concept:
It’s a world in which truth and memory become as fluid as our monthly subscription choices.