The idea of ownership is fading

For better or worse, as time goes on we’re going to own fewer and fewer items, and lease them instead. Gizmodo recently published an article titled “ In 2030, You Won’t Own Any Gadgets “, and I tend to agree with most of it.

At first blush, this is a bad thing. Don’t we want to own our stuff? Not always. I think music is a great place to start.

While owning CDs / cassette tapes / vinyl records is a neat thing, most of us keep all those in the back of a closet somewhere, because we much prefer Spotify or YouTube Music. It’s rather inexpensive, and gives us access to essentially everything. There’s certainly some lost nostalgia in not going to the mall to pick up a new CD, but from a practical point of view I think we’re almost all happy with the move to streaming services.

Games

The music analogy is interesting, because I see the same thing happening with video games and Google Stadia. The main criticism again Stadia is that “you don’t own your games”, which is completely valid, but we just went through the same cycle with music and then movies — and we’re all pretty happy with how that has worked out. Seeing video games go down that same road makes sense, and should work out well for us.

Cars