Suppose you run a restaurant. You’ve built it over ten years — the menu, the regulars, the reputation. Someone who ate at your place three years ago still comes in every Friday. You know their name. They know yours. That relationship is one of the things you built.
You sign up for DoorDash to expand your reach. New customers find you; orders come in; revenue goes up … All good! Right?
Here’s what you didn’t read in the terms of service: those new customers aren’t yours. Names, addresses, order histories, preferences — DoorDash owns all of that. If you leave the platform, or if DoorDash decides to remove you, you leave empty-handed. You cannot take that customer list with you because it’s not your customer list. You are borrowing access to your own diners.
The New Shape of Ownership
We are living through one of the most significant transfers of property in modern economic history, and it is happening so quietly, so incrementally, so buried in end-user license agreements and terms of service that most people haven’t noticed it yet.
The transfer works like this: you pay for something — a machine, a book, a software license, a platform subscription — and you receive in return access; not ownership. The thing looks like yours. It sits in your pocket or your field or your kitchen. You use it every day. But the terms under which you use it can be changed, restricted, or revoked by someone else at any time, for any reason, with little to no notice and absolutely no recourse.
Where you thought you have ownership, you only have tenancy. The rent is paid not just in dollars but in data, in dependency, and in the steady erosion of the right to decide what happens to the things you thought you owned.
John Deere and the $500,000 Tractor You Can’t Fix
Few figures are more associated with self-reliance in the national imagination than the American farmer — working the land, fixing what breaks, passing the equipment down to the next generation. That image is not entirely wrong historically. For most of the twentieth century, farmers did fix their own equipment because they had to. When a tractor breaks down during harvest, you cannot wait three weeks for a certified technician.
Then John Deere, the dominant manufacturer of agricultural equipment, began embedding proprietary software into its machines. The software controls everything: the engine, the hydraulics, the diagnostic systems. This software, though embedded in equipment you purchased for half a million dollars, belongs to John Deere.
To repair a modern John Deere tractor, you have to run the diagnostic software that tells you what’s wrong. The diagnostic software needs a special tool called the Electronic Data Link, which only John Deere and its authorized dealers possess. Without it, the tractor is effectively a sculpture. You cannot diagnose it. You cannot fix it. You call an authorized dealer and wait, during a busy season, while the clock runs out on your field.
This is a deliberate corporate strategy, replicated across industries, to convert the sale of a product into an ongoing dependency relationship. You don’t buy a tractor; you buy into a tractor subscription. Except the subscription comes with none-negotiatiable terms.
Your Kindle Library Doesn’t Exist
In 2009, Amazon remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from customers’ Kindle devices. The books had been sold in error by a publisher that didn’t hold the rights. Amazon issued refunds. But the books vanished from devices people had purchased them on, without warning, without consent.
The irony of memory-holing Orwell was noted widely. What was noted less was what it revealed about the nature of digital ownership: you don’t have any.
When you buy a Kindle book, you are purchasing a license to read that book under Amazon’s terms, on Amazon’s platform, at Amazon’s discretion. If Amazon closes your account — for any reason, or for no stated reason — your library disappears. Thousands of books gone. You have no more claim to them than a hotel guest has to the room after checkout.
This is true of nearly everything in the digital economy: iTunes purchases, Steam games, Adobe Creative Cloud apps, Spotify playlists … None of it is yours in any meaningful sense. It exists at the pleasure of the platform, and the platform’s pleasure can end at any moment.
We have allowed an entire generation to grow up believing they own things that they merely rent, and we have structured the economy around that misunderstanding so thoroughly that unwinding it feels impossible.
The Pattern Across Every Sector
The restaurant owner who can’t take her customer list. The farmer who can’t fix his tractor. The reader who doesn’t own his books. They are the same problem in different industries.
In every case, the mechanism is identical:
A company offers a product or service that delivers genuine value. Customers adopt it because it works. Over time, the company uses that adoption to insert itself between the customer and something they previously owned or controlled directly. The insertion is formalized in a terms of service agreement that almost nobody reads, that almost nobody could understand if they did read it, and that almost nobody has the leverage to negotiate. The customer’s dependency deepens. Exit becomes costly. And the company, now entrenched, can extract an increasing toll from a captive relationship.
This is the logic of the platform economy applied to ownership itself. Rather than being incidental to how these businesses work, it is how they work.
What you own, it turns out, is increasingly a legal fiction. What you actually hold is a revocable license, subject to terms you didn’t write, enforced by an entity with vastly more legal resources than you, in a jurisdiction you didn’t choose.
The Right to Repair Is the Right to Own
There is a growing movement — bipartisan, unlikely, and long overdue — called the right to repair. It argues, simply, that if you buy something, you should be able to fix it. That manufacturers should not be able to use software locks, proprietary tools, or warranty threats to prevent independent repair.
Farmers have been among its most vocal advocates, for obvious reasons. But it extends to consumers fighting Apple’s repair monopoly, to medical facilities that can’t service their own ventilators, to schools that can’t fix their own Chromebooks without sending them back to Google.
The right to repair is, at its core, a property rights argument. It says that ownership means something — that a thing you paid for is yours to use, maintain, modify, and pass on, without permission from the manufacturer. It is not a radical position. For most of human history it was simply called owning something.
The resistance to it from manufacturers is not about safety or quality, despite what their lobbying materials claim. It is about the extraordinarily profitable dependency relationships that proprietary repair ecosystems create. John Deere’s parts and service business generates margins that the equipment business cannot match. Apple’s repair monopoly is a revenue stream rather than a safety measure.
What Ownership Actually Requires
Real ownership has always implied a bundle of rights: the right to use, the right to modify, the right to repair, the right to sell, the right to pass on. Strip any of those rights and what you have left is not ownership — it is a conditional lease with the lessor retaining veto power over the terms.
The economy we have built in the last few decades has systematically stripped those rights, one terms-of-service clause at a time, without most people noticing and without most legislators acting. The result is a population that believes it owns things it doesn’t, depends on platforms it can’t leave, and has less actual economic autonomy than its grandparents did despite being considerably wealthier in nominal terms.
This is not a technology problem. Technology is neutral. It is a power problem — specifically, a problem of who holds power over the things people use every day, and whether that power is concentrated in the hands of a few platforms or distributed among the individuals and communities who actually do the work.
The answer to that question determines whether the economy works for people or merely extracts from them.
We have been answering it wrong for a long time.
--shon
Next: “The Platform Tax” — every transaction on Amazon, Etsy, and DoorDash carries a toll. What the aggregate cost of platform dependency actually does to local economies.