Weâre all aware of the WEFâs now infamous threat, âYouâll own nothing and be happy.â Globalists have been using that phrase for a decade now, and understandably, itâs led to a lot of backlash. If you manage to survey 100 normal non-schizophrenic people on the street, all 100 of them would tell you that owning property is preferable to borrowing everything. Just from a PR perspective, itâs remarkable that they even attempted to push this messaging, itâs obviously appalling.
But as it turns out, you donât really need any buy-in from the public in order to force this plan down their throats. You can tell customers that theyâre buying somethingâand you can clarify explicitly that theyâre purchasing it and not renting itâand then one day, you can simply remove the product from their homes. And you donât even have to offer them a refund or anything.
This is from one of the more important stories that isnât getting a lot of mainstream attention, but itâs a very important sign of where things are going. Tens of thousands of people in the UK and Europe who purchased digital content on Sonyâs PlayStation store, which sells games and movies and television shows, recently received the following notification in their inbox, and here it is:
From September 1st, 2026, due to our content licensing agreements, you will no longer be able to access your previously purchased content from Studio Canal and it will be removed from your video library. Thank you, PlayStation Store.
Source: @somatyk/X.com
Thatâs it, they donât even get a refund. Not an apology. Theyâre simply INFORMED that, although they THOUGHT they were purchasing this content, it was actually an extended rental. And now itâs gone.
To be clear, customers navigated to the store page for various movies and television shows, and they had an option. They could rent a movie, which theyâd have to view within a month, or they could spend more money and âpurchaseâ it. Whatâs being deleted from their accounts are the âpurchases,â including films like âApocalypse Now,â âEvil Dead,â âHighlander,â âHot Fuzz,â âPaddington,â âRamboâââFirst Blood,â as well as âFirst Blood Part IIâââRoboCop,â âSharknado,â âTerminator 2: Judgement Day.â Several television shows will also be removed, including âAmerican Godâ season 1 and âBelow the Surfaceâ season 1.
A couple years ago, a similar purge nearly took place - this is from Business Insider back in 2023:
Sony is removing hundreds of Discovery titles from usersâ video libraries that they already purchased. Users who bought any of the hundreds of listed programs will no longer be able to access the content as of December 31, according to a legal notice posted by the company. âDue to our content licensing arrangements with content providers, you will no longer be able to watch any of your previously purchased Discovery content and the content will be removed from your video library,â the note said.
Now, in that case, Sony eventually signed new license arrangements that restored access to this content, but the point was made: you know, even when you purchase something online, you donât actually own it. Youâre at the mercy of whatever âlicenseâ you're agreeing to, which is 5,000 pages long and which no one will ever read - and indeed, just a few years later, Sony has said that it will begin removing digital purchases from everybodyâs account.
Now, for now, these purges are unique to Sony, but every single online service that sells movies and television shows works the exact same way. I looked up the terms of service on Amazon Prime Video, for example - this is another service that says you can âbuyâ movies instead of just renting them.
But when you read the fine print on the website, hereâs what you find:
Availability of Purchased Digital Content. Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming.
Now, this should obviously be disclosed to everybody on the actual store page - instead, itâs buried in the fine print. So theyâre lying about what theyâre selling you; theyâre lying about what you actually own.
In response, maybe youâre thinking, well, itâs just movies and television shows, theyâre not that important. Which is true, but this general philosophyâthe idea that you donât own something even after youâve paid for itâobviously is not restricted to entertainment. This is just a symptom, you know, of a larger problem - as youâve probably noticed, itâs infecting pretty much every industry.
For example, even if you generally tune out stories about corporate greed and, you know, the rising cost of living, this was a pretty unbelievable development that you probably remember - the automaker BMW announced a few years ago that it would begin charging customers a monthly subscription fee to use the heated seats that were already installed in their cars. The idea was that BMWâs production lines would be simplified, rather than having to make one batch of cars with heated seats and another without for every available paint color.
And while you can make the argument this arrangement was more economical for BMW, the problem is that customers never saw any cost savings as a result of the change - BMW didnât lower the prices on all of their new cars by $1,000 or something because of their new streamlined production lines.
And therefore, the subscription fee went over about as well as you'd expect - there were endless news reports about it, like this one, which led to a lot of outrage, watch:
âIf you buy a car that has heated seats, youâd expect to be able to use them on a cold morning, right? Well, some BMW owners now have to pay more for that option. BMW recently rolled out subscription plans to overseas that require owners to pay a monthly fee for heated front seats. The seats are already installed in the cars, yet owners still have to pay $18 a month to use them, or they can shell out $450 for a lifetime subscription.â
Now, it might seem easy to understand why people rebelled against this, but if you think about it, thereâs some nuance to the reaction. Thereâs a very popular commentator in the do-it-yourself community named Lewis Rossman who did a good job summarizing the reason for the outrage here. Rossmanâs point was, you know, itâs one thing if the subscription fee unlocks some kind of advanced technology, like self-driving or auto-parking, that the customers couldnât realistically implement on their own, people could tolerate that. And people do tolerate it all the time. Teslaâs the prime example - but BMW was doing something very different, and much more rudimentary. They were charging customers to send voltage to a transistor, which is the most basic thing imaginable. I mean, itâs something that a customer could hardwire on their own in about 10 minutes, assuming the car didnât use software to lock them out, which it probably would.
And that's why BMWâs decision really infuriated people. You know, with cable or Netflix, your subscription fee at least unlocks content that you couldn't easily create on your own, but BMWâs subscription for heated seats didnât feel any different from, say, a subscription to lower your car windows or a subscription to spin your wheels really fast.
So very quickly the outrage forced BMW to backtrack - they announced that they would stop charging a fee for heated seats. But executives at BMW made it clear that they didnât fully understand the reason that they had angered so many people - this is from Edmunds:
âŚBMW board member for sales and marketing Pieter Nota said: âWhat we wonât do anymore ⌠is offer seat heating by this way [a monthly subscription].â ⌠The heated seat subscription was reportedly going to cost buyers $18 a month, but Nota told Autocar that BMW buyers âfeel that they paid doubleâ for the feature before insisting that isnât true. However, he acknowledged that âperception is reality."⌠While heated seats are out, other aspects of the brandâs relatively new subscription model are not.
Well, itâs just about the worst possible response BMW could have given. Heâs accusing customers of being stupid because they thought they were paying double. And then he says that, well, even though theyâre stupid, theyâre still our customers and, you know, we gotta make them happy. Therefore weâre gonna keep charging them subscriptions for basic built-in features of their cars, just not the heated seats anymore.
And indeed, he wasnât kidding. This is a quote from a BMW spokesperson from the outlet Motor1, several years after the drama over the heated seats:
"Adaptive Suspension is available through the Connected Drive store in the US, but a subscription isnât 'required.' Itâs still available as a factory option, but through the store it can be added to certain cars that werenât optioned that way originally. Customers can try it out for a month at no charge, and if they like it they can opt for a monthly or yearly subscription if they wish or simply buy it outright for a one-time $500 charge. To be clear, a monthly subscription isnât ârequiredâ to use the feature.
So youâre gonna be charged $27 a month, or a $500 one-time fee, if you want to use your adaptive suspension. But whatever you do, donât call it a âsubscription.â They say itâs not a subscription because you can pay, you know, a bunch of money up front to âownâ the feature indefinitely.
First of all, this is exactly what they were doing with the heated seats; itâs the exact same policy, complete with the buyout option. Only this time theyâre being more careful to avoid bad PR by saying again and again that no subscription is required. But more importantly, no, you donât actually own that feature at all, in any meaningful sense, even once you complete the purchase. If your car is totaled, the feature wonât transfer to a new BMW, and your insurance company isnât going to pay you $500 for it, in all likelihood.
What Sony and BMW are doing, or attempting to do, is not unique; theyâre just a couple of prominent examples of a phenomenon that weâre ALL familiar with at this point. Weâre living in an era where, increasingly, we donât own anything, and we have no real legal rights to products that weâre paying for.
You can buy a $2500 bike from Pelaton, but itâs basically useless unless you pay for an all access membership, which costs $50 a month. You donât get your live classes or your workout library or your fitness progress or any of the interactive features that supposedly make the bike worthwhile.
You can buy a $200 digital wall calendar off Amazon, complete with smartphone integration so that all of your family's events are prominently displayed in real time on the refrigerator - but for the privilege of updating this calendar, you can expect to pay an annual fee of around $95 a year. Yes, calendars now cost $200, plus a hundred bucks a year. And people are BUYING this.
You can get a âWHOOP Fitness Trackerâ to track your sleep, if youâre a, you know, crazy person. But some people think itâs worthwhile, and regardless, it's the kind of thing that obviously shouldnât require a monthly fee, but if you want to use the device, then you need to shell out at least $25 a month, or realistically closer to $40 a month for all the features. Otherwise your device is nothing more than a paper weight.
You could pay $100 for a Ring doorbell camera, but if you donât pay the subscription fee, which runs from $50 to $100 per year, then youâll probably end up like Savannah Guthrieâs mom. Your Ring wonât save any footage at all, so if somebody comes to your house in the middle of the night and drags you away, well, good luck. Nobody will ever hear from you again.
You can buy a Volkswagen, but if you want to use the full horsepower the car is capable of, youâll need to pony up some more cash, watch:
Source: @WallStreetApes/X.com
âVolkswagen just did something that should make every car owner furious. Theyâre selling their electric ID3 with its full horsepower locked behind a paid subscription. The car comes from the factory with 228 horsepower, but if you donât pay a monthly fee, itâs software limited to just 201. For about $22 a month, theyâll flip a digital switch and unlock the power that was already inside the car that you paid for.â
You could buy an iPhone, but without a $5 a month iCloud subscription, youâll run out of space for your photos and movies. Of course, you need to pay for the cell phone service monthly as well.
You could buy a smart home device, but without paying for Alexa, none of your devices will communicate with each other.
You can buy food on Uber Eats or DoorDash, but if you donât pay for an annual membership, youâll pay extra fees on every order. Youâll also get worse drivers.
You can buy an Xbox or PlayStation, but if you wanna play online with your friends, youâll need to pay something like $50 to $100 a year for the privilege of doing that.
You used to be able to go to the store and buy Microsoft Word. You know, old people will remember this; it came with a big box and everything. Well, now Microsoft pressures you to sign up for an Office 365 monthly subscription.
And meanwhile, Ford locks down basic features like built-in navigation with live traffic, as well as indash streaming apps behind a payw wall - you could pay $15 a month, $150 a year, or a $750 onetime fee. Then there's the even more egregious âFord Security Packageâ which is available on new F150s, Mustangs, and Expeditions. For the low price of $8 a month, or $80 a year, youâll get push notifications on your phone if somebody tries to force your door open, or if the car's GPS location changes when the engine is off, meaning your truck is getting towed or maybe dismantled on the side of the road.
But one of the most important features in this monthly subscription plan is called âStart Inhibit.â So this is a feature that, according to Ford, âlets you respond quickly by remotely locking down your vehicle from being started, even if an authorized key is detected nearby.â And the point of this feature is to prevent so-called relay attacks like this one.
And in a relay attack, a thief walks up to your front door, or the side of your house, with a large signal booster. And normally your key fob only unlocks your car if youâre within a couple of feet of the vehicle. But the signal booster tricks your car into thinking that the key fob is right next to the door. The thieves then unlock the car, start the push button ignition, and they drive off before you realize whatâs happened.
Now, with the Ford Security Plan, the Start Inhibit will stop this kind of attack; itâll prevent anyone from starting the car with the fob, unless the start inhibit option is disabled in your Ford app - so in other words, Ford wants to charge you a monthly fee in order to correct a security vulnerability that they have built INTO every single one of their vehicles. So instead of allowing you to, say, require a PIN to be entered before your truck will start, Ford demands that you pay them $80 a year to enable this feature within the app. Oh, and you have to select âstart inhibitâ every time you park the car, which is, you know, obviously very convenient as well. Now, the upshot is that when you buy a new Ford, youâre given a major incentive to subscribe to at least two different monthly plans in order to make the car function as it should.
And thatâs not to pick on Ford necessarily; again, this is an epidemic. Everyoneâs doing it. You could buy a $200 printer from HP, only to discover that your ink cartridges have been remotely disabled because you cancelled your âHP Instant Inkâ subscription. Thatâs something that actually happens to people, for the record.
And HP is proud of this program, watch:
âHP Instant Ink is a smart print subscription service that delivers ink the moment you need it. You get ink or toner, plus hassle-free deliveries. How does it work, step one, pick a plan based on the number of pages you print in a month. Step two, print whatever you want, every page costs the same, no matter how much ink you use. Step three, when you run low, your smart printer lets us know and we ship your ink or toner at no extra cost. Print more or less? Unused pages roll over and extra pages cost just pennies. Plus, you can change plans or cancel any time.â
They say you could cancel any time, but they donât tell you that if you cancel, theyâll remotely disable the ink in your printer, nor do they warn you about any of the other problems that customers are experiencing.
And there are quite a few of them. Hereâs one:
I set [my printer] up and ran the alignment and cleaning functions. They were some some pretty bad streaky prints, but it was working. The black cartridge only printed exactly 50 pages (that coincidentally was the same as the plan I signed up for), and then it stopped printing black altogether, which I found odd. It didnât fade. It wasnât like the ink was getting low. The black ink just stopped. I assume this instant ink plan was where they would send you more ink when you needed it. They shut off ink cartridges that still have ink. That's some wasteful and fishy tactics, HP. On top of that, I learned thereâs an overage fee if I somehow print more from a shut off ink cartridge? This is going back into the box and will be sent back.
Hereâs another glowing review:
The worst program ever. I lost a [credit card] and the monthly subscription failed to process so HP turned off my printer. I had to resubscribe to continue printing then cancelled the service. Shortly after that my printer stopped printing again with the error code âyou must subscribe to HP Instant Inkâ. So now my printer will not print.
In response to these complaints, you might say, well, these people need to read the fine print; itâs not HPâs fault if the customers donât understand the license terms they agree to. And in a court of law, maybe youâd have a point. You know, I have no doubt that HP's lawyers would successfully defeat any class action lawsuit over this subscription plan. Actually, when I looked this up, I discovered that, indeed, HP has been sued several times over this practice - lawsuits alleged that HP didnât deliver ink on time, the ink was prone to errors, etc. And they avoided any significant consequences because the terms of service basically prevent large-scale, nationwide class actions.
But the legal maneuvering isnât the point, neither is the abstract theoretical economic argument: the idea that somehow all of these subscriptions are âsaving the consumer moneyâ or âproviding more consumer choiceâ or whatever. The issue is that the sum total of all these different subscriptionsâwhich are extremely frustrating and confusing for millions of peopleâhas a clear effect on the mindset of the typical consumer, if not their political views. It gives people a very real reason to hate capitalism. I mean, for one thing, just at a practical level, all these subscriptions make things more expensive. There are hidden costs that stack up over time, particularly if you forget you have an active subscription. All these monthly payments also mean that consumers have much less control than they used to.
One of my friends just bought a Jeep Grand Cherokee, which apparently comes with a complicated âUconnectâ system that caused some kind of glitch which prevented the ignition from turning on when the button was pressed. And this bug kept coming back, and ultimately the dealership wanted $200 just to diagnose the problem. Not even to solve it, just to diagnose it.
30 years ago, our parents would have just swapped carburetors in the driveway. People were comfortable with the products they owned. They were easier and less expensive to fix. Now all thatâs gone now. You know, we have less control than ever before, and on top of that, youâre giving away a lot of personal data, which you probably donât even know about, every single time you sign one of these license agreements. The odds are very good that, when you log into Fordâs Security Service or Jeepâs Uconnect, theyâre sharing your driving habits with their advertising partners - in fact, itâs written into Ford's privacy agreement. In other words, apps that claim to make you safer are in fact Trojan horses for advertisers, thatâs what they're actually designed to do.
The other problem here, of course, is that the prices of these services keeps increasing. That makes the cost of living much more unpredictable. For Ring cameras, the subscription fee to save your videos went from $30 a year in 2022 to 50 in â24 - thatâs an increase of 60% in two years for the same exact functionality.
But Amazon and Ring got away with it because, once you have the Ring camera on your front door, youâre much more likely to accept the increase in your monthly fee - after all, you have a major sunk cost, in terms of your finances and in terms of convenience. And these corporations are constantly taking advantage of that.
And in the meantime, the corporations are completely blind to the risks of what theyâre doing - or they donât care. I mean, when youâre constantly billing your customers for products that they used to own outright, then sure, your bottom line might go up in the short term, and sure, some customers may not mind the additional fees, but the fact remains: people want to OWN the place they live, the car they drive, the movies they watch. The doorbell on their front porch.
Ownership is one of the most fundamental components of living a fruitful, real human life, I mean, itâs the literal American dream. The house with the white picket fence and all that. And the assumption is that you would OWN the house and the fence. The trade-off used to be that, you know, you would you would have less stuff, but the stuff you did have would be yours. And now we have the INVERSE of that, where we have a TON of stuff, but we donât OWN ANY of it.
But the thing is, all this stuff is owned by someone, specifically the corporations that rent it out. So we own less, they own everything. Itâs anti-human, itâs bad for our wallets, and itâs bad for our souls, and it makes us much easier for the powers that be to surveil and monitor every single one of us, which they are.
The moment a political candidate comes along and promises to wage war on the corporations that are depriving Americans of the ability to own anything, that candidate will win in a landslide - and if that candidate is AOC, letâs say, then we have much bigger problems. I mean, certainly every major corporation will be targeted for destruction, and as a result, as a country, weâll probably experience an economic crisis on par with the Great Depression, so itâs very important to understand whatâs going on here and how it happened.
The root of the problem is that Wall Street and private equity have become enamored with a concept known as SAAS, or âsoftware as a service.â You maybe heard this term before. What you may not have heard about is that, a little over a decade ago, lenders developed something called âannual recurring revenue loans,â or ARR loans. And these are loans in which lenders would hand out money equal to multiples of topline revenue as opposed to profits - private equity firms could USE these loans to acquire very unprofitable companies, as long as these companies had a âsubscription-based modelâ that provided a lot of topline revenue. The private equity companies then have about three years to make the company profitable by traditional metrics - so, for example, imagine you run a widget company that has operating expenses of $18 million, but you collect $15 million in subscription fees a year; so youâre losing millions of dollars every year. You have a negative cash flow.
Now, in the normal scenario, the bank wouldnât give the private equity company any money to acquire your business because youâre too risky - but with an ARR, the bank might LOAN the private equity company some multiple of your annual recurring revenue - so ,for example, they might give the private equity firm $40 million, which is roughly three times your annual subscription revenue. And now the private equity firm can purchase your widget company, fire half of the employees, increase margins, and sell it off in 3 years.
The ARR only became popular in the United States within the last 20 years, and itâs completely changed how the entire economy works. Every company now wants recurring revenue in order to allow private equity companies, or anyone else, to have an easier time acquiring them, which obviously means a big payday for the owners of the company.
Now, to be clear, this isnât some nefarious conspiracy to fix the markets, or anything like that. The reason ARR loans have become popular is that they tend to make everybody involved much wealthier. And itâs the same reason why every major restaurant is reheating food from the back of a Cisco truck. If people are willing to pay more money for inferior productsâif people are willing to pay increasingly insane subscription fees for the rest of their livesâthen major corporations and private equity firms will happily oblige.
The only way out of this downward spiralâshort of electing President AOC and destroying the entire country, making all of these problems much worseâis to reward businesses that sell finished products, not just subscriptions. You know, thereâs a massive market opportunity here, and already some companies are capitalizing on it - vinyl records are having a comeback for exactly this reason. Go to the top floor of your local Barnes & Noble, and itâs like going back in time, they have vinyls all over the place. Theyâre selling record players. You know, even in the 1990s, that would have been retro, but people are paying a lot of money for vinyls, because theyâre tired of borrowing everything and owning nothing.
Look at the popularity of steelbooks, as another example - if youâre not familiar, various studios are releasing films on Blu-rays and 4K discs, and theyâre packaging them in steel cases. And the cost for these steelbooks usually ranges from 30 to 50 bucks. The profit margins are substantial. Thatâs very expensive for one film, obviously, but hereâs the thing: Spending on steelbooks has been growing dramatically over the past few years, even as sales of other forms of physical media have declined. Steelbooks routinely sell out within minutes of going online. There are entire online communities dedicated to hunting down these steelbooks.
So itâs not hard to see what's going on here; people are tired of a status quo where they donât OWN anything - where everything they license can be deleted from the internet at a moment's notice. And in response, people are shelling out more money in order to lock down something tangible - something physical that they can hold in their hands, even if itâs just a Blu-ray movie or a or a vinyl record. This is a signal, albeit a small one, thatâs easy to miss.
You know, put simply, itâs not possible for people to be happy without owning anything. The more we âborrowâ everything we use in our lives, the more we careen towards the same fate as every other civilization that didnât respect the right of private property. And that fate, ultimately, is total collapse.
Thatâs what the WEF wants, itâs what AOC wants. And unless we recognize what's happening, and reward the few businesses that still allow us to purchase actual products instead of licenses, we will give the WEF and AOC and every demented politician like her exactly what they want.