Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Rent the man a spot on the river, and make him tick a box on a multi-thousand-word end-user licence agreement meaning that any fish he catches, ultimately, still belongs to you, and you stand to get very, very rich indeed.
We live in an age where stuff we think we own is, really, stuff to which we subscribe
This is the business model that now dominates the digital age. Neo-feudalism, technofeudalism, chokepoint capitalism: it gets called all sorts of things, but the basic idea it has in common is that the rules of property ownership, as we have tended to understand them for most of the history of capitalism, are shifting under our feet. We think we’re buying products. In practice, we’re locking ourselves into subscriptions where the power rests with the vendor and the things we think we own are merely licensed to us.
That’s why a petition about videogames currently before the European Commission deserves our attention. A campaigning group called Stop Killing Games was formed in protest after Ubisoft shut down the servers for an online car-racing game called The Crew in 2024. That meant, in effect, that without warning or right of appeal, everyone who “owned” that game ceased to. It became unplayable. As one player complained: “You buy a physical copy of a game, you bring it home and install the game, you play it for some amount of time. Then all of a sudden the publisher completely destroys all copies of the game worldwide, including yours.”
