The “not owning stuff” bubble is bursting13 Apr 2021 13:14
The “not owning stuff” bubble is bursting
The more venerable readers of this column – anyone over the age of about 45 – might recall the days when content had value. Records, for example. Blokes (mostly) would spend years, decades even, building up a collection of records. As plain a signal of amorous intent as he could ever give would be to record a mix tape of his favourites and hand it to the object of his affections.
And then along came digital technology – iTunes, Spotify and all the rest of it – and the value of that priceless collection went pretty much to zero. The object of affections, now his wife, declared he would have to put that priceless collection in the attic if they wanted the relationship to succeed. Or, better still, give it to a charity shop. And so did the bubble of analogue tech deflate.
Now nobody owns anything. Stuff isn’t an asset, it’s a burden. Generation Rent hires the house, the Rolls-Royce, the holiday home – it doesn’t own it. This asset-light generation prizes experience over material things.
The LP-owning hero of our story makes do with a Spotify subscription, which takes up far less space in his home, which, thanks to an inflated housing market that is verging on the fraudulent, is of a much lower square footage than he would ideally like.
“Most people who own homes are like rich people or old people,” Generation Rent disparages. “We don’t want homes. We don’t want the hassle.” It wants wealth, but is less bothered about physical possessions, so the story goes. They don’t work in the “real world” economy; they work in the digital economy.
In fact, the bubble in “not owning stuff” got so bloated, it had Klaus Schwab of World Economic Forum fame declaring – in what must be one of the most misconstrued statements ever uttered – that by 2030, “You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy about it.”
Well, surprise surprise, it turns out that people do want to own stuff. In fact, owning stuff – whether it’s caves, or glinting gold nuggets hanging round one’s neck together with shell necklaces, shares in Tesla, or originals of easily-replicated digital art designed by artists with groovy names like Beeple – is about as basic a human urge as there is, surpassed only by eating, reproducing and keeping safe.
What the easy replicability of digital tech did was to devalue content and make ownership much harder. Now NFTs have come along and they are, to misquote Donald Trump, making ownership great again.
What NFTs are really for – owning digital stuff
For sure, NFTs are a bubble –bubbles always accompany new technology. But bubbles also serve a purpose in that they accelerate investment and adoption. Without the railway bubbles, the tracks would not have been laid; nor, without dotcom in 2000, would the cables. Tulips were a bubble and, 400 years on, the Dutch still rule the roost in flowers. Scorn bubbles at your peril.
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