Politics & Economics

Politics is the long argument about who decides. Economics is the slower argument about who gets paid for the deciding. Most of what shapes a working life sits somewhere on the seam between the two, closer to the second than is comfortable to admit. The notes collected on this page try to read that seam plainly, without nostalgia and without theory-stacking, as the slow accumulation of small structural decisions that quietly reorganise daily life.

The first thing to notice, and the thing most of the writing here keeps returning to, is the steady erosion of ownership in favour of subscription. Almost every product category that used to involve buying a thing now involves renting access to a service. Software, music, films, books, the operating system on your phone, the device the operating system runs on, the storage that holds your photographs, the documents that record your work, the communications you carry on with the people closest to you. None of it is yours in the older sense of the word. All of it is a tenancy.

The pivot was structural and recent. For most of the twentieth century, the dominant economic relationship between a person and a product was purchase. You bought a record. You bought a copy of a piece of software. You bought a car, with all the long-term costs and complications that ownership involved. The cost was high and the friction was real, but the thing was yours. The pivot to subscription took roughly fifteen years, beginning in earnest around 2008 with the rise of cloud-hosted software, and ending around 2023 with the saturation of the model into almost every consumer category. The payment shifted from a one-time transaction to a recurring one. The relationship shifted from owner to tenant.

Tenancy has political consequences that ownership does not. The tenant has weaker leverage than the owner. The tenant cannot accumulate equity. The tenant cannot pass the asset to a child. The tenant has to keep paying just to retain access to what they previously paid to get. The tenant can be evicted with little notice and no recourse. None of these features are accidents. They are the design intent of the arrangement, and they reproduce, in miniature and at scale, the older political problems of land tenancy that the labour movement spent a hundred years trying to solve.

The labour movement won a particular victory in the early twentieth century around the eight-hour day. Eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will. The third clause, the one that mattered most, was the one most quietly lost. The hours outside work could not be allowed to remain hours of pure unaccounted life, because pure unaccounted life is bad for consumption. Some had to become consumption hours, organised around products and entertainments. Some had to become improvement hours, organised around classes and self-betterment. None of this was a conspiracy. It was the predictable behaviour of a system that needs the population to keep buying things in order to keep the system running.

The subscription economy completes the project. The third block of hours is not just consumed now. It is also rented. The streaming service, the cloud storage, the news app, the audiobook subscription, the meditation app, the gym membership that opens through a phone, the AI assistant that increasingly mediates how you do your job. Each of these is a small monthly bill. Each one, by itself, looks reasonable. The aggregate is a tenancy on the entire third block. The accounting is brutal in a way that most people prefer not to look at. The average household in many wealthy countries now spends more on subscriptions than on food.

There is a closer political analogue worth drawing, even though the language has gone out of fashion. What the subscription economy has produced, structurally, is rentier capitalism at consumer scale. Rentier capitalism, in the older sense, was the political economy of landlords and bondholders. People who derived income from owning the assets that everyone else needed to use. The current arrangement is the same shape, downsized and digitised. The platforms are the new landlords. The subscription is the new rent. The user, who was supposed to be a citizen of the digital commons in some earlier version of this story, has been quietly demoted to a tenant whose tenancy is non-transferable and whose lease can be modified at the platform’s discretion.

This is the structural lens through which most of the writing on this page reads contemporary culture. The football club that used to belong to a neighbourhood becomes a billion-dollar brand the same way a factory becomes a logistics asset. Slowly. With everyone’s apparent consent. And irreversibly. The socialist startup turns down venture capital and learns that the men in fleece vests were never the real problem. The May Day fire was a maypole long before it was a slogan, and the slogan was won at exactly the moment the third block began its slow re-annexation. The pattern is the same shape in each case. A common asset gets transformed into a managed property. The transformation looks like progress at every individual step. The aggregate is a slow loss of the sort of leverage that ordinary people used to have over the conditions of their own lives.

The labour question runs through this in a particular way that has gotten louder lately. Artificial intelligence is the latest and largest non-human force entering the production process. It will probably change the economic landscape more than any technology since electricity, and probably faster. The political question, the one that almost nobody is asking with the seriousness it deserves, is who is going to own the AI infrastructure. The compute. The foundation models. The data flows that train them. The agents that increasingly mediate work between people and organisations. The default trajectory has all of this owned by a small number of platforms, distributed to a much larger number of users on a subscription basis. That is the same shape we have already seen play out in software, in entertainment, in social communication. The labour movement, if it is paying attention, has one window in which to demand a different arrangement. The window is closing fast.

This is where the writing on this page tries to be clear without being prescriptive. The page does not have a programme. It does not pretend to know what should be done. It does notice, in different shapes across different essays, the same underlying pattern. When leverage shows up, what do the people holding it actually do with it. The answer is almost always the same. They settle for output, and they cede ownership. The factory worker fought for a better wage and ceded the means of production. The software user fought for a better app and ceded the operating system. The streaming subscriber fought for a better catalogue and ceded the media library. Each settlement looked reasonable at the time. Each compounded into the slow tenancy that defines current consumer life.

There is one more honest observation worth keeping. None of this is the fault of the individual subscriber, the individual tenant, the individual worker. The arrangements are structural. The structures are inherited. The day-to-day defections from the structure, the personal projects to own one’s own files or use only open-source tools or read only public-domain books, are admirable and largely useless. The structural problem requires structural answers. Structural answers require collective bargaining. Collective bargaining requires a working memory of what previous generations did when faced with similar consolidations of leverage. That working memory is what the writing on this page is trying to keep alive, in small and partial ways, against the current of forgetting.

The page does not prescribe. It mostly asks, in different shapes, the same question. When leverage shows up, what do the people holding it actually do with it. Most of the time, in most generations, the answer has been the same. Most of the time, the people holding the leverage handed it over for slightly better terms on the existing arrangement. The notes collected here are an attempt to remember the moments when they did not.