I am not going to do a full review of Read, Write, Own. I generally only look at books that I think will be interesting and the reviews of this have made it pretty clear that this is bog-standard pump book. A book, in other words, meant to hype something rather than discuss it. The reviews, however, have highlighted a consistent theme in the book: the concept of an ownership society. And the immorality of that concept is worth discussing.
An ownership society is one where everyone is an owner, where the most important thing about a person’s relationship to society is defined, as much as is possible, by what they own. Crypto has always taken this idea as far as bad imaginations allow:
On page 207, he imagines how Hollywood could be revolutionized by NFTs: “what if fans really could be owners, and media companies could harness their energy to help create and evangelize original stories?” (Ah yes, let’s turn fandom into multi-level marketing. Sounds like paradise.)
The comment about multi-level marketing should demonstrate why an ownership society is morally dubious at best. There is nothing wrong with owning things, in moderation. Owning a home has advantages (and disadvantages) owning some stock can help you retire or have influence over the company, owning books lets you, well, read books, etc. But ownership is not citizenship — the incentives do not align.
Take the example above — if fans are owners, then they are incentivized to argue against fair use, to side with management against labor, to pump and dump products, to restrain criticism, etc. They aren’t incentivized to do what is best for art, but rather to inflate the value of art they have a share in. What is good for art and what is good for the owner of a specific piece of art will often be at cross purposes.
Almost every class of ownership would have this problem. If your retirement depends on the performance of the individual stocks you own rather than a collective pension plan (such as Social Security), then your well-being is tired to polices that are good for the companies represented by those shares — not necessarily what is good for the economy and society as a whole. You may support weakened anti-trust enforcement, for example, because if you don’t your shares in Behemoth Inc. will fall, putting your retirement at risk. We can already see this dynamic in housing.
For many people, their house is the largest assets, the difference between retirement and not being able to retire. As such, they are reflexively opposed to pro-housing expansion policies out of the fear of losing the one asset they feel they can count on. Pushing ownership of this nature in lieu of a fully funded pension plan, for example, has already contributed to creating a housing shortage. Imagine if the housing incentives applied to every aspect of life.
Simple common sense tells you that people who push the concept of everyone becoming an owner are at best only interested in pumping up their own net-worth by inflating assets classes. In the worst case, they are trying to atomize society, to make people believe their interests are not served as a member of a society but rather as only an individual. This is, of course, nonsense. Only through collective power can individuals hope to restrain the predations of the rich and powerful. We didn’t get vacations and forty-hour work weeks and Medicare and environmental protections because of the largess of owners. We got those goods, and many, many more by putting the values of the society above the incentives of ownership.
While there is nothing wrong with ownership, even the most capitalist of society must ensure that collection of wealth and thus power are never allowed to override the collective good. Pushing ownership everywhere, as a replacement for the collective actions and goods that define a healthy society, is inevitably going to lead to an immoral society. And I prefer morality to ownership.