The Future of Stuff

0:00:01.0 Paul Matzko: Our story starts with a Swedish grandmother and a magical device called a tvättmaskin. With a simple gesture from a single finger, she could compel this box to replace hours upon hours of her time and years of back-​breaking labor. What was this wondrous device? I’m going to let the late great physician, Hans Rosling take the story from here.

0:00:30.5 Hans Rosling: My mother and father had been saving money for years to be able to buy that machine, and the first day it was going to be used, even grandma was invited to see the machine, [laughter] and grandma was even more excited. Throughout her life, she had been heating water with firewood and she had hand-​washed laundry for seven children, and now she was going to watch electricity do that work. My mother carefully opened the door and she loaded the laundry into the machine like this, and then when she closed the door, grandma said, “No, no, no, no! Let me! Let me push the button!” [laughter] And grandma pushed the button and she said, “Oh, fantastic! I want to see this. Give me a chair. Give me a chair, I want to see it.” And she sat down in front of the machine and she watched the entire washing program [laughter] She was mesmerized. To my grandmother, the washing machine was America.

0:01:42.7 Paul Matzko: When was the last time you put a load of clothes in the washing machine, pulled up a chair and marveled at this miracle of domestic efficiency? Well, I’ve yelled many things at washing machines over the years, few of which I should probably say on the podcast. Hans Rosling’s grandma understood something we’ve all forgotten, that our lives are filled with wonders, with inventions and material possessions beyond even the wildest imaginings of pre-​modern people. And those appliances and computers and machines, they make our lives easier in a thousand different ways, so easy that we forget just how hard it used to be to do the tasks those objects have streamlined. We are a forgetful folk, a privileged people, blind to how much we have. I’m Paul Matzko, this is Building Tomorrow, and I want us to be more like that Swedish grandma, constantly amazed by the new technologies around us, thankful for the material abundance they provide, and overflowing with the determination to take the next step to build a better, more abundant future.

0:02:54.7 Speaker 3: I want some more.

0:02:56.4 Speaker 4: More.

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0:02:57.5 Speaker 5: More.

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0:02:58.4 Speaker 6: More.

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0:02:58.9 Speaker 7: More.

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0:03:00.0 Speaker 8: More.

0:03:19.0 Paul Matzko: What our Swedish grandma knew intuitively, experientially, we have to learn. To appreciate the miracle of the washing machine, we need to know what life was like before it existed when women had to wash clothes by hand.

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0:03:37.4 Ruth Cowan: We used to think, people talk about blue Monday because women would do their wash on Monday.

0:03:43.5 Paul Matzko: That’s historian Ruth Cowan, whose book, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology, I can’t recommend highly enough. She basically defined a whole new field back in the 1980s when the history of technology was still dominated by male scholars who weren’t interested in so-​called women’s work. But what is a Blue Monday? Blue Monday was once the scourge of women across the country when doing the laundry involved immense amounts of physical labor.

0:04:23.5 Ruth Cowan: She’s got to pump the water from the well, it’s possible that she has a coal burning stove, and next to that stove, there is a hot water boiler.

0:04:36.3 Paul Matzko: Often, those schlepping those gallons and gallons of water from the outside well, were either men or the children in the household, thus the nursery rhyme.

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0:04:51.6 Paul Matzko: Okay, so we’ve got our water, it’s been slowly heated to scalding. Now, what?

0:04:56.3 Ruth Cowan: Gotta scrub the clothes. She had a scrubbing board for that. Most people, even today, I think can’t recognize what one is, when confronted.

0:05:05.8 Paul Matzko: So you take your wet clothes and you physically repeatedly grind them by hand against the corrugated metal surface of the washboard, it’s back-​breaking to do it for a minute, but you’ve got to do it over and over and over again with every single item of clothing for hours, all day long. By the end, you are soaked, sweating, and your hands are scraped raw. But you’re still not done, the clothes might be cleaner now, but they’re still soaked. You need to wring them out. In the early 19th century, that wasn’t automated. Ruth actually tried the old method once at a historical recreation of a farm.

0:05:48.1 Hans Rosling: Which we took the Wash outside and we put it… Say a sheet, put it around a tree trunk and twisted it. It was very hard work, and it required both of my children and me to do it with a thing as heavy as a sheet.

0:06:05.9 Paul Matzko: But by the mid-​19th century, the wringer had been invented, a series of rollers that you’d attach to the side of a bucket through which the clothes would pass while you cranked a lever. Actually, one of the first parts of the washing machine to be automated was the wringer, though that immediately led to the rather gruesome origin of the ostensibly cutesy phrase we still echo today, like, He was put through the wringer. That’s a reference to the habit of kids putting their fingers or hands into automated wringers with predictably catastrophic crush injuries like wringer arm, when the skin was pulled off the muscle by the rollers and the bones pulverized.

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0:06:53.4 Paul Matzko: So you can imagine why when modern electric washing machines with Spin dryers were introduced in the 1930s, women flocked to buy them. The experience of plugging in that machine for the first time was nearly magical, like it was for Hans Rosling’s grandma. But for us, Well…

0:07:17.3 Chelsea Follett: I think we have lost that sense of wonder. When you put clothes in the laundry machine, now, you probably don’t think about it, you don’t even appreciate just how much time and labor that machine is saving you, but it really is life-​changing.

0:07:33.6 Paul Matzko: That’s Chelsea Follett, the Managing Editor of human​progress​.org.

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0:07:40.4 Chelsea Follett: There’s an economist at the University of Cambridge, Ha-​Joon Chang, who famously argued that the laundry machine has changed the world more than the internet has, and I’m sure many people are skeptical of that. When you look at how women used to spend their time, I think that he is on to something. Their laundry used to take up a full day a week at least, ironing and starching was a totally separate task as well, that took up even more time. And when you have that time given back to you, when you no longer have to devote the majority of your life, the equivalent of more than a full-​time job to cooking, cleaning, laundry, and so forth, then you have so many more options you can use to still put that time into household labor if you want, but to better effects. You’ll have a much… A better run household. It’s been said that the advent of technology allowed the housewife in the 1960s to produce the same standard of living for her home that previously a woman would need a huge staff of servants to maintain. So that labour, that additional time can be put into household labor still, but it gives you so many more options.

0:09:00.0 Paul Matzko: Chelsea’s point is well made. We don’t appreciate what that washing machine saves us from having to do. It did produce new efficiencies, decrease the time and effort needed to accomplish the same chores. It’s a big deal, yet… And this is a big yet, washing machines didn’t end up accomplishing quite what you might think: A life of relative ease for women freed from the tyranny of blue Mondays. There’s a fascinating study done by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s that shows what happened when washing machines were adopted. The WPA sent researchers to a Midwest town where only half the town was going to be electrified before the winter set in. I’ll let Ruth take over again.

0:09:48.2 Ruth Cowan: So they had what social scientists call a natural experiment, they had half the town electrified and half of the town not electrified, got whatever manufacturer to donate however many washing machine, electric washing machines, were the half that had electricity, and watched what happened. And the answer was that the women with electricity were spending as much time doing laundry as the women without electricity.

0:10:26.8 Paul Matzko: But wait, you said washing machines were transformative, Paul. Swedish grandmas and such. What gives?

0:10:33.8 Ruth Cowan: Because they were doing more wash. So, here we are, we’re in 1930. We’re in a farm town. You may not remember this, but I’m old enough to remember it. There was a time when men’s shirts came with detachable collars and cuffs. So on one side of the town, the women were washing the collars and the cuffs, the other side of the town, the women were washing and then ironing the whole shirt, and more than one shirt a week. But the real bulk of the laundry that was added to the households of the women with the electric washing machines were sheets. I was a child in the 1940s. We still only changed one sheet a week, you just used to put top sheet or the bottom sheet into the washing machine, and you put the other sheet on top. Our blouses were not changed every day, let alone twice a day. And so what happens when you got a washing machine in that town was that the women started doing what we would call providing for their households, a middle class standard [0:11:48.3] ____ it wasn’t make work, it was make status. Were they spending as much physical energy? Of course not. It wasn’t back-​breaking work.

0:12:01.5 Paul Matzko: So, now we arrive at the paradox of “labour-​saving technology.” It does save the amount of time and energy spent on a particular task, but the amount of time we spend in domestic labor is relatively fixed. We plow that time and energy that’s saved, back into doing more domestic work. For laundry, that means we now wash both top and bottom sheets, instead of doing just one, that means changing clothes every day or not having winter and summer underwear that gets washed seasonally. Though I suspect my seven-​year-​old son would approve of the old pathways. In other words, we compensate the gains in the automated domestic efficiency, not by doing less labour, but by doing more with the same amounts of labour. I call this the plinko board of domestic labour.

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0:12:58.3 Paul Matzko: We like to imagine that automation is a free fall, like suddenly dropping an obligation altogether, but it’s more like putting a ping-​pong ball in one of those plinko boards at a fair, in which the ball slowly descends the board as it bounces side the side off the intervening nails. Sure, the ball ends up at the bottom either way, but it’s not as straightforward a process as one might think. There’s another surprising wrinkle to the automation of household work. In as much as it was truly a labour-​saving technology, the labour it saved wasn’t women’s labor, it was men’s and children’s. Take laundry as an example again, while women spent Blue Monday scrubbing, men and children contributed to the chore by chopping wood, hauling water, dumping buckets, hanging laundry and so on. That labour was mostly replaced by the washing machine.

0:13:57.4 Ruth Cowan: Once you shift it to electricity and gas as the fuel for the stove, there was no more work for men to do, they had to do work outside the home to earn the money. But inside the home, there was no work. And chopping down a tree, then hauling it, was very strenuous work. The work becomes focused on one person rather than on another. And in this case, we have gendered work, so women cook and men provide. So if you want your child to be educated, you are willing to let the child go to school, but there’s still that work that has to be done. So who gets to do it? Either the children do it before they go to school, or after they come home from school, or the housewife does it. So as industrialization began to progress from the East Coast into the Midwest, you could watch in diaries and letters, you can watch the burden of housework falling almost solely on the housewife, whereas for her mother or her grandmother, it would have been shared work, shared between the man and the family, the woman and the family, and the children.

0:15:19.9 Paul Matzko: In other words, the Material Revolution was not equally distributed. Domestic labour-​saving technology was at least initially, more a tool of men’s liberation rather than women’s liberation. Yet today, if you ask someone off the street, though they might think these appliances came along and freed women from house works, they could go have careers outside the home and so on, but the reality is closer to the opposite, that these devices freed men from domestic chores, so they could go off and become workaholics or Don Draper. Ironic, right? This isn’t to say that these devices don’t represent progress or that they don’t save labour, they do. But the way those gains would be passed on was socially determined. The big winners from new domestic technologies were men, children, who now did vanishing-​ly little work inside the home compared to the past, and people who would have once been servants. When human capital was cheap in the 19th century, middle and upper class families would hire domestic servants to wash clothes, clean, take care of the children. But as workers’ lives and opportunities improved during the 20th century, their labour increasingly cost more than middle class families could afford. That lost servant labour was substituted for with vacuums, refrigerators, washing machines and so on.

0:16:44.1 Paul Matzko: But there was only a partial substitute. Appliance manufacturers claimed that their machines would mean less work for mother, but it really meant more work for mother and less work for everyone else. I hope you’re getting the nuance at this point. We absolutely do not appreciate our miraculous material possessions as much as we ought. Our stuff has truly liberatory potential, it improves our lives in a thousand, almost forgotten ways. We market-​friendly, pro-​growth, neo-​liberal and libertarian types, we’re often very good at telling this half of the story: Global poverty has plummeted, hurray! Compounding economic growth is a superpower, yes! And so on. But we’re not always great at telling the other half of that story. You see, it’s up to us to decide where the gains from automation, and new gains in productive efficiencies are invested, and who the beneficiaries will be. The abstraction we call the market doesn’t decide that. We do, both individually and socially. The washing machine didn’t have to create more work for mother, but that’s the end to which we deployed it. That’s on all of us.

0:18:06.7 Paul Matzko: We could stop our story here, happy to metaphorically sit next to our Swedish grandma, marvel at our washing machines and contemplate how we can more equitably redistribute the gains from future innovations. But we’re not stopping here because we’re in the early stages of a true revolution in material possession. You see, while the path to material abundance in the past was helping people to own more and better physical possessions that would improve their daily lives: More washing machines and such, the future of abundance is now actually de-​materializing, it’s a future in which we all own less but have more. That future is already here. At least in part, the perfect example is the rise of Netflix, Spotify and other streaming services, let me put it this way, when I was a kid in the late ’80s, early ’90s, I remember thinking that rich people were defined this people with large VHS tape collections.

0:19:10.4 Paul Matzko: I’d go over to my richest friend’s house, and that was a lawyer or something, and I marvel that his rec had floor to ceiling shelves filled with what seemed like every movie I could imagine. He could watch any Disney movie whenever he wanted. Whoa, my little mind was blown, but little could I have imagined as a kid, that one day almost everyone would have that kind of access to movies and forget a wall of VHS tapes or a DVD tower. Now you can just sign up for Disney plus or Netflix and have access to far more than a mere wall of content, that same transformation is happening to music and books, but it’s coming for almost everything we own in the next decade or so, more and more of your stuff will be converted into things you access temporarily without owning, think of cars, kitchen appliances, power tools, even Christmas trees, we are entering a period of radical and accelerating dematerialization on with big losers and even bigger winners. That’s a big claim, but it’s also rooted in a feeling common among millennials and Gen Zers.

0:20:25.3 Michael Munger: Why would you want to own things? And I understand old people like me want to own things, and in fact, if you look at my Facebook page, there’s pictures of my pathetic BMW. Look, I have a BMW, I’m so cool.

0:20:37.1 Paul Matzko: That’s Michael Munger an economist and political scientist at Duke University who has written extensively about the Future of work and ownership, including a book you can download for free, titled the sharing economy, its pitfalls and promises.

0:20:52.6 Michael Munger: My son, who’s a professor at Penn State, has pictures of him hang gliding in Nepal, so young people don’t want to own things, it’s hard to go to Nepal if you owned a bunch of things, so if you collect experiences, if your idea is I want to have a life, whereas the curated set of experiences, that’s what young people are looking for. Old people wanna have pictures of their BMW in a damn garage in a giant house that’s storing a bunch of stuff that they rarely use.

0:21:20.1 Paul Matzko: You can intuit Mike’s point just by spending time scrolling through Instagram or TikTok, young folks increasingly value curate and signal our interest in living a life defined by experiences.

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0:21:35.2 Paul Matzko: The places we travel, the food we eat, the people we do it with, as the DJ Avicii wrote, one day you’ll leave this world behind so live a life you will remember. Lyrics he paired with a music video of a shaggy young man, cliff jumping, skating and doing so in exotic locations around the world, and on Instagram pictures of people swimming in tropical oceans of white sand beaches have become such a motif that it’s actually an object of ridicule. By contrast, people obsessed with big houses, fancy cars, flashy jewellery and other expensive markers of material consumption come across as hopelessly cheugy, shallow. Now, it might be tempting to scoff at that attitude, millennials and their brunch picks of perfectly arranged avocado toast, but it anticipates the coming dematerialization of ownership. Just think of what it means to possess something, what the point of ownership is. Most of the time when you own a material object, it’s not because you value the object itself, but because you want access to the service that object provides. To understand that distinction, consider the lowly power drill.

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0:22:53.5 Paul Matzko: It’s not some object art are that you buy to hang on the wall and the admire. No, it’s not the drill itself that you want.

0:23:02.3 Michael Munger: Well, I don’t actually want a drill, what I want is two holes in this wall right now. And the question is, what is the easiest way for me to obtain two holes in this wall right now, and the answer is, until now it has been the ownership of a drill, but if there is an easier, cheaper way for me to get two holes in this wall right now, I’m happy to do it.

0:23:22.0 Paul Matzko: Mike’s making a deceptively simple, but deeply profound point, so much of the stuff we own, we don’t really want. What we want is holes in the wall, not the drill itself, we want to get from point A to point B in comfort at our convenience, not to own a car per se, we want a cut lawn, not owning a lawn mower, “a lawn mower.” Now, sure, there are exceptions to each of these examples, some people are collectors obsessed with the objects themselves or folks who just love the experience of using them for their own sake, but for most of us, most of the time, we want the outcome, not the thing itself, in other words, we can differentiate the product from the object, we want access to what economists call streams of service, physical possession is just one way of providing that access. I know I can get these holes on demand because I have a drill in my basement, or Mike’s case…

0:24:23.8 Michael Munger: I’m embarrassed to admit, Paul, I have four power drills.

0:24:27.9 Paul Matzko: Okay, okay, confession time. I’ve actually got three drills myself two so I don’t have to switch between drill bit and screw bit, one special one for cabinet work, hey, he who are without multiple drills, throw the first stone or screw, but what if we could separate access to a stream of service from material ownership? Sure, that’s easiest with digital services like movies and music, which is why it’s happened in those sectors first. Heck, when I was a teenager, we’d brag about installing a CD player in the trunk of the car that held… Get this 10 whole CDs, you could switch between the entire discography of the Bayside boys, the Macarena guys with the press of a button. Whoa. Yeah, today… Well, I’ve donated most of my CDs to goodwill, but I still have access to a global collection of film, television and music content that dwarfs even the largest home CD or cassette collection. In other words, I have given the material possession of a reel of tape or etched disc in exchange for access to a stream of music service. And I’m better off for it. Now, obviously, we can’t turn drills and lawn mowers into digital goods like We could movies and music, but we can create platforms that ease the sharing of those physical goods between consumers.

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0:25:56.9 Paul Matzko: Think of it like the intermediate step between the oldy days of home videos and streaming Netflix when you stop by a red box or blockbuster, even your mailbox to pick up a physical copy of a DVD that you send back or put back when you’re finished with it.

0:26:11.8 Michael Munger: Suppose that my wife wants me to hang some pictures, I pull out my phone, I go to Uber and I say I need a power drill, which I scroll down which one, it knows the kind of power drill that I want to rent. I say, oh right, I’m gonna rent it. 10 minutes later there’s a smart pod in front of my house, my phone rings because the smart pod has seen a delivery from an autonomous Uber of an excellent commercial quality power drill that’s better than any of the four that I now own. I drill the two holes, I used that commercial quality drill, I finish, I put it back in the smart pod, another autonomous Uber picks it up and takes it to the next user. There’s 10 or 12 users per day.

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0:26:52.4 Paul Matzko: Okay, so now we’ve converted a drill from a thing we own into a stream of service that we access. Well, why is that a good thing? What’s the advantage? Well, it means we get the outcome we desire, two holes in the wall without the downsides of ownership, and those downsides are actually quite large, I’ll be it somewhat invisible to us because we’ve become so used to them. You see, ownership entails a bunch of costs.

0:27:21.9 Michael Munger: If you own something, you always pay for it twice, you pay for the thing itself, and it is a stream of services that are going unused, so all of whatever money you have tied up in that thing are just sitting there, they’re not being used. And the amount of stuff that you have, the total size of the capital you have tied up in all of the stuff that you own, I have a riding loan mower, and so about once every eight days for 40 minutes, I use my riding lawn mower all the rest of the time, I have the money that… This thing is $3000 or $4000, maybe it’s not that much, but it’s some. But I also pay for it a second time because it’s in a shed that’s outside that I also have to maintain, so I’m paying for storage costs, so once you start to think of there’s always two costs of owning, purchase and storage, if you can get rid of both of those and you can do it across the board for many different things, the savings are dramatic.

0:28:24.3 Paul Matzko: Now, if you grew up in the suburbs, maybe those storage and maintenance costs don’t seem all that dramatic, but if you move into a city, they start to become much more visible when you’re living in, say, a 600 square foot studio, paying hundreds of dollars a month for a parking spot for your car. Storage, whether or a car, or a fake Christmas tree that costs something. Shifting to a stream of service model reduces the dead weight loss of ownership, just think of the sheer massive waste that our traditional pattern of ownership entails. The average American spends a little over an hour in their car each day, but that means 23 hours of the day that the car sits empty in the driveway or parking lot, it just sits there baking in the sun, decaying, depreciating, what an astonishing waste. In your car, is relatively well utilized compared to your drill.

0:29:24.9 Michael Munger: There’s 110 million power drills in the United States. The estimates are that the total lifetime use of one of those power drills, the median 30 minutes, if you use a power drill for four or five minutes that’s a long time. Usually it’s like 30 seconds. It doesn’t take very long, even if you’re working, making something for Mikia the cursing takes a long time. The power drill doesn’t take very long.

0:29:47.6 Paul Matzko: 30 minutes [chuckle] in years, decades of ownership, you will use your drill for about 30 minutes, but if we de-​materialize possession, if we move to a streams of service model, that means less of that utter waste.

0:30:07.3 Michael Munger: We would need something like seven or 8 million power drills total, so instead of 110 million power drills in the United States, we would need seven or eight million. We have more than enough stuff it’s just in the wrong place. So if you can reduce the transactions cost of sharing it, you need dramatically less stuff.

0:30:24.1 Paul Matzko: And that is the future of material possession, when you want a drill, you’ll push a button on your phone and one will show up in minutes, when you want to go somewhere, you’ll say a voice command, and the self-​driving car will pull up outside and take you wherever you want to go, we will own less stuff, but we will have access to so much more.

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0:30:47.3 Paul Matzko: That’s because the marginal cost of putting two holes in your wall, the cost of storing, maintaining the upfront purchase of the drill will fall, the cost of access to a car will fall to some small fraction of your current 24 hours a day ownership. Furthermore, the median quality of the services provided by our things will rise. Remember the tale of the washing machine, how did households respond when washing clothes got easier? Well, they didn’t respond by spending less time or money on clothes. No, they responded by washing more clothes, likewise, if your access to a car is several times, many times cheaper than is today, expect people to respond by getting access to nicer and nicer cars, in other words, a world in which cars are a stream of service is a world in which more of us will use what we today, we consider a luxury decked out fancy cars, we can actually anticipate that transformation in a partial way today, I’ve never owned a new car. In fact the average age of the three cars I’ve owned to my life is about 10 years, but guess what happens when I temporarily access a car as a stream of service, what in real life, we call renting a car. Well, I drive a nice new fresh off the line car, often of a more luxurious build than anything I own, the future of car ownership will look like that, but even more so.

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0:32:21.5 Paul Matzko: Thus far, I’ve painted a pretty rosy picture of the future of material ownership, but there are two cautionary notes I want to leave you with. The first is to remind us of one of the lessons we learned from our Swedish grandma and her washing machine, the benefits of this future transformation of ownership will not be equally distributed. Consider for example, the person who currently works in a factory that manufactures power drills. Sure, you and I, the consumer and society as a whole, will benefit from a more efficient usage of drills reducing the number needed by a factor of 10 or more, but most of the people employed by the drill maker will lose their jobs. A similar pattern will ripple across the entire consumer economy, the benefits will be widely and deeply distributed, but the losses will be concentrated, and no matter how great the net societal benefit, that’ll be cold comfort to displaced workers at least in the short term.

0:33:25.5 Michael Munger: My real wages are gonna go up, but if you make power drills, your wages are gonna fall to zero, and it doesn’t matter how far the price level falls if you’re unemployed, the difficulty is, for a whole lot of people, there’s going to be an attempt to find a cause. Why is it that I’m unemployed?

0:33:47.9 Paul Matzko: And this is dangerous territory. How do we know? Well, it’s happened before. Economic historians have a name for it, Engels’ pause, named for the 19th century Marxist and the often violent upheaval of workers displaced and alienated during early industrialization.

0:34:11.8 Michael Munger: So 1848, when Karl Marx looked out his window and he’s writing the communist manifesto, it was not hypothetical, the cities of Europe were on fire because of the industrial revolution and American cities and European cities and Asian cities are going to be literally on fire again, because we’re not very good at making the transition to people who had expectations, you go to high school, you get a job, you work, they’re not going to have any access to the benefits that come from this kind of new economy, the level of inequality is gonna go through the roof and the condition of those who are least well off, it’s going to be catastrophic, so my prediction is armed revolution and cities on fire.

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0:35:05.6 Paul Matzko: Now, I personally think Mike is being a bit hyperbolic, but even so, we should expect an escalation of political agitation, labor organizing, and general social unrest to an extent we haven’t really seen since the turn of the 19th and 20th century. And while then is in the future, society will emerge from that disruption, the wealthier, happier and better off than before, it’ll be a rough time in the interim, especially for those without higher education or specialized skills working in fields, resistant to automation and dematerialization. How we ought to respond to that coming crisis. Well, that depends on one’s ideological and political priors, it’s propelled calls for everything from a universal basic income to a more flexible workplace design and tax structure designed for an economy with fewer jobs and manufacturing more contract work, and the shift towards highly paid, soft skill dependent service jobs. I think of it this way. Sure, there will be fewer people employed in jobs like manufacturing, shipping delivery that will mostly be automated, but there will be more demands for skilled workers who facilitate the stream of service, helping customers, plotting delivery routes, engineering, maintaining the robots and so on.

0:36:23.9 Paul Matzko: Regardless, there’s a second cautionary note I want to sound, physical possession does have one fundamental advantage over access to a stream of service, a stream of service approach lowers transaction costs, making access to something easier and cheaper, but those lowered transaction costs cut both ways. The stream of service, giveth and can be taketh away. You see, a physical possession it’s relatively hard and expensive to take away, yes, your possessions can be repossessed, but that’s only common practice with more expensive goods like cars and houses, but with a stream of service that can be summoned with the push of a button, it can also be interrupted or taken with the push of a button, at this point, we’re pretty used to the idea that online platforms like Twitter or Facebook can suspend accounts or kick people off for a range of reasons, and it’s okay to have mixed feelings about that, but now, let’s take that into the IRL world, into real life, imagine at the company that manufactured your washing machine or your power drill could remotely disable that drill for a wide variety of reasons, complain on social media about problems with your rural pool washer. Well…

[automated voice]

0:37:47.1 Paul Matzko: And it won’t start up anymore, let’s say you use an unofficial drill bit in your power drill one that doesn’t bear an RFID tag showing it was made by DeWalt. Sorry, now your drill won’t drill until you buy an officially licensed drill bit. Does that sound far-​fetched? If so, you haven’t been paying attention, perhaps you own one of those coffee makers that brews coffee from disposable pods. If so, you might have noticed that any attempt to use an unlicensed pod causes an error on the machine, or if you’re a farmer who owns a tractor, you know that trying to repair your own tractor can result in the operating system breaking itself, turning a piece of farm equipment that cost you several times your home mortgage into an oversized paper weight until you bring in an officially licensed repairman, the ability of companies to dictate the use of our physical possessions is not hypothetical. It’s happening right now. And it could get much worse.

0:38:54.9 Cory Doctorow: Your toaster can’t make you use authorized bread, your dishwasher can’t make you use authorized dishes, your fireplace can’t make you burn authorized logs, and your barbecue can’t make you burn authorized charcoal. You can mix and match Roman Coke from two different vendors, and you can wear any socks you want with your shoes.

0:39:11.2 Paul Matzko: That’s Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, journalist and the leading activist in the fight against what’s known as Digital Rights Management or DRM for short. In as much as most folks have heard of DRM, they might have some vague idea that it’s a kind of copyright protection system, a way of fighting digital piracy or something like that, and those are the reasons often given for its existence, which was codified by Congress in 1998, but what really is DRM.

0:39:45.6 Cory Doctorow: All the DRM is, is the minimum viable technology to invoke DRM law, that’s the only thing that people use it for.

0:39:57.0 Paul Matzko: In other words, DRM isn’t a specific technology, it’s any technology that gives the manufacturer of a product the ability to control or sanction its use by the consumer, it could be a line of code, it could be a proprietary trademark designed to hinder third-​party imitation, it is legion and it isn’t for your benefit. Cory is also known for coining something called Doctorow’s First Law.

0:40:24.7 Cory Doctorow: Which is that any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won’t give you the key, that lock is not there for your benefit.

0:40:34.1 Paul Matzko: To put this in practical terms, how precisely does breaking your coffee maker, if you use an unapproved coffee pod, benefit the consumer, protect them from hackers or prevent piracy? It doesn’t, it just forces them to buy the manufacturer’s own over-​priced coffee pods, or if you owned a computer printer, it forces you to buy overpriced ink cartridges and so on. So DRM is about boosting the profits of manufacturers at the expense of consumers, and it’s ultimately anti-​competitive. Corporations lobby the federal government to create a moat around them to prevent other companies from challenging their advantage in the market, it’s not a free market approach, it’s something that only exists via governmental largesse, Cory has a term for it.

0:41:26.4 Cory Doctorow: That creates felony contempt of business model. So now we have felony contempt of business model in tractors, John Deere uses this to stop you from effecting your own repairs, coffee machines Craig uses it, juicing machines Juicero used it. We have it in toaster ovens, we have it in cars and spades, this is in every Tesla, this is in home thermostats, this is in solar panel controllers, this is in anything that’s got an app store, it’s in smart toys. It’s in smart watches. It’s in Smart bikes, your Peloton, your treadmill. They have all conceived of ways to effect a kind of enduring, an expanse of [0:42:11.0] ____ where they can effectively insist in ways that expand over time, because they can send you software updates that you must increasingly arrange your affairs to the benefit of their shareholders and to your own detriment.

0:42:28.7 Paul Matzko: I don’t have any problem with profits and shareholders, of course, but I do take issue with companies using DRM to rig the market against consumers and in their own favor, but my opposition to DRM isn’t just philosophical, it’s also rooted in my belief that DRM represents a step-​backward in human development. The story of human development from the beginning has been the story of a war, we wage battle against the fundamental fact of scarcity, there is never enough resources, labor, energy or capital to meet every desire of every human being, nature… To quote the poet, Tennyson is red in tooth and claw. We fight back against this fact of scarcity, we make tools to improve the hunt, we add wheels to move faster, we build engines to make more. Technology allows us to act more efficiently to press back on the boundaries of natural scarcity, and we do so despite the deck being stacked in scarcity’s favour our tools, engines, wheels, our bodies, they wear out, they break down, stop working.

0:43:44.2 Paul Matzko: Entropy is the cousin of scarcity, another way of putting it is that we must overcome the natural obsolescence of our things over time, our material possessions degrade, they must be replaced, but that’s part of the wonder of living in the digital age, digital goods don’t necessarily degrade over time, if you own a print copy of a book, over time, the pages will yellow, the binding will loosen, the ink will fade, it will end up likely in the trash, but the ones and zeros of a digital version of a book, they’re not subject to natural obsolescence. They can theoretically live forever, and that’s huge, we have dealt an incredible blow, an unprecedented blow in the course of human history to the entropic bent of the universe, Take that scarcity and all your terrible cousins, chalk one up for humanity. Which makes it deeply perverse for people in the digital age, to use those tools to build planned obsolescence into our possessions, DRM means purposefully designing products to eventually fail.

0:44:56.7 Cory Doctorow: Well, yeah, and I would say that there is something quite perverse and even, I don’t wanna use, say demonic, but kind of a moral hazard on that makes virtuous people wicked. In any system where you go from thousands of years of doing your best to make enduring products, and then in the digital world, you try to make them self-​distract, whatever that incentive is, I think we can call it a wicked one, because they are someone who has gone from a developer of knowledge and practices that improves the human condition to one that worsens it.

0:45:43.8 Paul Matzko: Wicked indeed. And so we end as we began, there are technologies that promised to unleash new productive efficiencies that will enable us to own less, but have more. It’s a thought that makes me wish I could pull up a stool next to my Swedish grandma and just sit there and wonder at the tangible promise of a transformed world, but she’s also a reminder that a material revolution is not equally distributed, because of the cultural values and gendered social norms of the time, new household technologies freed children, men and servants from domestic labor before they did the same, or at least to the same extent for women. Today, we too have a say in deciding how these gains are channeled, where that liberatory potential is invested, some would deploy the power of the state to take the gains realized from the switch to a streams of service-​based economy and funnel them into the pockets of corporate shareholders, lawyers and lobbyists. But their victory isn’t guaranteed. The next time you pick up your drill and make a couple of holes or the next time you throw a load of laundry into the washing machine, I hope you’ll be thankful for the technological miracles that are at your fingertip and also be ready to give them up to embrace a new model of ownership, but do so while fighting to ensure that those benefits are spread freely and widely.

0:47:16.4 Paul Matzko: I’m Paul Matzko, this is Building Tomorrow, and I want us all to own less but have so much more. I have a special announcement. This will be the last episode of the Building Tomorrow Podcast, I hope you’ve enjoyed listening to it as much as our team has, enjoyed making it. You’ll still be able to find this odd little blend of forward-​looking history, emerging technology and under-​appreciated aspects of public policy on my social media feeds, including @pmatzko on Twitter and soon on TikTok. Thank you for listening. And as always be well. This episode was produced by the frozen chosen fin Landry Ayres, special thanks to the entire lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org team over the years that made this show possible, Greta Major League Langhenry, you don’t wanna make me angry, Natalie Dowzicky, test the nut so terrible and Aaron Warhammer Powell.