What does “own” even mean?
It means like To Own! When I look around the apartment that I rent, what is mine? For keeps?! This could be physical objects, animals, children, but what else? It’s been brought to my attention recently that we are experiencing many things on rented time. That we are often literally borrowing space in public, and almost always paying for our spot. Especially in online spaces, we do not own the content or the platform. So, what do we own?
What do I actually own?
I was able to fit a list (categorical) of everything I have on a small journal sheet. Roughly 200 DVDs or Blu-rays, the appropriate equipment to play those movies and store those discs. I technically own Hildie, plus the tools she needs to survive. Cat bed, cat tree, automatic feeder, water bowls, litter box, carrying case. Don’t worry I won’t go on much more, furniture I’ve acquired over the years, almost all hand-me-downs. Lots of decor/art collections, craft supplies, journals, this computer, my clothes, consumable products and their accessories (dishes, towels, sheets, hygiene tools). That’s kind of it, my physical footprint: condensed. If my apartment crumbled to the ground today in an explosion, leaving Chicago uninhabited for years to come, what would archeologists know of me?
It ain’t much, though it is simultaneously more than I want and hardly what I need.
I don’t own a lot
I don’t own my walls and I quite literally don’t know anyone that does. Keeping in mind, I and most of my friends are 30 or younger, which is to say very young. It is still common place to hear anyone say that they may never have an opportunity to buy a house. Never owning a home is like a final-boss example of the themes at play here but the housing crisis is honestly far too much for me to comprehend and then regurgitate. Therefore, I will be focusing on where we spend even more time than in our homes: online. (surprise, surprise).
It struck a couple of people as an odd choice that I chose to build my photography portfolio on a purchased domain rather than a free Instagram account. Thousands of businesses are built on and advertise almost exclusively on Instagram. Very successfully, I might add. After weeks to months of researching options and conceptualizing my business, I ultimately concluded that any thing I did on Instagram would never be owned by me or my business. It would be owned by Meta. Not only would it creatively restrict how I present myself and my product, but it could completely vanish in a day if the company responsible dissolves. While I am hosting on a third-party website (Cargo Collective), my domain and the following I’m building are completely my own. It and its contacts can be transferred to any other platform I choose, easily, as can these blog posts.
Where do we spend our time?
I want to ask where we are spending our time online, which platforms, and who is benefiting in the exchange? On Instagram a lot of people, myself included, can spend a lot of time (maybe too much, maybe not), on the reels. Which I will bluntly say is to only the benefit of Instagram and a small number of creators, even if you are enjoying yourself when scrolling. In the opposite sense, if you’re primarily on your main feed and catching up with friends, that has a socializing aspect that benefits you. Or if your business makes money on Instagram that has a financial benefit, etc, etc. Instagram is free, except that you’re paying with your attention. Time is literally money now, it’s your responsibility to spend it wisely or not.
Alternatively: on something like Netflix, we can spend hours a day or a week watching it. I’d say streaming doesn’t necessarily always feel like being online and it doesn’t necessarily feel transactional, but you are explicitly paying for it with your money. You know that. You do benefit from this, you get entertainment, access to exclusive shows, and access to exclusive conversations about these exclusive shows. All that, and Netflix will only charge you $7.99 per month to watch with ads ($95.88 per Year) or $17.99 per month to watch without ads ($215.88 per year). Plus if you want to share that account with anyone else, these fuckin’ cops, you must pay an additional $6.99 a month to give that friend an ad-full access or $8.99 a month to give them the equal access that you have. That alone is $83.88 or $107.88 extra per year, on top of the one to two hundred you already agreed to! Isn’t that awesome?
After paying hundreds of dollars to Netflix over the few years that I’ve had to pay for it (often sharing with friends or family), will I have anything to show for it if/when I can no longer afford it? The price is often increasing. Will they let me keep a download of The Boss Baby (2017) as a compilation? No! They will not. In fact they will not even offer you so much as a month for free. It’s pathetic, and most of us are paying for one if not more streaming services. But what are we paying for other than access? And is it worth it? For us as viewers or for the professionals as creators? Is the streaming platform model working for the people who should be benefiting from it, like creatives, writers, production crews, and actors?
We don’t own our accounts
When on a social media app to do our socializing, is it really a public space? Who is in charge? What are their rules? Every single site that you create an account on has a terms of service. This is normal, there are laws in our real world, there are rules at places as public as a city park. How do those rules differ? For one, your right to Free Speech extends to the park. You are allowed to advertise a business, an idea, a hobby. Anyone can bring out their soap box and start spewing to the masses. No one can tell you that you are not allowed or to leave completely (of course, unless you are posing a danger to people). Even the private conversations you’re having with friends, at this park, cannot really be policed by anyone.
What about on a site run by Meta: Instagram or Facebook? Can your “public” posts say literally anything you want? Can any account holder delete the comments you leave on their profile? Will Meta delete your account all together if you are caught breaking some of their guidelines? Are the answers to these always considered bad things? I think a more extreme example of the kind of speech policing I often find so off-putting is seen more-so on Youtube and Tiktok.
Censorship
The very first time I heard someone use “unalive” to describe death I had to rewind and listen again multiple times. Is this creator uncomfortable using the word ‘kill’? Is this video sponsored by a kids toy? A similar wave of questions came when the term “SA” was popularized to refer to sexual assault. I was more sure this time that it had to do with the people paying the ad-sense and Youtube prioritizing those companies. A commentary host I enjoy often employs a graphic of a hand pointing a gun to his head labeled “YOUTUBE” when he is, effectively, forced to use these and similar euphemisms (to put it politely). It always gets a giggle out of me, because he’s one of the only creators I’ve seen point out exactly how silly we all sound. That being said, he is not even allowed to say the word “gun” in his videos.
These are obvious, and some would say important, terms to censor. However, platforms like Youtube and Tiktok suppress content based on a lot more than just violent or graphic words. Terms like abortion, ADHD, disability, #MeToo, queer or LGBT, and all of their associating content. Plus hundreds of more marginalized topics I simply cannot list here. The experiences and information being shared by, already silenced groups are actively being removed and suppressed from our “public” platforms. Which is completely legal and within the rights of the owners of the property. The barkeep can kick you from the bar if they think you’re talkin’ nonsense.
Youtube Video: “The Answer is Pay the Writers, Obviously” Duncan Kastner, referenced above.
Cesspool
On the opposite end of the spectrum. On an app people are fleeing because it’s as lawless as the wild west. It’s been 3 years since Twitter’s take over and X users have noticed an, honestly expected, surge in hateful or violent posts from extremists. As you might imagine, this has upset the balance of the cool funny people on X and the incel dweebs. Unfortunately, having a number of social media platforms to choose from ends up making some of them quite cliquey. This means you’re likely seeing the same people or types of people on each varying apps, maybe these are people you know but most them are certainly people you don’t. People you aren’t seeing often and people who may only communicate with you via this app. I’m not saying these relationships don’t benefit you but I’m wondering how worth it that benefit is and who is benefitting most?
Well, who is it?
Spoiler! It isn’t us. Instagram, X, and Tiktok can be lucrative for people. A very small amount of users will get filthy rich from posting, yes. The rest of us are just watching the celebrities, collecting the recipes we may never cook, and sending the memes to one another. These companies make BILLIONS off of us, Instagram made $49.8 billion in 2023*. Off of our viewership, our hours, our ideas, our creativity. They are making money around the clock showing us ads, selling us crap, and mining our data. Literally making money off of our boredom, our ambitions, impulses, and our friendships. Now I’m not anti-making money, but I am concerned about the greater effects the attention economy is going to have on us and the communities we inhabit. Things like extremism, which is much of the content pushed by the algorithms that are employed on most of the platforms we use. Things like consumerism, instant gratification, cognitive dissonance, deliberate misinformation, shortening attention spans, and the under-socialization of our young people. *deep breath*
How can we benefit?
We can take back some of our ownership and some of our privacy. Private conversations and public communal conversations are, in my opinion, the most important. If it is possible to see your people, see them. If you can call them, call. If you can start going to the library or the coffee shop when you’re lonely to find a kind stranger to engage with, go there. We need to be getting out of the house to form most of these connections. I think we really need to learn to entertain each other again. There are a few apps with the user’s rights in mind. Currently at the top of my list are, Signal Messaging and DuckDuckGo, a private search engine alternative to Google. If you know of any let us all know in the comments.
(For the record I use both Signal and DuckDuckGo currently, highly recommend both.)
If you don’t want to quit the streaming platforms, share them. Downsize and share the burden, share your resources, hell! share physical media. If you only talk to friends on socials, start to practice reaching out else where, shoot a text in the dark, send a funny photo from your camera roll instead of a meme. I love physically writing cards and letters to my people, it’s insanely therapeutic. I love that I can gift someone something to keep and tell them all my updates and ask all my questions at once. I love loaning out books I enjoyed, and printing out pictures to share. Our household recently cancelled all of our streaming accounts. We spent the next day finding movies to watch at the library. These changes don’t have to be too extreme. I’m still living in 2025, I will likely still rent some movies from Youtube, or ask for a login to binge a show. I will definitely keep texting my friends and downloading Instagram for an hour every month.
That being said, never stop texting your friends. Only keep in mind, who really owns those texts?
What can we PHYSICALLY do.
I get the feeling that a lot of our generation are watching instead of doing. It is easier to sit down and watch something you’re interested in. But it is better, infinitely, to get up and do something you’re interested in. I’ll tell you why.
When you go see a movie at a local theatre you are literally investing in your community! When you learn a skill instead of watching people learn one you are literally investing in yourself. When you read a banned book instead of watching a popular show, you are literally fucking giving it to the man. When you borrow a DVD from the library instead of streaming it, you’re making a job and going into your community. Doing all of this, or even some of it, requires much patience, strategy, pre-planning, and lots of intentionality. But if I can be frank…I think these next few years are going to require A Lot of Intentionality. Boat loads of purposeful and careful delegation. I want to benefit and want my community to benefit from my choices, even the silly entertaining ones. I want to invest, actually invest, back into me and into my neighbors, even during my recreation. Always renting just isn’t worth it for me anymore.
So, What have I been doing?
Our household has cancelled (almost) all of our subscription services. Between two of us we were paying for two Netflix accounts, Max (formerly HBO Max), Apple TV, Hulu, Adobe Premiere, Canva, Patreon, and something for sports -I don’t know what they’re called. These are the entertainment and hobby related subscriptions. I opted to keep my Patreon because it pays the creators I consume directly. We also kept our sports packages because we watch a lot generally and cannot get those elsewhere. Technically, I am also paying a subscription for our compost service, WasteNot. That is obviously a good subscription to have, for the world, and I also receive compost soil back in return. I think we will be saving maybe $100 a month from these cancellations, not much but definitely pocket money to be put towards doing things.
Since cancelling these we have not even opened the apps that we still have access too. I am opting to entertain myself in more hands-on ways: sudoku books, non-fiction books, graphic novels, making more plans with friends, stretching, writing, trying to reform a tenant’s union, and listening to music (sometimes on a record, mostly not). Every day I watch a Youtube video or two and am way overly aware of how much I’ve been looking at a screen. It is a sickness, I don’t know how to stop. Obsessed. However I do believe it will get easier and more Normal.
In all I do think I feel Better. It is a little bit nicer to live in my brain when I can easily explain why I have the things I have. Even if they are things that I only have access to. I am genuinely worried about the effects of the recent shift in administration. It may feel like a silly conclusion to come to: The world is ending so I stop watching Netflix. But I want to be able to share my wealth when times inevitably get tougher. I do not want a greedy suit to tell me what I can and can’t do, can and can’t say, can and can’t watch. I’m making small steps to be able to share what I have, and plus how can you share something you don’t own?
If we don’t own anything we do on the internet what happens when they say we can’t do it anymore. We have been told “the internet is forever” but is it actually? I don’t really think so anymore. What I do know is that we deserve to have some of our things forever. I think that we can!
That’s all from me, for now.
As always, thank you so kindly for being here. I promise every post will not be a hate campaign against the internet. I love being a modern girl, I hate having modern problems. March 15th’s blog issue will be about the amazing magic of changing seasons and how a FL girl came to love winter! Inspired by a podcast recommended to me by my wonderful brother:
-The Art of Manliness: The Winter Mindset https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/podcast-1046-the-winter-mindset-how-norwegians-love-the-winter-and-you-can-too/
If you’d like to watch the video commentary that inspired this post you just read, I will link it here:
Another video posted more recently, Drew sums up some of my thoughts better and funnier than me.
Thank you so FREAKING much for being here and subscribe if you love me :) okay bye!
*$49.8 Billion: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/instagram-statistics/
Such a thoughtful take on ownership in this modern hellscape! This is definitely something I think about constantly and it feels nice to see it put down into words.
I pay for a lot of subscriptions. I share them with my mom and she likes them and watches as much TV as you’d expect a 55 year old single woman to do.
Anyways, every single month for the last six months, I have gotten an email to let me know the subscription price for one of my apps is going up. And there’s nothing I can do. It’s like rent. They just make the price whatever they want and change it on a whim.
The other day, I realized the one thing we watch on AMC is mad men, and the amount of money I’ve spent on AMC we could have purchased the series on DVD. Woof.
Much love 🩷 call or text any time!