a) Digital "ownership" and/or The first sale doctrine
b) Cloud gaming (as in rendered in the cloud, delivered as video streaming)
I'll explore those links, thanks for the heads up.
I think several years ago now, I had this epiphany about the way software and "ownership" seemed to be going. I worked/work in software most of my adult life. Mostly in marketing but that got me working alongside brilliant people from CEOs of startups to software developers who are so talented they can instantly switch sides in our local software hotbed here in Waterloo, Ontario Canada. But the way I saw it is that the recurring revenue stream is the golden goose everyone is looking for out of their software company. I've mostly worked for B2B companies looking to extract monthly/annual licensing or support fees. But it's really become obvious to the general public in B2C subscription services.
What I didn't expect to see start to metastasize was that workers (generally starting out, low skilled work) would obtain a form of employment from the same model, think Uber Driver, and maybe even Amazon/Shopify retailers.
The epiphany was the kind-of the philosophy behind it and what it might be doing to our society or what we think of as a society where "ownership" isn't really a thing anymore, we just "rent", and employment becomes a different condition as well as we become more of a "gig" economy. That "gig" economy exists at both the low and high levels... as I've seen among brilliant developers who are able to switch high-paying jobs at the veritable drop of hat. I've also spent years working gigs myself in marketing, although not as well paying as the really brilliant software engineers.
Maybe I'm too fascinated with about reading medieval history, but I see a correlation between this kind of life and serfdom of the past, particularly where it applies to the "low end" of the gig economy, renting everything, even entertainment people used to "collect" as records or movies on tape or disc. I don't know if I like it all that much. But I use it, I subscribe to Netflix, but still retain my own local music and movie collection, maybe I'm just old fashioned.
I just wonder what the future holds for the classic American ethics of private property, freedom of speech and maybe even capitalism itself. In modern political discourse, it's easy to find populations for whom the very word "capitalism" represents all the evils of society, rather than the vehicle that has brought untold prosperity to the most impoverished nations on Earth.
But at the same time, I don't want to dismiss the "millennial" complaints against what they see as "evils" of capitalism, as I see the future for my own children in a first world nation where kids are coming out of University with mounds of debt, little hope of home ownership as Chinese money causes spiraling housing costs in our cities, and then either relying on questionable government "health care" or having none at all as in the US. I think we have legitimate problems to solve here. I just wonder how these new ethics forming around technology are going to play out.