Prediction · Abundance ·
The Trojan horse
Nobody will vote for a world where you own nothing. Each of us will take the deal in front of us, the way we took the smartphone, and only later notice how much we have come to depend on it. The biggest changes are the ones nobody chooses.
- The dealIt costs less than what it replaces.
- The habitIt becomes how you do the thing.
- The dependenceThe old way quietly closes behind you.
- The orderThe world rebuilds itself around the new way.
A man waits in a long line to buy a phone that is also a music player and a web browser. He is not joining a movement. He is getting three gadgets for the price of two, and he will tell his friends it was a good deal. He is right.
Not of human design
In 1767 the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson noticed something strange about the institutions people live inside. Nations, he wrote, stumble upon arrangements that are “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.” Nobody designed the English language, money or the market town. Each emerged from millions of people solving their own small problems, and only afterward did anyone look up and see the shape.
Two centuries later Friedrich Hayek gave the idea a name, spontaneous order, and borrowed Ferguson’s words for the title of an essay. His point was that the most powerful structures in a society are often the ones nobody planned and nobody could have planned, because no planner knows what millions of people know about their own lives.
So here is the principle. A new order does not have to be imposed. It can be accepted, one good deal at a time, until it is simply the way things are.
The phone we took
In 2011, when Pew first measured it, about a third of American adults owned a smartphone. Today about nine in ten do. Nobody passed a law. Nobody was forced. Each person took the deal in front of them.
Then the phone did what every good deal does. It replaced the camera, the map, the music player and the alarm clock. Then the bank branch, the boarding pass, the parking meter and the restaurant menu. Each replacement was its own small, sensible choice.
And then the world rebuilt itself around the people who had made those choices. The bank sends the security code to your phone. The parking lot has no meter, only a sign with an app. The menu is a square code on the table. Nobody banned the paper map; the world simply stopped expecting anyone to carry one. You are still free to live without a smartphone. Try it for a week.
That is the shape: the deal, the habit, the dependence, the order. We only see it looking back.
The same road, again
The subscription in this series walks the same road. Here it is step by step, next to the phone.
- The dealThe phone. A camera, a music player and the web in one pocket, for less than the three cost apart.The plan. Rides, internet and AI for $500 a month, less than a car payment, its insurance and its gas.
- The habitThe phone. You stop carrying a camera, then a map, then a wallet.The plan. A child who has ridden robotaxis since birth never learns to want a car.
- The dependenceThe phone. You no longer remember a single phone number.The plan. On the $2,000 Living plan the house is sold, and the mortgage, the insurance and the repairs go with it.
- The orderThe phone. Banks, parking lots and menus assume you carry one.The plan. Buildings, zoning and land are arranged around subscribers, and most of the land belongs to the companies that supply the plans.
Notice that no step asks anyone to believe anything. Each one asks only whether the deal is better than the alternative, and at every step, for most people, it is. The child who never wants a car is the subject of the third piece; the house that gets sold is the subject of the second.
Communism’s Trojan horse
Look at where the road ends. Individuals no longer own homes or cars. The basics of life come from one integrated system. Half the population pays nothing and is carried by the margin on everyone else, as the fifth piece worked out. Read that list aloud and it sounds like the old promise: from each according to ability, to each according to need.
Communism tried to build that destination by design: from the top, by plan, by force. It failed, largely because it gave people no exit and no prices, so the planners never learned what people actually wanted.
The subscription arrives at a similar place by the opposite road. It is capitalist to the core: competing companies, real prices, profit measured on the subscription. It is democratic in the most literal way: every person decides every month, with no mandate and no coercion. That is what makes it a Trojan horse. It is so plainly a market product that nobody looks for an ideology inside it. And there isn’t one. The new order is not hidden in the product. It is hidden in the sum.
Nobody chooses the new order. Everyone chooses a plan. The order is what the plans add up to.
What keeps the horse honest
An order nobody chose can still go well or badly, and two things decide which.
The first is exit. As long as you can switch plans as easily as you once switched phone carriers, every company has to win you again each month, the argument of the monthly election. If the market collapses to one bundle, the emergent order stops being a market and becomes a planned economy owned by a private company. That is not communism. It is a company town.
The second is ownership. If subscribers hold stakes in the companies that supply them, as the second piece proposed, the order spreads ownership across everyone. If they do not, a few own everything everyone uses. Same product, same price, two very different societies.
A renewal notice arrives with a rival’s offer attached: more food, the same price. She reads it over coffee in a building she has never owned, in a city she crosses without a car, and decides to stay. She cannot remember the last time she carried a key. She is not unhappy. She just notices it, the way you sometimes notice the phone already in your hand.
Six predictions
No one will ever vote on it.
The change will never appear on a ballot. It will show up first in a quarterly count of subscribers, and only later in the history books.
Opting out becomes a lifestyle.
Like the person with a flip phone today, the household that still owns its house and car will be admired, a little inconvenienced and increasingly rare.
The world rebuilds around subscribers.
Within a decade of most people subscribing, buildings, zoning, payments and identity will assume you are on a plan, the way the parking lot now assumes you have an app.
The political fight will be about exit.
Not whether to subscribe, but how easily you can leave: carrying your history, your health record and your home from one company to the next, the way you carry a phone number today.
It will be called communism and capitalism at once.
Critics on one side will see the collectivism. Critics on the other will see a few companies owning everything. Both will be partly right, because the order is both.
The regret, if it comes, will be about dependence, not price.
As with the phone, people will say the deal was good, and still wish they could put it down.
Where I stand
At E2open I watched a network grow the only way networks grow. Each company joined for its own reasons, because it saved money or time, and each one that joined made the network more valuable to the next. Nobody had to plan the result. And I already give my students advice that walks them down this road: rent rather than buy, ride rather than own, keep your needs small, as I wrote in First Customer. I give it because it is a good deal. That is exactly the point.
The claim ledger
- Already true
- The smartphone went from about a third of American adults to about nine in ten in under fifteen years, with no law and no mandate, and the world rebuilt itself around it. Rides, satellite internet and AI are already sold by the month.
- What has to happen
- The bundle has to beat ownership at every tier, every month, housing included. Switching has to stay easy. And the companies have to be trusted enough that people hand them the house.
- Where I am probably wrong
- Ownership may matter more than the price suggests. It stores identity and belonging as well as wealth, and people may not give those up at any price. An outage or a price shock could reveal the dependence early and set off a backlash. And governments may step in before the order has time to emerge.
Back to the phone in your hand. It was a good deal. It still is. That is exactly how it happened, and exactly how the next one will happen.
The new order will not be imposed. It will be accepted, one good deal at a time.
Background
- Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767.
- Spontaneous order, on Hayek and the idea of orders nobody designed.
- Mobile Fact Sheet, Pew Research Center.
- Smartphone Adoption and Usage, Pew Research Center, 2011.
- John Rector, First Customer.
- John Rector, You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy.
- John Rector, What Ownership Was Holding.
- John Rector, Nobody Hands You the Keys.
- John Rector, The Monthly Election.
- John Rector, Feeding the Machine.