From what I’ve read Steam is like permanent rental. You pay a one time fee for the privilege of playing a game on their server, and you have to log in to authenticate, and they can terminate you for any reason at any time, and they can delete the game for any reason at any time, and you’re screwed. Fuck that.
You know, I’ve got games, CDs back when those existed, from 25 years ago that I can play in a DOSbox on any computer and as long as I don’t do anything to physically destroy the disk I’ll be able to play it forever because the lifetime of a CD is longer than a human lifetime.
It’s the same thing with Windows 10. You don’t own it, you’re renting it from Microshaft. What you buy is an exclusive license to rent a copy of the OS that they can change at any time without your permission.
When did we switch over to living in a society (LOL) where you own nothing?
Serious answer: M$ has been floating that particular trial balloon for twenty years. There is a convenient “leak” of internal M$ documents and memos saying “the next version of Windoze will be a subscription for a service that will require monthly payments and won’t work without an Internet connection.” Until around 2015 the public response was, shall we say, negative. Since then a non-trivial number of consumers and businesses have said “Okay, Big Daddy Bill! You’ll just put in the tip, right? And M$ has been very encouraged by this. Note the widespread acceptance of “Office 365” in which your business is halted 100% dead if the Internet connection goes down and you can’t even reach the saved files if you saved them to “the cloud” instead of locally.
All of this fits too neatly to be anything but part and parcel of a certain vision for the future that certain very powerful groups have been pushing very hard almost as long as M$ has been trying to convince the public to let them make Windows subscription-only. Using “the environment” as a pretext for outright economic warfare against rural areas, to depopulate them and force the population into the cities in order to seek work, has been going on since the late 1970s. By some mysterious coincidence the push for “the cashless society” started at the exact same time, pushed by some of the very same people.
This is the plan. Everyone–well, not everyone, exactly, just peasants who don’t matter–is to live in a tiny room with a shared bathroom at the end of the hallway, in a grim prefabricated concrete Soviet-style apartment building, or maybe a Tokyo-style “coffin hotel,” in a polluted rat-hive city, where you don’t dare go outside after dark to go the supermarket lest you be murdered by the junkies lounging in every alley. Automobiles are bad for the environment. Freedom of movement is bad for Mother Gaea. You will ride a bicycle and you will like it. And the bicycle will be rented, so that it can be taken away from you at any time. And if you don’t like this state of affairs and start talking about “dangerous” ideas, the government/bank (it’s already a distinction without a difference, if you haven’t noticed) will cancel your card. Cash will be a thing of the past. Cash will be illegal, and it will be justified with laws about “money laundering” and “hoarding” and “terrorism” and maybe even “paper money transmits disease.” If you step out of line, you’ll get evicted, immediately, because there’ll be no other means to pay. You won’t even be able to buy a can of beans, because your card won’t be accepted and paper money will no longer exist. You won’t be able to pay in cash, or save cash for emergencies. You’ll sit down, shut up, and obey, or else. Just like government controlled medicine. Want your kid to keep getting those asthma meds? Say “I love Big Brother.” Say it. SAY IT. Louder! I can’t hear you! Or else.
The same people who tell you “the Great Reset” is a conspiracy theory, and you’re crazy for talking about it, have been talking about it for decades, and for the last ten years using that term. “The Great Reset” is not something some Alex Jones listener made up. It’s the term they use for it in their press releases. They can’t shut up about what they want to do. Telling the world about it makes them feel all warm and gooey inside. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays they tell us it’s all a conspiracy theory and we’re all nuts. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays they publish agitprop:
He’s one of the cool kids. Don’t you want to be like him? Don’t you want to be one of the cool kids? You’ll never be normal if you aren’t enthusiastic about being a high-tech serf, without even any of the rights European serfs had a thousand years ago. You’ll never get laid if you don’t want the Great Reset. You’ll never be normal. You’ll be censored, cancelled, banned, ostracized, and driven to the fringes if you say anything bad about it, because that’s “dangerous misinformation.” There will be no concentration camps because they won’t be necessary. They won’t even have to imprison you. They won’t even have to torture or kill you, because the criminal underclass they will allow free rein in the no-man’s-land that starts at the entry doors of the coffin hotel you lived in will do it all for them.
You will live in the coffin hotel. You will eat the bugs and drink the soy. You will drink municipal water that may have antidepressant drugs added at the water plant. You will ride a bicycle. If you have access to a vehicle, it will be a “smart car” with a government kill switch and remote controls, and it will be wired for video and sound, so that it can be remotely halted at any time and you can be dropped off at the police station if you dare to voice any badthink, even alone in a vehicle. Your access to even the “smart car” can be cut off at any time, with the pretext of an excessive “lifetime carbon footprint.” Like a medieval peasant you will in all likelihood never set foot more than ten miles from the place where you were born. You will be microchipped like a pet, because that is what you’ll be, with no rights, only privileges that can be suspended at any time, with or without cause. Every purchase you make will be tracked, recorded, and surveilled, down to a stick of gum–and so will you. You will live in Bentham’s Panopticon, and there will be no possibility of escape, not even in theory. You will have nothing, but you WILL be happy about it, because you’ll be wired out of your head on SSRIs–and maybe just a bit of brain surgery, if you resist taking the mandatory daily happy-pills. You WILL cease this crazy, dangerous conspiracy-theory talk about “rights” and “human dignity,” because those are selfish, racist, outdated concepts. You WILL be happy. Or else. It’s for your own good. And this is the future, every nightmare George Orwell had times every warning Aldous Huxley gave us. Forever.
And if this “utopia” makes Mad Max’s blasted radioactive desert look like paradise by comparison to you, join the club. I have no idea what to do about it. Half the population seems to be eating this stuff up with a spoon. “Govern me harder, Mr. Soros! I want to live in the tube!”