You will live in the pod. You will consume. You will own nothing and you will be happy.
so, as you may know, the concept of actually owning stuff has been slowly dying off. instead, cloud services and subscription services have been replacing them.
with subscription services, to buy a service, you need to "subscribe" to it. when you complete your subcription, you will be then charged a repating fee. you can cancel the fee at any time, but doing so, you will lose access to said service. notice how i said "access"? that's because you don't actually own anything with these services. you're paying for access and that access can be taken away from you at any time. it's nuts.
the term "cloud" in computing refers to services being hosted on someone else's computer. this usually refers to apps. e.g: "cloud storage" means that you're storing your files on someone else's computer, "cloud apps" refers to apps being hosted on someone else's computer and you usually being able to access said apps, etc.
the most notorious user of subscription services is Adobe with their Creative Cloud suite of applications. stuff like Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere, etc. stuff you have probably heard of before. they make it extremely hard for you to cancel your subcription, even giving you a cancellation fee if you cancel early.
another notorius user of subscription services + cloud is streaming services. stuff like Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, Paramount+, again, stuff you probably have heard of already. it was just Netflix at first, but then companies started seeing the market for streaming services which then led to every company ever making one and exclusives becoming more and more common you had to pay for a whole new streaming service just to watch one show and nothing else in the sea of garbage produced by these services.
this trend is usually used in software, but it has made its way to completely unrelated things.
like teslas! elon can literally just remotely disable your car at any moment. if you don't believe me, look it up. it's so dystopian. also, in order to "unlock" certain features of your car, you need to pay up
OEM whitelists are a huge problem too. in many hardware devices, you can't install random hardware that is supposed to be compatible with your prebuilt computer, no, it has to be from a "whitelisted" vendor. if you install hardware that is not whitelisted, your computer will usually error out and disable said hardware.
i hate it. and i'm not alone. why is it so bad to just own stuff? in "Ye Olde Times" you used to be able to just pay for the software you want and then do whatever the fuck you wanted with it. copy it onto another computer or a cd, mess with the hex code of the program, launch it without internet, you name it. oh and speaking of the internet, many of these subcription based programs rely on key management servers to prove ownership. that means you can't even launch the damn thing without internet. it'll usually error out with a cryptic error message. that also means it restricts the programs life to the kms servers' life. you ever heard of the term permacomputing? that term absolutely shits in the mouth of practically any modern software that is SaaS. not everyone has a good connection. not everyone wants to use it all the internet all the time.
simple. it's because of $$$. these companies KNOW what subscription services are essentially user hostile. they know that people don't like it. but they don't give a fuck. companies exist for the sole reason of making money. THAT'S IT.
rant over.