Fully Automated Luxury Serfdom

"You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy," was the opening gambit of a 2016 promotional video from the World Economic Forum, highlighting their 8 predictions for mankind in 2030. 

This video resurfaced in 2020 in conjunction with a slate of world leaders and international institutions promoting the "Great Reset", the brainchild of Dr Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum. Though not a new idea on his part, it seems to have been given new life as he sees the COVID-19 pandemic as a springboard to bringing about his new economic world order. 

Owning nothing is the proposed communistic end state desired by Schwab and his supporters; it is a future in which property ownership is monopolised in the hands of international corporations and the class of billionaire owners and their accompanying retinues of experts. The general population are to be merely transient renters who live like high-class serfs which have their necessities and luxuries delivered by drone at the pleasure of their feudal line managers, working under the command of King Bezos. 

The purpose of this project is to address “wealth inequality”, improve the “state of our world”, and save us from the apparent catastrophe of a changing climate, according to Schwab and others. A technocracy shall ensure that “everyone has a role to play” in this great unified plan for the future of the human race. 

It is only natural that this proposed future should prick the instincts of those people who do not wish to become an atomised, interchangeable cog in a giant unaccountable world-machine. To those people who do not view rights as being provided by governments, but protected by them, it is with great insistence that the following question arises:

If I own nothing, who owns me? 

The foundation of the English liberal tradition is that “every man has a property in his own person: this nobody has any right to but himself,” as John Locke formulated it in his Second Treatise on Government. This is the Enlightenment philosophy that informed not only the American Revolution and the Constitution of the United States, it is also the moral principle that has governed political, social and economic progress in the wider English-speaking world and beyond. 

To be a free man is to be a man who has no other owner. A free man is his own master,  which is another way of saying that man’s physical body is his own property which he can dispose of as he wishes and acts in accordance with his own will. If you own nothing, then you do not own yourself. If you do not own yourself, then you are owned by someone else, you act in accordance with someone else's will, and someone else is responsible for your behaviour. If you do not own yourself, you are not free. 

It is from a person’s self-ownership that we derive the right of a man to his own labour, again as Locke put it, the “labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his”. If a man does not own his body then he does not own the work of his hands, and this properly belongs to someone else. 

The right to own oneself, and the property one's labour accrues, is the basis on which liberal democracy is predicated. It is the essence of the Enlightenment tradition of the Anglosphere and something that we should all guard with extreme prejudice. The terrors of the 20th Century are due in large part to the abolition of personal self-ownership, the root idea upon which liberalism diverges from fascism or communism. To the fascist, all people are owned by the state, and to the communist, all property is owned by the state. To the liberal, who believes that the person and the property are one in the same, and both are owned by the individual, these ideas are completely unacceptable. 

Our right to self-ownership is priceless, and we should not be fooled into thinking that silken chains would be sufficient price to pay for our loss of autonomy. If we are unable to own property, then we are unable to take command of our own destiny. If we can create nothing of which we can guarantee our continued use, we shall be unable to build enduring wealth nor will we have an independent base of power from which to object, if and when the Faustian bargain to which we foolishly agreed is changed without our consent.  

To agree to be a global citizen with immediate access to fulfilment of our carnal desires, with no duty to anything except our status as hirelings, is an enervating future indeed. The challenges to overcome will be internal, the achievements ephemeral, and the rewards fleeting. What is being offered to us is a shallow, materialistic life.

No longer will we know the feeling of fulfilment. The job well done will be the job done to the minimum standard, the good life will consist of the instant gratification of our social media peer group and the corporate-approved soma high that has been prescribed by the appropriate regulatory committee, scheduled for delivery. 

The common mass of humanity will merely exist, labour, consume, and be replaced. Worse still, the pod people that this system creates will not be worthy of remembrance. What would be the point in remembering any individual worker drone in an ant's nest? What significant difference separates it from the rest of its class? As the nest makes the ant what it is and guarantees its place, so shall the resetees be a product of their great global metropoli and be unable to survive without their addictions. 

There will be no reason that any one individual should be remembered as they will have done nothing memorable. There will be no heroes, there will be no villains, there will only be the eternal attempt at fine-tuning out the practical problems raised by the flaws in the current iteration of the technocracy. 

There will be nowhere else to go and no other virtue than compliance. The idea of divesting from this life of dependence will become as alien to them as the idea of personal independence would be to an ant. They will have, after all, arrived at the end of history. 

If we wish to avoid such a future, our thinking should begin, first and foremost, with the idea that each and every person owns at least one thing: themself.