Not too long ago, buying something meant owning it perpetually. Your files lived on your machine, your photos on your hard drive, your music collection wasn’t tied to a subscription. If the company disappeared tomorrow you still had the data. While today almost everything sits behind an account, a subscription, your data is stored on the “cloud”.
Recent events have made that increasingly difficult to ignore. Sony recently announced that all new PlayStation games will become digital-only from 2028, marking another step away from physical ownership. Around the same time, PlayStation reminded us how fragile digital purchases can be when hundreds of previously purchased movies disappearedfrom their libraries after licensing agreements expired.
Neither of these decisions is particularly surprising in isolation. Licences expire. Businesses change direction. Digital distribution is undeniably convenient. But together they highlight an uncomfortable reality: in many cases, we haven’t been buying ownership—we’ve been buying permission.
That distinction seems small until the day that permission changes.
It made me ask myself: how much of my own digital life do I actually own? If I stopped paying tomorrow, lost access to an account, or a company simply decided not to renew a licensing agreement, how much of what I consider mine would still be mine?
The answer, unsurprisingly, was very little.
I could wake up tomorrow and find that my favourite songs have disappeared from the playlist I’ve curated over the years. The games I paid for could vanish from my library with no way to recover them. The applications woven into my daily workflow could shut down, taking years of data, habits, and accumulated context with them.
Some of this might sound far-fetched. After all, the books you’ve purchased digitally aren’t going anywhere… right?
Now, to be fair, I don’t think the companies making these decisions are necessarily wrong or even acting maliciously. More often than not, they’re operating within the law, responding to changing markets, and building products that millions of people genuinely prefer.
And it’s hard to argue with the convenience. I stream almost all of my music. I can’t remember the last time I bought a movie instead of watching it through a streaming service. My photos are backed up to the cloud, I collaborate through shared documents every day, and I happily pay for software that genuinely saves me time.
Cloud computing solved real problems. It made collaboration effortless, backups automatic, and software easier to access than ever before. I wouldn’t want to go back to manually syncing files between computers or carrying around external hard drives just to move a document.
The issue isn’t the cloud. The issue is when cloud becomes the only medium.
I don’t believe every application should be local-first, nor do I think every service should be self-hosted. Collaborative tools, communication platforms, and anything fundamentally multiplayer benefit enormously from centralized infrastructure. But I do think every piece of software should begin by asking a simple question:
Who should own the data this application creates?
If the answer is the user, then ownership shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be the foundation the rest of the system is built on. Cloud sync, collaboration, backups, and AI can all be layered on top, but they should enhance ownership rather than replace it.
That one question has shaped how I think about software over the last few years. It’s why projects like Crona are local-first by default. It’s why I’m increasingly drawn to software that works without an internet connection, degrades gracefully when services disappear, and treats exporting your data as a basic expectation rather than a premium feature.
See I’ll be honest, I don’t think we’re going back to the days of boxed software and physical media (at least on a global scale). We’ve gained far too much convenience to abandon it now. But I do hope we can move toward software that gives people both: the convenience of the cloud, and the confidence that the things they buy or create ultimately belong to them.
Because if software is meant to help us build our lives, it shouldn’t require us to hand ownership of those lives over in return.
P.S. There’s a certain irony in relying on external links to make an argument about digital ownership. If some of them stop working in a few years, consider that an unintended—but rather fitting—demonstration.
Originally published on https://webxsid.com/.
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