- The first quarter of the 21st century coincided with the peak of the franchise system which, combined with the extreme copyright laws and IP system had created a terror regime comparable only to the early communist terror-era. </p>
Restriction of free speech under the pretext of Intellectual Property protection and enforced by armies of lawyers was similar to the 20th century KGB or Securitate censorship; under its guise, the 17 multinational corporations and their omnipresent franchises had absolute powers, the ones of former dictatorial states but without their geographical constraints. The seemingly fragile equilibrium between the 17 was actually a global cold war kept silent only thanks to the arbitrage of the States. The introduction of the Chips, however, marked the start of an emerging war where the States would have a crucial role to play.
- Probably one of the most interesting concepts developed in the 20’s was universal borrowing: having started in the 00’s with the concept of monthly fees for borrowing software or multimedia, it had grown into a global phenomenon, where several corporations encouraged consumers to stop buying merchandise and borrow it instead from the omnipresent rental networks. One could therefore borrow clean clothes and return them once dirty, or borrow electronic appliances, tools, etc.</p> …
As mentioned above, this highly interesting concept can only be compared to the extreme communist regimes of the Soviet Union or North Korea, in the early 1950’s and 1960’s. Still, although from the consumer point of view the outcome was the same, i.e. a common sharing of goods between individuals and the graduate abolition of private property, the stated purpose was exactly opposite: since IP(Intelectual Property) on goods belonged only to the manufacturer, property could not be transmitted nor shared. The goods remained the property of the original creator, who only shared temporarily the product’s usability.
excerpt from Luke Renauld’s thesis, October 2070