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Rent is theft
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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@zedgeist How about rent of things, as opposed to rent of living space? I'm specifically thinking of the hardware I'm renting for this Fediverse server. A network connection, power, and cooling come with it. In my view this is more acceptable than having to rent a house or car. (Related topic: is having a car moral? Related to that: Is there a moral argument to be made for our against living away from a population center? And related to that: why the Hell do people refuse to wear masks during a pandemic?)
Is my renting that hardware more paying for a service than straight rent? There's certainly the aspect of my not being able to afford the hardware cost up-front and just renting space, network, and power.
Ideally I'd just run the server in my cellar, but I live in the woods and trees fall on the power lines all too often. (Loop to the question of the morality of living away from population centers.)
Rental of land is unique because land ownership is made by drwing line on a map and drawing up a contract with the state. Equipment rental is the product of labor that has transformed natural resources into something people can use.
Land ownership is inherently a violent act in that paper agreements are a surrogate for establishing territorial dominance. End of the day land ownership is enforced though force.
Renting objects on the other hand is rooted in mutual benefit. Tool creation and use being separate skills creates a natural opportunity for cooperation.
Up to a point. If I rent a modem from my ISP, I eventually meet and then exceed the value of the modem. If you rent a $60 modem for $15 a month, you have fully compensated the ISP for the tool by the fourth month. Every payment after that is no longer a trade for someone’s labor; it is a fee because someone else holds the title to the hardware. A mutual arrangement would recognize that once your payments cover the cost of the tool and its maintenance, the ownership should shift to you. , This stops being cooperation.
TBF One could also argue that in your example the value of the modem also consists of the skills to build it both the modem and the materials it consists of. Obviously it would cost you personally significantly more than $60 to produce the same device, assuming that's even possible for you.
But I digress.
I don't deny that coercive relationships exist... but I'm talking about "roots" like tool usage and cooperation in communal animals such as primates. It relates to the context of property ownership because animals mark their territory and use violence to enforce it. Hence why property as a concept is fundamentally violent.
Object ownership isn't as fundamentally violent the way I see it.
I'm not exactly sure what you're saying other than land ownership started as violent and tools were shared in small tribal collectives. This seems muddied to me. I don't think small tribal bands protecting territory or sharing tools with their own tribe translates to a modern rental contract. There is no reason to believe that the origins of those behaviors should trump the reality of how these systems function today.
Today, object ownership allows a person to claim authority over an object that is in someone else’s hands. An ISP can remotely disable a modem. Or a manufacturer software-locks a tractor. This is territorial dominance.
In primitive societies, everyone had access to the tools that allowed them to function and survive. Today, you can be excluded from those tools. The exclusion is the violence.
Renting an object grants someone else the legal right to "mark territory". This is not like a person letting another tribe member use the communal tool they just finished with. Those tools were communal and not private property. Renting an object is part of a fleet of tools you don't use or plan to use. They protect that profit stream like a pack of chimpanzees patrolling their territory and evicting intruders with violence. modern owners can rip a tool from your hands by locking you out remotely by executing a script.
Are you making this argument? Should I spend time addressing it?
All ownership is inherently backed by violence. If someone wants to take away your things without giving anything back you either give up ownership or use (the threat of) violence to defend your ownership. That threat of violence might be deferred and abstracted to a legal system, but in the end it is all rooted in force.
Someone created the house. The house didn't grow there organically...
Can't argue with that. Or connect it to the current topic. Care to elaborate?
Landlords as the people who rent out places to live to other people are responsible for the house. It's not raw unimproved land. Houses need to be built. They're objects with many moving parts, subject to a lot of technical challenges, and code enforcement.
If you allow that object rental has a place in society, I struggle to understand how houses are not ethically the same as renting lawnmowers. You can be a predatory arse or a fair dealer about any rental situation.
it's about your usage needs.
renting and owning have different costs, more than purely economic. if you own your own hardware... you have to maintain it. if you rent it, you don't.
if an AWS server blade on which I'm hosting blows up, I don't have to go spend $5000 to replace it. if I am running off that server blade from my home.. it can blow up with the bonus risk of possibly burn my house down. also if someone hacks my serve in my basement and stuff CP on it... well that's another big risk that I wouldn't have if I was renting, because if someone hacks my amazon AWS rental space, the cops aren't going to come raid my home. they subpoena amazon.
home owning is no different. it involves much more risk than renting. and being a landlord assumes yet more risk as you take on the risk of your tenants.
but most people dont' understand any of this. they don't even have a basic economics 101 understanding. there is also this thing called insurance, usage agreements, etc, that all have pricing affects and can be used to mitigate risks at increased costs.
I run IT for my company in a hybrid structure. Certain legal requirements and risk factors require us to keep certain services/data on premises, and other services we have moved to the cloud (rental) because it's cheaper and takes less man-hours of maintenance and assumes less risk. 10 years ago were entirely on premises and used zero cloud services, but we also had more downtime and had to shut down operations if we had a power loss or connectivity. Now power loss has a minimal impact and connectivity losses are mere annoyances.