Video by Alex Antic:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1059873890017722

In our once free country, you used to own the things you paid for and didn’t live your life on subscription. The digital prison is closing in. Not just in Australia but globally. Once it’s complete, your freedom will rely on your compliance to big government and big tech who will control the off switch to your participation in society. To hear more from me and stay up to date, signup to my email newsletter here: http://alexantic.com.au/join

Audio transcription

Transcription: Digital Feudalism

(Teksten er bevaret ordret og ikke oversat.)

There's a quiet revolution that's transforming free citizens into something far less free. We're being controlled and we're being turned into vassals, not by armies or kings in the old sense, but by a modern form of digital feudalism that strips ordinary Australians of ownership and makes them permanent renters in their own lives.

It's happening in every aspect of our lives and it even now extends to the physical ownership of shattles.

Consider what's happening, what's already happened in a single generation. Let's take music for example. Compact discs and DVDs sat on our shelves available whenever we chose, but they're being replaced by streaming services that can remove content, raise prices and lock us out at will. Software we once bought and owned forever has now turned into a perpetual subscription. Memory cards and hard drives once owned forever are now being replaced by cloud storage that we must rent every month.

It's not progress, it's the systematic transfer of ownership from the individual to distant corporations and increasingly to an administrative state that partners with them.

In the feudal system, vassals didn't own the land, it was held at the pleasure of the Lord subject to conditions, fees and the constant risk of forfeiture. Today the digital Lord collects the rent in monthly installments and retains the power to revoke access with a single keystroke and that pattern is spreading. Motor vehicles now are increasingly software locked, platforms that property we don't truly control. Works, tools and even data of our own lives has been converted into services that we never actually finally progress.

Now we're told it's modern and efficient, but in truth it's a profound shift in the relationship between individuals and the things that sustain independent life.

Ownership has always been central to a free society and the man who owns his tools, his home and the products of his labour answers first to himself and to his family. The man who merely rents them answers to the landlord. The landlord is a handful of global tech companies, often working hand in glove with governments keen on digital identity systems and programmable money.

The risk is no longer theoretical, it's structural. Australians have already seen the early stages of this control architecture, the push for digital ID, expansion of surveillance powers, the quiet preparation for programmable central bank digital currencies and if you pair those tools with a population that no longer owns its own goods, you have created the perfect condition for modern surfdom. Compliance becomes the price of continued access, descent can be met with deplatforming account suspension or the simple withdrawal with a digital key.

And not that long ago property rights and the dignity of ownership weren't just optional extras, they were the foundation of personal independence and national sovereignty. We're now being invited to trade that inheritance for the temporary convenience of never having to manage our own affairs.

Well I reject that bargain and Australians should be able to buy things once and own them. They should be able to store them on their own data without paying rent to a foreign server farm. They should be able to drive a car without seeking permission from a software update and they should be able to participate in the digital world without surrendering the fundamental right to own rather than to merely access.

We are sleepwalking into a society of permanent renters dependent on the good will of corporate and bureaucratic overlords. And I know which side I'm on. The question is whether this parliament and this government has the will to protect us from it.