The Licensing Revolution: Is Resistance Futile?

Part 1: Loss of ownership comes to the car

“Neoliberalism as an economic system enshrines the extraction of rent over industrial production.”
—Yours truly, here

Two of the most revolutionary inventions man ever made were created in the 20th century, one at its start and the other close to the end. Both offered the same innovation: a quantum advance in individual freedom and power.

I’m talking, of course, about the automobile, personal transportation, and the PC, your own personal computer.

Cars and Computers

If you own a car, you own your own transportation; you don’t rent it or borrow it. You can argue the merits of “owning” personal transportation — there are climate, pollution, and crowding arguments against — but there’s no question about the freedom it gives to people. You want to leave now? Just jump in the car and go.

If you own a PC, same thing. Before the PC, some calculations and modeling were just too painful and time-consuming to do, and many were simply impossible. Think of the most complicated spreadsheet you’ve ever created — could you have done that by hand? Or better, if you could have done it by hand, would you have?

An early Sun Workstation, the corporate version of the PC, from 1990 (source)

Before the PC and its business equivalent, the UNIX-based Sun Workstation, access to computing power were through IBM-style mainframes and minicomputers, like those made by DEC. None of these could be considered “personal”; they were too costly, and though they could accommodate multiple users at terminals, the computing itself was centralized and corporate-owned.

The minicomputer, a smaller-than-mainframe computer that served users through ‘dumb’ terminals (source)

A minicomputer ‘dumb’ terminal (source)

Keep this in mind: Before the PC, computing was centralized and corporate-owned. After the PC, computing power was inside the box you worked at, and priced for individual sale. Now thanks to Windows 11, that’s all been reversed.

Cars and computers, each a revolution in personal power and control. Now both will be taken away. Your car will no longer be yours, nor will your PC.

Soon You Won’t Own Your Car

The above statement is true in too many ways. The car you’ve already bought will be licensed to you, a license that can be revoked.

Your New Car Is a Spy

Cars have become computers over the last few years. And that means cars have become spy machines. Here’s one review, by the Mozilla Foundation, of the automobile industry from the standpoint of privacy, written in 2023. Its bottom line is the headline:

It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy

All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label -- making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed.

The link for individual brand reviews is here. Their sins are many; these are the important ones:

1. They collect too much personal data (all of them)

2. Most (84%) share or sell your data

3. Most (92%) give drivers little to no control over their personal data

4. We couldn’t confirm whether any of them meet our Minimum Security Standards

Recipients of the sale of your data could include your insurance company, which can purchase everything recorded about your driving habits.

And you can’t shut this stuff off, because it’s not hardware, but software, and the car needs its software to run. Here’s Tesla’s warning about its software, again from 2023 (emphasis mine):

However, “if you no longer wish for us to collect vehicle data or any other data from your Tesla vehicle, please contact us to deactivate connectivity. Please note, certain advanced features such as over-the-air updates, remote services, and interactivity with mobile applications and in-car features such as location search, Internet radio, voice commands, and web browser functionality rely on such connectivity. If you choose to opt out of vehicle data collection (with the exception of in-car Data Sharing preferences), we will not be able to know or notify you of issues applicable to your vehicle in real time. This may result in your vehicle suffering from reduced functionality, serious damage, or inoperability.”

It’s gotten worse since then; Tesla’s just getting started.

The Biden Bill–Mandated ‘Kill Switch’

Watch the Breaking Points video at the top; it details, from reputable reporters, the next dystopian “feature” of cars manufactured in 2027 and later — a “kill switch” that turns your car off if it thinks you shouldn’t be driving.

The detail is here. Basically, under Joe Biden, Section 24220 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act “requires all new passenger vehicles to eventually include factory-installed technology that detects driver impairment and prevents or limits vehicle operation.”

The implementation falls under the NHTSA, which is writing the rule. Barring congressional prevention or modification, the kill switch is expected appear in all newly manufactured cars (but not used ones) starting in late 2026 or early 2027.

Privacy and Control

In modern America, two things are certainly true. 1) Once privacy is taken away, it never comes back; and 2) when a power is gained by corporations and government, they pervert it as fast as they can.

The prime example is this war — because Congress long ago surrendered its war-making power, the Executive has steadily moved in, to the point that today there’s not even a pretense of getting congressional permission. Trump wants a war wherever, that’s what he does. Or consider the definition of “terrorist” — today it’s “whomever the feds wishes to hurt, and to whatever extent.”

So what’s the maximum harm that can be done by the “new automobile”? Your driving is monitored by AI; the data is fine-grained and stored; anyone who wants it can buy it for whatever goal, including to raise your insurance, or deny you coverage.

Further, anyone with control of the software — the manufacturer, the FBI (initially under subpoena, but later, who knows?), cops, Homeland Security, or any branch of the law, whatever that means — can turn off your car when it wants, or (why not?) gain full control, lock you in, and drive you wherever it wishes. Remember, eventually every new power is perverted.

It starts, as always, with calls to Save the Children (MADD is mad for this law).

The next expansion is to further the War Against Crime. (“Remember the OJ Simpson highway chase? What if they could just turn off the car? You want to catch OJ, right? Do you hate the cops?”)

Then it transforms into … what? Whatever the security state wants, because “keeping you safe.”

OJ Simpson’s low-speed getaway try (Branimir Kvartuc/ZUMAPRESS.com/Corbis)

The Licensing Revolution

You won’t own your car for another reason as well. You may have noticed a trend: what you used to be able to buy, you now merely rent.

• Apple doesn’t sell music, it licenses use.

• You no longer own your software. TurboTax, for example, sells a “personal, limited, nonexclusive, nontransferable, revocable license to use the applicable Software only for the period of use provided in the ordering and activation terms”.

• Same with Amazon’s ebooks and audiobooks.

• Same with Microsoft Windows. (More on that later.)

Non-transferable and revokable licenses. Renting your life.

The benefits of the Licensing Revolution are many for those in charge. A big one is social control. If Amazon wants to delete a book from “your” library, it has every right to do so — and it has. Imagine a Trump-run Amazon “curating your books.” Or a Tipper Gore-style Apple deleting “violent” songs you’ve already “bought.”

The other big corporate benefit is an income stream amounting to billions of dollars. You used to be able to buy Adobe Acrobat. Since 2020, it’s a license that must be renewed. That’s hundreds of dollars per user per year, forever — or until customers just walk away. With hundreds of millions of users, that’s billions per year.

You can walk away from Adobe. Maybe from Apple. You can’t walk away from your car and still hold a job.

What To Do, What To Do?

Every new car made after the mandated date will have un-bypassable software that monitors and controls your use. In addition, these cars will be increasingly unusable without per-feature software licenses, which must be renewed.

What to do? Simple: Don’t buy a new car. Forever. You won’t be alone, and the used car market will bloom.

Windows and the ‘Personal’ Computer

I said several times that computers have already gone where the car will soon go. They will no longer be yours, but belong to the software companies that control the OS, and which also control the “trust chip” (Trusted Platform Module, or TPM) that most new computers contain. Privacy and control issues with the TPM chip are many; same with Windows itself. This will be the subject of Part 2 of this set of articles.

But the big bottom line is this: With Windows 11, you no longer own your computer. You’ve purchased a terminal, where most of the software and data live somewhere else, and most of the processing happens up “in the cloud” — meaning on machines controlled by somebody else.

So yes, we’ve been brought back to this:

The PC undone, the revolution reversed, like much of what else we’ve endured. Stay tuned for the detail.