Let's face it. This isn't about games anymore.

Okay, I got this really cool idea (in a dystopian kind of way), but you're going to need to follow me a bit on the buildup. But it's worth it, believe me. It is the most plausible version of Big Brother I've ever seen.

PROPERTY

First of all, you have to know something about the new face of ownership. Thirty years ago, when you bought a car, you owned it. When you bought a house, you owned it. When you bought a cassette tape, you owned it. Even though none of those statements were true, it still felt true. It made sense.

But in our time, we've been forced to re-evaluate our concept of ownership. Now, we know that, as long as we're making payments on a car, the bank owns most of it. As long as we have a mortgage, we know that we don't own the house, just equity in it. Also, anyone who has seen eminent domain in action knows that you don't own land either. Even the cassette tape, which we used to think of as being clearly owned, is now seen as a license to listen to media, only for personal use, and subject to approval by the RIAA.

We're even starting to get a different definition for "having" something. For instance, we used to use VCR's to tape TV shows, and watch them later, maybe even storing them for a library. In that situation, we "had" an episode of the show. Now we have TiVos, which will keep shows temporarily, and delete them when they get old. The shows move through our window of observation, without any real permanance. Nobody tries to tape them and keep them, because reruns are available, and besides, once you've seen it, why keep it?

Napster has recently done that with music. They will allow you to buy music cheap, but the music will self-destruct after a certain number of months. So, you're really just renting a temporary listening license for the music. And a lot of people are okay with that, because they know that, while they like the music now, their tastes may change in three months.

Consider also, the doctrine of "Planned Obsolescence". This is the idea that, you make a car so that it will fall apart after a certain number of years. You don't support the older models, or you make the parts so expensive, that people have to buy new cars periodically. This is something that the automakers have been doing for years, and other industries have continued the tradition when they could. Based on current auto sales, it could be argued that the people are not revolting at the concept.

So consider this: People don't believe that they own their home, apartment, land, car, or media. They are okay with the idea of a car breaking down after a while, and having to buy a new one. People do not believe in the permanance of ownership.

MANUFACTURING

There's a machine out there that acts as a 3D printer. You feed it a CAD file, and it will build the object you describe, by printing out plane after plane of plastic. Once it's done, you have a real 3D object.

Imagine we could do that with other types of media. If you could print, not only in plastic, but also in steel, crushed stone, and wood pulp. If so, you could mass produce new products with only a CAD design for the object.

Now, imagine we build "Planned Obsolescence" into our building materials. They are all made of a stable isotope which, when triggered by a catalyst, break down into dust and the fresh scent of pine. Every 3D object you create could biodegrade instantly, ready for replacement.

Now, imagine we put a small RFID chip in the object, and a WiFi reciever. So small, it runs of inductive power, but capable of two things. 1 ) Identifying the object it's embedded in, and 2 ) Releasing the Catalyst (thus, destroying the object) on remote command.

With that system in place, manufacturers could offer mass-produced objects, on the cheap, that will biodegrade when they are told to.

CULTURE

So now, imagine a world where your clothes are always in style, your furniture is always new and trendy, the pictures on your wall are new and vivid and topical, and where your car is always the latest model. Every month, you get an e-mail with a list of objects in your house that are coming up for "renewal", and you get to pick through a catalog of replacement items to be delivered to your door.

You might pay $20 for a sofa, but that's not too bad, because it lasts six months. You might pay $400 for your car, which will last you a year. The prices are all reasonable, and you don't really care about "having" the things, or "owning" them, because it just doesn't matter in the long run. Sure, you're renting everything in your life, even the clothes on your back, but so what? If you decide that you really don't need a sofa, you can just decide not to renew it, and let it lapse into nothingness. If money's short, you can just cut out a certain part of your wardrobe or choose a cheaper vehicle for the next year or so.

But in another way, because you own nothing, you would be working at your job just to pay rent on everything in your life. Also, whoever is providing you with your items will have a complete history of what styles, brands, and objects you like. They would have a complete history of your life, with a database that could be used for anything from market research to Homeland Security.

If a criminal breaks out of prison, the police immediately get a court order, forcing the provider to destroy all of his possesions. Now the criminal is running through the streets naked, with no ability to buy new stuff.

You know those stories about people who die alone in their apartments, and no one knows about it for months, until the smell gets to them? Imagine that happened, and when you opened up the apartment, the entire place was bone-dry clean, except for a naked body in the middle of the room.

The ramifications behind this are staggering. Our whole culture would fundamentally change, but here's the wierd thing. I'd bet that 90% of the world would be okay with this happening. It means they get cheap stuff, always up to date and trendy.

We would get to the point where the most cherished items would be the ones that do not disappear. A decoy duck, whittled by your son from driftwood, would become one of your most treasured posessions. Amish furniture would become a booming industry, catapulting them to new heights of affluence that seems creepily reminiscent of the American Indian Casinos.

And ten thousand years from now, archeologists will scratch their heads and say, "I just don't get it. There's no sign of a meteor or plague or anything. At some point, people just stopped leaving a physical record. They just all stopped making things, leaving nothing behind but their bones."