Capitalism is now dreaming of a future that has few owners and lots of borrowers. The technology that might make this kind of consumer society possible is blockchain, a kind of Napster for ownership rights, or, more closer yet, a Napster for the type of subject celebrated in Freakonomics (and critically examined by Michel Foucault in his 1979 lectures, "The Birth of Bio-Politics," at the Collège de France). This subject is homo economicus on steroids. The leading idea for what we can call hyper-ownership society forms at the intersection of peer-to-peer networking and the sharing economy, which so far has been dominated by cars (Uber) and rooms (Airbnb).
Both peer-to-peer networking and the sharing economy began as movements toward a post-capitalist horizon. The former, seeing a utopia of information exchanged in the absence of a center or organizing hierarchy; the latter, seeing a utopia of reduced waste (a crucial externality for the maintenance of capitalist accumulation) by the facilitation of social forms of consumerism. Their point of intersection, however, has presented capitalism with two possibilities, the first being what heterodox economists in the Minsky school of thinking call a "displacement event," which is "an event which causes a change in sentiment."
A displacement is, to explain more plainly, a disruption by some change in the law or fiscal policy or technology that essentially presents, by its surprise or newness (and therefore the element of a positive unknown, as opposed to a negative one—the former leading almost always to liquidity panic and a market crash) an opening to the only place where the returns that big and institutional investors restlessly search for and can't live without exist: the future. With a displacement, speculation is excited. With speculation, an investor can break the grip of the present, with its slow and low profits (3 percent, if you are lucky).
The second thing to emerge from the intersection in question is a way not to just directly and efficiently manage exchanges and contracts—for example, to "punish people who fall behind on their car payments" by shutting off their car on the spot and without discussion (an idea that has apparently caught the attention of Toyota Financial Services) or to make it easier for consumers to borrow things at short intervals, and for the neutral or impersonal control of this borrowing system with smart doors or smart appliances or smartphones. The real opportunity here concerns the removal of middle persons (which means, the removal of jobs, which for capital eat at profits).
In this respect, there is nothing new about blockchain. It has entered the defining and founding struggle between the components of what neoclassical economists call "the factors of production"—labor and capital. Technology has been on the side of the latter from the very beginning. In this respect, the technology, if it came into its own, would be directly related to checkout machines and other technologies that do not fundamentally advance humanity by bring "good things to life" but simply offer capital a way to extract savings from the costs of production and distribution.
Great confusion has been caused by the conflation of utopian futurism with the prime motive (or prime mover) of capitalist technological change.
