Landlord 2.0: Tech’s New Rentier Capitalism

By selling us hardware but retaining ownership of software and data, tech companies are treating users like digital tenants

Jathan Sadowski
OneZero
Published in
6 min readApr 4, 2019

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Credit: Michael Short / Stringer/Getty Images

WWhen Tim Cook and his fellow executives hit the stage for Apple’s event on March 25, it was to announce a major strategic pivot. The company knows that its markets for iPhones, iPads…

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Jathan Sadowski
OneZero

author — TOO SMART: How Digital Capitalism is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World — https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/too-smart