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8 min readJust now

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In my previous post, I wrote briefly about a concept that many had noticed but few had mapped. Digital Tenancy describes a system that has been quietly shaping how technology governs our lives. What follows is an attempt to give that concept form, to describe how it works, and to show why it matters.

Welcome to the Ministry of Machines

Somewhere between “next update available” and “please sign in to continue,” the market for software became a sort of digital real-estate ministry. You do not buy tools anymore; you apply for residence. Every Windows installation begins with an act of surrender. Each patch rewrites the laws of your machine while you sleep. The terms and conditions read like civic decrees.

“Software always came with licenses”, I hear you say. Correct, but something changed. What changed was enforcement. The network turned agreements into continuous supervision. Payment that used to be a one-time event became a monthly rent. The state of things now is not medieval but modern: a networked oligopoly, a market where a small number of firms dominate everything. This network is run on Zoom or Teams, where decisions are made about how your future will behave. Tenancy travels with your account across borders, and the landlord can visit at any time.

“The rent is behaviour, not pieces of gold.”

Our identity is now attached to access, access to payment, and payment to memory. Each year, the real and virtual identities tighten their knot. AI systems feed on what these chains collect. The notion that computers are personal has all but expired.

The difference today is scale and intimacy. The cloud centralised the work. AI personalised the feed. Identity systems sealed the contract.

Paperwork, but Make It Digital

Behind every login you will find a small bureaucracy, invisible but exact. Each click files a report to headquarters. It is the politest surveillance ever invented. Cloud storage acts like a registry office, and identity systems behave like passports. A Microsoft Account knows who you are, what you opened, and when you tried to leave.

The user sees sync and recovery and thinks convenience. The administrator sees compliance. Somewhere a dashboard glows green because your behaviour meets expected parameters. That dashboard is what you actually work for.

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The Law That Updates Itself

In this environment, laws do not come from parliaments or from semi-informed politicians. They arrive through software updates. Security is the official language of every decree. When Microsoft requires online accounts, or Apple refuses unauthorised repair, the reasoning is protective. When Google deletes an app, the reasoning is integrity. These are credible justifications that just so happen to carry political effect.

“Dependence is comfortable until the power flickers. That is when the rent comes due.”

Courts and regulators can still force governments to explain themselves. Platforms, however, answer to churn, not charters. A few jurisdictions, like Europe, Brazil, and those that still pretend servers have an address, have begun to push back, but jurisdiction only works if it can reach the servers themselves. Public power is bound by courts and explanation. Private power answers to profit and reputation. Courts can be slow, yet they leave a record. Markets move faster, yet they leave no trace. Only one of these creates accountability you can enter into evidence.

Meet Your New Landlords

Microsoft governs through its operating system and enterprise identity, binding work to a stack that runs from your desktop to the cloud. Apple governs through hardware and purity, selling privacy at a premium (charger sold separately!). Google governs through search, attention, and the quiet power of default settings. All operate under their own private law.

Amazon and Meta complete the picture. AWS carries the data of hospitals, governments, and half the internet. One maintenance window in Virginia can produce a small global blackout, as seen recently. Meta rules over our conversations, a ministry of speech and propaganda with little to no public oversight. Somewhere, a policy update decides what three billion people may say or how they will feel. The map is digital, the borders invisible, but the control? That is still territorial.

“We remain tenants with excellent Wi-Fi and very bad landlords.”

We Pay in Behaviour Now

Every landlord collects rent. Here, the rent is behaviour, not pieces of gold. Each search, scroll, and voice command is logged as a kind of tax. But these systems work. They sync our files, back up our photos, and remember our passwords better than we do. Consent is a byproduct of service quality. The more reliable the system, the harder it is to leave. The same integration that makes them seamless also makes refusal expensive. That is why digital and consumer rights should matter more, not less.

It would be easy to mock this arrangement, but most of us signed the lease willingly. The alternative is inconvenience, and inconvenience now feels like poverty. Dependence is comfortable until the power flickers. That is when the rent comes due.

Network effects have made these services both excellent and inescapable. The better they get, the fewer exits remain. The choice is real, but it exists inside a comfortable cage.

Control with a Friendly Interface

Control no longer needs to wear a badge since it’s embedded in the architecture. Auto-updates are obedience made automatic. Digital rights management is property law that checks itself before every act. Account suspension is the 21st century exile. Companies argue this is the cost of speed and safety. There’s truth in that. Yet speed sacrifices the appeals processes, and safety becomes a reason to hide the evidence. A fast system still needs brakes. Ways to appeal can be built, but they will need to be triaged. Most cases can be resolved automatically with a clear record and a restore path. High-impact cases that touch payments, identity, or developer keys need a human operated procedure under clear time limits. Aggregate reports should show reversals, timelines, and causes. Scale is not an excuse for silence but the reason why thresholds have to exist.

“Freedom belongs to those who can build redundancy, which is to say, almost no one.”

Volume is real. If one billion users generate one million enforcement actions a day and one percent seek review, ten thousand cases need triage every twenty-four hours. The easy and flawed response is to automate everything. But the effective approach is to preserve a human lane for decisions that remove livelihood, identity, or access to essential services.

The State Outsourced Itself

While platforms matured, public infrastructure thinned out. Records, education, and even city planning moved into vendor dashboards. Procurement departments traded autonomy for a discount code. Cloud bundles looked cheaper than staff, and annual budgets rewarded short-term savings over long-term autonomy. It was a rational mistake, perfectly timed for the end of the quarter. Control slipped away in fiscal increments.

Now a university opens a ticket to read its own archives. A civil service needs permission to patch its own systems. Each migration looks efficient until the day you try to leave and realise you cannot export the state.

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Sign Here to Stay Online

The result is a kind of digital landlordism adapted to high bandwidth. You live and work on property you do not own, under rules that change without notice. Long gone are inheritance and locality… today the law of the land is code and policy.

Some days it feels as if the app store might start charging a loyalty tax. At this point, no one would bat an eyelid. Freedom belongs to those who can build redundancy, which is to say, almost no one.

“The law of the land is code and policy.”

How to Steal the Keys Back

The digital environment now functions as a collection of private states enforcing rules of access, speech, and property. The remedy is to introduce procedures where there is only design.

A suspended account should come with the right to appeal, reviewed by a human under clear deadlines. Terms that change core functions should include notice periods proportionate to impact and a visible log of revisions. Data should move through open formats and export paths that work without vendor permission. Regulators and accredited researchers need the right to inspect high-impact algorithms under legal protection, and every platform operating in a region should maintain a service address in that region to answer to local law.

To prevent the internet from belonging only to giants, we can define tiers. Companies of a certain size require local offices whilst smaller ones can adhere to shared protocols. Payment networks already manage this, a chargeback works across borders because the protocol enforces it.

Jurisdictional evasion ruins accountability. Rules must bind where a service operates. Local presence need not mean an office in every country. It can mean a verified in-region contact, adherence to shared dispute protocols, and the loss of app store or payment gateway access for non-compliance.

“Account suspension is the 21st-century exile.”

Competition needs genuine exit. Identity, payments, and messaging should connect through documented interfaces so that leaving does not equal erasure. Devices that fail after an update should allow controlled rollback. When a product dies, keys and configuration should be escrowed locally to keep the hardware alive.

Public contracts can set these standards by default. Require local-first modes where feasible, open formats by default, and clean export on termination. Rate vendors not only on price but on explainability, reversibility, and repairability. The right to repair should include parts, schematics, and diagnostics, and anyone who buys hardware should be free to run lawful software on it. None of this will end tenancy, but it gives consumers some of their rights back.

These rules will meet resistance. The firms that must obey them will try to rewrite them. Let that not stop us. That’s exactly why we have to design oversight that leaves a trail and can be reformed.

Start with accounts, identity, and export. Without appeal, notice, and workable exit, every other safeguard is cosmetic. Civil society can still push from below. Open protocols and cooperative infrastructure will not replace the platforms, but they can remind them what accountability feels like.

Life Under Excellent Wi-Fi

Digital tenancy is the administrative shape of power when software becomes the infrastructure and finance teams write the terms. The user lives under a steady rule that very rarely explains itself. Convenience makes obedience look voluntary. Power hides inside its own reliability. The rent is collected on time, the landlord is attentive, and the connection is fast. Until someone properly rewrites the terms and conditions of all of this, we remain tenants with excellent Wi-Fi and very bad landlords.

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Editorial Note

This text was refined by using a large language model (LLM), meant exclusively for structural, editorial, and linguistic revisions. The model does not generate ideas, arguments, or conclusions.

All reasoning, insight, and authorship remain fully the writer’s own.

Images created using an AI tool.