It Was Never a Dream. It Was a Subscription. And You Can't Cancel.

They repealed the middle class on purpose. Now they are renting it back to you by the month, and they wrote the contract so you can never cancel. I help build the locks for a living. Here is where the keys are.

Last week's piece ended on a hopeful note: what was built on purpose can be rebuilt on purpose. I meant it. But before we rebuild anything, we should look hard at what got poured into the hole while we were distracted, because there is already a structure going up, and it is not for us.

In his latest video (“The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now”), Benn Jordan coins a term for it: Leveragism. He made the word up, and he is upfront that it is bad news.

Watch the full breakdown: Benn Jordan, “The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now”

I am going to be straight with you about my sources here, because that is the whole point of this blog. I have Jordan's thesis and the argument his work has been building toward for over a year. I have not transcribed every minute of the new video. So when I extend his idea, I will say so. The bones, though, are his, and they are sound.

Here are the bones. The center of gravity in our economy is sliding away from making a profit on a thing you sell and toward controlling a thing you cannot live without. Ownership gets replaced by access. Access gets metered. And the meter never stops running. Some people call the endpoint technofeudalism: a handful of landlords, the rest of us paying rent on everything, forever.

If that sounds abstract, let me make it concrete, because this is the part I actually know cold.

I Sell the Lock for a Living

I am an endpoint and software guy. Decades of it. BigFix, enterprise IT, the machinery that large companies use to manage tens of thousands of computers they technically own.

Here is a thing most people outside the industry never sit with: you do not own almost any of the software on the device in front of you. You licensed it. You agreed to terms you did not read, that the vendor can change whenever it likes, that end the moment they decide to stop the service. The box on your desk is yours. What makes it useful is rented.

I watched this model eat the industry in real time.

• Software you used to buy once, you now rent monthly. Adobe, Microsoft, the whole catalog. The product did not get more expensive to make. The leash got shorter.
• “The cloud” is just someone else's computer, and they can raise the rent, change the rules, or lock the door on your own data with thirty days notice.
• Vendor lock-in is not a side effect. It is the design goal. The harder it is for you to leave, the less they have to earn your loyalty. I have sat in the meetings. Nobody calls it a trap. They call it “stickiness.”

And it did not stay in the server room. It crawled into your driveway and your living room.

• Automakers now sell heated seats by subscription in hardware you already paid for.
• Your tractor will not let you fix it; John Deere turned a wrench into a service call.
• Your printer rejects off-brand ink because the cartridge phones home.
• Your thermostat, your doorbell, your watch: all of it useful only as long as you keep paying a company to let your own hardware keep working.

It's Not a Glitch. It's the Roadmap.

Sound familiar? It should. It is the exact same move from last week's post, run on a new target.

In Part 1, housing flipped from the main way regular people built wealth into a thing you rent from someone wealthier. That was not a market accident. It was a predictable output of policy.

Leveragism is that same logic, generalized. Take a category people used to own (a home, a car, a piece of software, a song, a skill), and convert it into a category people rent. Ownership builds equity for you. Access builds revenue for them, on a schedule, with your dependence as collateral.

The middle class they repealed was built on ownership. A house you held. A pension you earned. A trade you possessed. The replacement they are pouring is built on access. Nothing accrues to you. Everything accrues to the meter.

“You will own nothing and be happy” got passed around as a conspiracy meme. Strip the paranoia and look at the receipts and the first half is just a quarterly earnings strategy. Nobody is asking about the happy part.

If You Can Subscribe to It, You Can Cancel It

Here is where I follow Jordan's lead and refuse to leave you in the dark, because the same fact that makes Leveragism possible is the fact that makes it beatable.

A system built on access instead of ownership is a system held together by terms. And terms are policy. Policy can be rewritten. That is not optimism, it is mechanics.

What rewriting it looks like, in plain language:

• Right to repair. If you bought it, you get to fix it. Full stop. The tractor, the phone, the car.
• Interoperability and data portability. Leaving a platform should not mean starting your life over from zero. Your data is yours, in a format you can carry out the door.
• A ban on dark patterns. Signing up takes one click. Cancelling should too. The maze is not an accident, and it should not be legal.
• Own where the lock-in is worst. As a personal defense, the rule I live by now: rent the trivial, own the load-bearing. Never let a subscription sit on top of something you cannot afford to lose access to.

None of that is utopian. Most of it is just consumer law that has not caught up to the business model. Which is the same thing I said last week: this was done on purpose, so it can be undone on purpose, and I would like the people who built the meter to be in the room when we shut it off.

Why I'm Telling You This

In Part 1, I told you that calling your bankruptcy a personal failure is how the people in charge keep you isolated and quiet.

This is the sequel to that lie. The new version says that if your whole financial life has quietly turned into a stack of monthly payments you cannot escape, that is just modern convenience, and you chose it.

I know this one from the inside. I helped build the locks. I am telling you where the keys are.

Watch Jordan's video. Then get loud with me.

Source: Benn Jordan, “The Richest Country Is Pretty Mid Now” (2026), where he introduces the term “Leveragism,” building on the argument in his earlier essay “You Are Witnessing the Death of American Capitalism.” Part 1 of this series: “It Was Never a Dream. It Was a Policy. And They Repealed It.”

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Casey writes about economic policy, nomadic life, cybersecurity, and navigating the world as a late-diagnosed AuDHD adult. New posts drop on my professional website.