A while ago I went to download a song I’d had on Spotify for years. I couldn’t. It was never mine to download. I’d been renting it the whole time and never noticed.
I knew how the service worked. I just hadn’t applied that knowledge to the way I thought about the song. I called it my music. Really, it was music I could reach while the arrangement held.
That sent me through the rest of my life with a slightly uncomfortable question: if the company behind this disappeared tomorrow, or just changed its mind, what happens to me?
The interesting answers were the ones I’d stopped thinking about. Notes accumulated inside an app. Photos I could see on a screen without being quite sure where the originals lived. Software that felt like part of my working life until I imagined the next payment failing.
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None of those arrangements is automatically bad. Convenience is useful. I’m quite happy to pay someone to do a job I don’t want to do myself. The problem is how easily an arrangement becomes an assumption. I stop noticing which parts depend on permission.
My notes were the first thing I wanted to bring back. They’re the record of what I’ve learnt, tried, changed my mind about and still haven’t worked out. If I’m going to build on that for years, I want the words to survive whatever happens to the software around them.
So the important layer lives in plain files. I can open them without the app I used to write them. I can give a different tool access to them. I can copy them somewhere else. That doesn’t make the files indestructible. I still need backups, and I still need to check those backups open. It changes who carries the responsibility.
This is where the ownership argument gets more demanding than buying a box.
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Moving dependence onto hardware in my house gives me new jobs. Updates. Repairs. Backups. Knowing what to do when something stops working. I can’t claim freedom from a service while pretending its useful work has disappeared. I’ve chosen to carry some of it myself.
That makes the audit more useful than a rule against subscriptions. Some things are worth renting. Some things are worth the trouble of owning. I want to make that decision while I still have a choice, rather than when an account stops working.
The same question sits underneath the wider SOVEREIGN project: my body, home, data, mind and money. Those areas are at very different stages. Having my notes on my laptop doesn’t mean I own a home, generate my own power or have finished building a financially independent life. They belong on the same map because each asks what I can actually rely on, and what I’m merely assuming will stay available.
I’m starting with data and mind because that’s where I can make the argument concrete in my own work. I can hold the files. I can change the tool reading them. I can notice what still breaks.
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If you want to try the audit, choose something you’d be genuinely upset to lose. Find out where it lives, what you can take with you and whether you’ve ever tested that copy. You don’t need to rebuild your life this weekend.
Bring one important thing back within reach.