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We're Renting Our Lives Away to Enrich Tech Lords and Wall Street Oligarchs
In the new, out-of-control rental economy, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.
Dec 30, 2025
On Sunday, both President Donald Trump and his secretary of Housing and Urban Development told us that 50-year home mortgages may soon be a thing. While seemingly insane (you could end up paying more than three times the cost of the house and never escape the burden of debt before you die), this is just the latest iteration of one of American businesses’ most profitable scams: the rental economy.
It’s a growing threat to the American middle class that rarely gets named, even as it reshapes our lives every day. Over the past two decades, it’s snuck in quietly, disguised as convenience, efficiency, and “innovation.”
As a result, nothing is “ours” any more. Instead, we’re renting our lives away.
There was a time when you bought things.
It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.
You bought a house, a book, a record, a car, a word processing program. You paid once, took it home or lived in it, and it was yours. If the company went out of business, your stereo still worked. If the manufacturer didn’t get their annual payment, your computer didn’t lock you out of your own words. You could read books on your phone or pad without an internet connection to “confirm your purchase.”
That America is disappearing.
Today, almost everything that used to be a purchase has become a rental.
Take Microsoft Word. Decades ago, you bought it once and used it for years. Now it’s a monthly fee. Stop paying, and you may not even be able to open documents you wrote yourself. Adobe did the same thing. So did music, movies, and television. At first, it felt like convenience; a few dollars a month didn’t seem like a big deal.
Even the latest versions of the two major computer operating systems are essentially spyware, constantly tracking everything you do while demanding that you put all your personal information on their “cloud” servers.
Instead of buying homes, people are renting because, in part, massive New York hedge funds and foreign investors are purchasing as many as half of all the homes that come available for sale in some communities, and then flipping them into rentals. Renters can end up on the hook for their entire lives.
Even the means to get a good job—a college education—has become something you must pay for over a period of decades or even a lifetime instead of the pay-as-you-go model my generation had before Ronald Reagan gutted federal aid to higher ed. We now have almost $2 trillion in student debt—the only developed nation in the world that does this to its students—and I regularly get calls into my radio program from people in their 70s still paying off their student debt.
But this change was never really just about money. It has morphed over the past decades into a new form of corporate control over our lives and our wealth. It’s become a never-ending extraction of money and personal data from each of us, every month, every year, time after time, over and over again until we’re financially exhausted.
When you own something, you decide how it’s used. When you rent, someone else makes that choice. They can raise prices, change terms, remove features, track everything you do with it, or shut it off entirely. Your “choice” becomes compliance.
The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.
That same model has spread everywhere.
Cars used to be machines you owned. Now they’re rolling computers with features like heated seats, remote start, or performance upgrades locked behind monthly fees. Similarly, cars are increasingly leased instead of purchased. Miss your payment this month and the lender will remotely disable “your” vehicle. Your car doesn’t just take you places anymore: It reports on you.
Phones are even worse. They’re not just devices; they’re gatekeepers. Apps can be removed. Accounts can be banned. Services can disappear overnight. And because so much of modern life runs through that phone—banking, work, navigation, healthcare—being cut off isn’t an inconvenience. It’s a functional exclusion from society.
This extends from major things like our cars and homes to simple things like apps. Louise loves to play Scrabble on her phone, and would gladly pay a one-time fee for an app that doesn’t throw ads at her, track and sell her information, or demand constant interaction. Instead, since the old Scrabble app she’s used for years went to a rental model, she’s gone through a half-dozen apps, each worse than the last at demanding her interactions or throwing ads.
And to add insult to injury, layered on top of this rental business model is a vast, multibillion-dollar industry harvesting our personal information.
Every website you visit. Every app you download. Every product you register just to make it work. Your location, habits, preferences, relationships, and even emotional responses are tracked, analyzed, packaged, and sold. Most often without meaningful consent, and almost always without real alternatives.
This is not how American capitalism worked for over 250 years.
The question business leaders used to ask was simple: “What unmet needs do people have that our company can satisfy with a new product or service?” You built something useful, people bought it, and that was the deal.
Today, the question has changed: “How do we make our product so essential that people can’t function without it, then crush or buy out our competitors so there’s no real consumer choice, then charge a monthly fee forever, all while extracting user data we can sell for even more profit?”
That’s not innovation. It’s parasitism.
If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.
In this model, the product is often just bait. The real commodity, the real profit center, the real source of unending corporate cash flow is you.
And because the billionaire “Tech Bros” and Wall Street oligarchs control the products, the data, and increasingly our nation’s news and social media, they also control the content and algorithms that shape public opinion.
As a result, social media and even our news (think CBS, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Fox “News”) increasingly doesn’t just reflect reality, they engineer it to get us to think of this new rental economy as normal, as innovative, as The Way Things Should Be.
In addition to profitably amplifying outrage, profitably distorting truth, and polishing the public image of this new rental economy—all to create billions in ongoing month-after-month profits—America’s billionaire tech lords and the right-wing politicians they bankroll (thanks to five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court) are manufacturing our consent (to apply Noam Chomsky’s phrase).
Thomas Jefferson warned that people are inclined to suffer evils while they are sufferable rather than abolish the forms to which they’ve grown accustomed. The billionaire Tech Bros and Wall Street are hoping we’ll all just roll over, sign up, and let them ding our credit cards until our dying day.
It’s gotten so bad that apps—which also acquire and then sell our data—have emerged that track our “subscriptions” so we can try to get it all under control. They’re advertising them on TV every day: Get this app to find out what apps are secretly extracting your cash because you long ago forgot you clicked on that link.
None of this was inevitable.
The solution is not to smash technology or retreat into the past. It’s for government to once again work for the 99% instead of the 1%. That means once again regulating money in politics, private equity, social media, data harvesting, and the out-of-control rental economy that has replaced ownership.
It means breaking monopolies, restoring regulatory independence, making education affordable, supporting home and car ownership, and reaffirming that democracy—not billionaires—sets the rules of the road.
Technology should serve human freedom, not manage it. Markets should reward service and quality of content, not extraction. People should be able to choose to pay or not to pay for things from apps to the functionality of your car or home’s HVAC system.
Nothing is ours any more. Not the road, not the floor. If everything we touch is leased, freedom is just another fee.
If we don’t act to regulate this out-of-control rental economy, we may one day realize we didn’t lose our wealth and even our democracy all at once: We simply rented our way out of it.
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Just After Settling With Trump DOJ, RealPage Sues New York Over Ban on Algorithmic Rent-Setting
"As if we need any more evidence the settlement is BS," wrote one antitrust advocate.
Nov 26, 2025
After securing a corporate-friendly settlement with the Trump Justice Department earlier this week, the real estate software company RealPage on Wednesday turned its attention to the state of New York, suing to block a recently enacted law aimed at preventing algorithmic rent-setting that has helped drive up housing costs nationwide.
The law in question prohibits software companies like RealPage, which is owned by a private equity firm, from enabling landlords to collude and push up rents. Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the measure into law last month, making the state one of the first in the nation to combat algorithmic price-fixing.
In a legal challenge filed Wednesday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, RealPage argues the state law is "a sweeping and unconstitutional ban on lawful speech specifically intended" to outlaw RealPage's software.
On the third page of the lawsuit, RealPage cites its pending settlement with the US Justice Department in an effort to bolster its case against New York's law, which advocates hailed as a major victory for renters.
"Especially because RealPage offers [revenue management software (RMS)] that does not reference any competitor’s non-public information when a customer is using the software, there is no plausible basis to conclude that RealPage’s RMS can be used to facilitate any form of collusion among RealPage customers," the lawsuit states. "In fact, this version of the software is specifically permitted by the U.S. Department of Justice under its proposed antitrust consent decree with RealPage."
"As if we need any more evidence the settlement is BS," replied Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project.
With sky-high housing costs a central focus in New York—particularly the successful New York City mayoral campaign of Zohran Mamdani—and across the country, RealPage and management companies that use its software have drawn heightened scrutiny. Last week, nine states reached a $7 million settlement with Greystar, the largest landlord in the US, in a lawsuit over the company's use of RealPage software to raise rents.
As part of the state settlement, Greystar agreed to no longer use rent-setting software that relies on private data from other landlords.
Late last year, during the presidency of Joe Biden, the Justice Department sued RealPage over the company's alleged "unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing."
“RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software,” said the Biden DOJ. “This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information.”
On Monday, the Trump Justice Department announced a proposed settlement with RealPage that the company openly welcomed, characterizing the deal as an effective endorsement of the legality of its product. The settlement, in which RealPage does not admit to any wrongdoing, still must be reviewed and approved by a court.
According to a report published last year by the Biden White House, algorithmic price-setting cost renters across the US nearly $4 billion in 2023 alone.
The American Prospect's David Dayen noted Wednesday that RealPage previously "promised landlord clients that it would generate 'revenue lift between 3% to 7%' by feeding rental data in a metro area into an algorithm that recommended price increases."
"Then, RealPage agents would tell landlords that they risked losing access to the platform if they didn’t comply with hiking rents," Dayen wrote. "This was a case of classic price-fixing."
"Not having to pay a nickel or admit wrongdoing is lenient enough," Dayen added, referring to the DOJ settlement. "But there are several loopholes even in the restrictions. RealPage can continue using past data to train AI models, which will inform future price recommendations. Public data can be aggregated and used for this purpose. And RealPage can continue using an 'auto-accept' feature for price recommendations, as long as clients can reconfigure it to opt out. We know from most of digital age history that opt-outs don’t work well."
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'Terrible for Renters': Trump DOJ Settles Price-Fixing Case With RealPage
"Far from stopping illegal practices," said one critic, "it gives a green light to algorithmic price-fixing across the economy."
Nov 25, 2025
The Trump Justice Department on Monday announced a settlement with the real estate software giant RealPage, which the federal government and multiple states accused of illegally facilitating collusion between landlords to drive up rents.
The settlement, which must be reviewed by a court, would require RealPage to "cease having its software use competitors’ nonpublic, competitively sensitive information to determine rental prices," among other mandates.
Abigail Slater, head of the DOJ's Antitrust Division, cast the agreement as a win for competition and for renters. But RealPage downplayed the settlement's impact on its business model, saying the deal's terms "bless the legality of RealPage’s prior and planned product changes"—alluding to the company's voluntary decision last year to let its customers remove nonpublic data when using the software to calculate recommended rents.
The company emphasized that the settlement does not include any financial penalties or admissions of guilt.
"What a total farce," Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project, said in response to the DOJ announcement. "This sham settlement violates the first thing we tell every lawmaker: Fixing prices based on public data sets is still price fixing!"
"This is lipstick on a pig and terrible for renters," Hepner added.
The Justice Department initially sued RealPage last year under the Biden administration, accusing the company of running an "unlawful scheme to decrease competition among landlords in apartment pricing and to monopolize the market for commercial revenue management software that landlords use to price apartments."
"RealPage contracts with competing landlords who agree to share with RealPage nonpublic, competitively sensitive information about their apartment rental rates and other lease terms to train and run RealPage’s algorithmic pricing software," the Biden DOJ said. "This software then generates recommendations, including on apartment rental pricing and other terms, for participating landlords based on their and their rivals’ competitively sensitive information."
The DOJ complaint used RealPage's own words against it, citing the company's description of its products as "driving every possible opportunity to increase price."
A White House report released late last year estimated that the kind of algorithmic pricing that RealPage enables cost renters across the US a total of nearly $4 billion in 2023 alone. The report characterized that estimate as conservative.
Basel Musharbash, managing attorney at Antimonopoly Counsel, warned following Monday's settlement announcement that "far from stopping illegal practices, it gives a green light to algorithmic price-fixing across the economy."
The states that joined the DOJ lawsuit were not listed on the settlement.
Last week, California, North Carolina, and other states announced a separate settlement with the apartment management giant Greystar, one of the companies that used RealPage software to set rents.
Under the state deal, Greystar agreed to pay $7 million in penalties and stop using RealPage’s software or similar products for pricing.
"Whether it's through smoke-filled backroom deals or through an algorithm on your computer screen, colluding to drive up prices is illegal,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta. “Families across the country are staring down an affordability crisis. Companies that intentionally fuel this unaffordability by raising prices to line their own pockets can be sure I will use the full force of my office to hold them accountable."
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