The Google Doc you're writing in right now isn't yours.
Close your laptop. Lose your password. Miss a payment. Watch the company pivot. Your work doesn't disappear because you deleted it. It disappears because they decided to.
We traded ownership for convenience. We got real-time cursors dancing across screens, updates that sync before we finish typing, the certainty that everyone sees the same version. Revolutionary.
What we lost was quieter.
Your thesis lives in a datacenter you'll never visit. The raw footage from your film exists at the mercy of a terms-of-service update. Every creative professional using cloud tools is building their life's work on rented ground.
The old way wasn't better at collaboration. Emailing "project_final_FINAL_last.xls" back and forth was absurd. But when you saved a file to your hard drive, it was yours. It worked offline. It worked forever. The software couldn't be taken away from you.
Here's the pattern we're missing: what if your data lived on your devices, syncing in the background, collaborating in real-time, but always yours first? Not as a backup. As the primary copy.
The technology exists. CRDTs, they call them. Conflict-free Replicated Data Types. It's possible to build software where you own everything and lose nothing.
But we built the cloud instead. Servers as the source of truth. Your device as merely a window into someone else's computer.
The question isn't whether we can make collaborative software that respects ownership.
The question is whether we remember why ownership mattered.