You can own the building and still have a landlord

Imagine buying the Chrysler Building. You’d own a recognizable piece of the New York skyline, but you’d still have a landlord: the land beneath it belongs to Cooper Union, a private college. Buying the building hasn’t meant buying the ground it stands on.

When I first published this article in 2023, this arrangement made a great analogy for building a business on someone else’s platform. Then reality supplied its own follow-up: in September 2024, Cooper Union announced it was terminating the ground lease over unpaid rent. In January 2025, a judge ruled against the leaseholder, allowing the college to take control.

A commercial property lease and a social media account aren’t equivalent, but there’s still a valuable lesson here: what you’ve built, what you own, and what you control can be three different things.

Nicholas Carr coined the term 'digital sharecropping' to describe how platforms capture economic value from the work their users contribute. I prefer 'digital tenancy'. Sharecropping carries a history of racial exploitation that we don't need to borrow in order to explain platform dependence.

Digital tenancy is what I call building part of your business in a space someone else controls. That might be a social media profile, a marketplace shop, or a publication hosted on a platform.

The issue isn’t necessarily who owns the content. Substack, where this article originally appeared, explicitly says that creators retain ownership of their original work. Its terms also reserve the right to remove content at any time. Both can be true.

A platform doesn’t need to own your work to control whether people can find it there. You might have every article saved on your computer and still lose something important when the place where people read, discuss, and share them becomes unavailable.

I don’t consider "never build on rented land" particularly useful advice. Usually, the other people on that land are the reason you’re there.

A platform can be a way to stay connected with someone you met at a networking event, or let one peer introduce you to another, or a conversation may lead to a collaboration, a referral, or a friendship.

Those interactions have indisputable value. The question is whether you understand the dependency you’re creating and how comfortable you are with it.

If your main platform became unavailable tomorrow, what would you lose, and what could still function?

Could clients find your contact details? Could you publish an update somewhere they’d know to look? Would you still have your articles, images, product information, and customer records? Which relationships could continue elsewhere, and which would be difficult to reconnect?

Those are more useful questions than whether you technically “own your audience.” People aren’t property, and having their contact details doesn’t guarantee their attention.

In the original version of this article, I called the alternative digital permaculture. I still like the garden analogy: build something you can maintain, preserve what’s useful, and avoid making everything depend on one thing going right.

That doesn’t require maintaining six social accounts or becoming your own IT department. Here’s how I’d apply it.

Publishing articles, videos, and a newsletter through one service may give people different ways to consume your work but it doesn’t give you an alternative when that service becomes unavailable. Consider how people discover you, where your work lives, how you communicate with customers, and how you make sales. Start with the dependency whose failure would cause the most damage.

Instead of trying to predict which company will still be dependable in ten years, investigate what leaving would involve. What can you export? In what format? Can another service use it? Are images and attachments included, or does the export merely link back to them? Keep independent copies of important work, and check that those copies are usable.

Resilience doesn’t require a constant supply of new content. Review articles that stood the test of time, replace broken links, correct outdated advice, and retire work you no longer stand behind. This article is one example: the original idea was worth keeping, but some of the facts and recommendations needed another look.

Make your website and contact details easy to find. Where it makes sense, exchange direct contact information with people you work with or want to stay in touch with. Offer a newsletter people have a reason to subscribe to, rather than treating subscription as the price of continued contact. You don’t have to move every interaction elsewhere to reduce your dependence on a single shared space.

Pick one important piece of your business and try recovering it somewhere else: open an export, restore an article with its images, or check whether your customer records contain the information you’d actually need. A recovery plan should tell you what you can restore, what you’d need to rebuild, and what you might lose.

Your own website and a portable email list can be parts of that plan. So can offline relationships, collaborations, and a presence in another relevant community. The right combination depends on your business and your capacity to maintain it.

None of this makes you completely independent. The goal is to have fewer dependencies you haven’t considered, and more options when something changes.

A backup can preserve an article. A contact export can preserve some ways to reach people. Neither recreates the conversations, introductions, and shared context that made a platform valuable.

That’s a reason to take platform dependence seriously, not a reason to dismiss everything you’ve built there.

Use platforms for what they offer; keep independent copies of what matters; give people another way to find you, and find out what leaving would actually require before you're forced to do it.