The idea was that people would avoid large purchases in favor of renting whatever they want when they need it. Note that this was not a prediction by the forum, it was a fictional speech given at the Forum by one person trying to make a point.

The original quote meant that you would be a lifelong renter and was assuring you that the loss of freedom would be in your interest somehow.

The phrase comes from an article written in 2016 by a Danish MP about what the world could look like in 2030 given the rising trend of goods being rendered as services through phone apps. Basically, a world where everything is rented as and when it is needed. Public transport has been made free so owning a car is pointless. Owning a home is silly when you can rent and move somewhere else whenever you want. Shopping is a thing of the past when food is delivered to your door along with clothes and appliances as and when you need them. This means you have far more choice and you don't clutter up your home with products your rarely use. Why spend a lot of money buying a set of clothes for your wardrobe when you have the choice of an infinitely huge range delivered to your door? It's similar to choosing between paying $70 to buy a single video game or paying next to nothing to have access to all the games that have ever existed. Netflix instead of DVDs for example. The benefits of all this extend to the environment. We would use far fewer raw materials to make things. Manufacturers would be incentivised to make long-lasting products over disposable ones that clog up landfills. Pollution would be reduced and people would wonder why we didn't do all this sooner. People would be happy to live this way as their lives would be better. On the other side, privacy becomes a thing of the past. Everything we do is constantly tracked, monitored, and logged. There is also a the creation of a new underclass of people who do not have access to this lifestyle. Those who live 'outside the city'. The piece wasn't written as a utopian dream or a dystopian nightmare. It was created to stir debate and discussion about the direction the world is heading in. It is certainly a world with numerous benefits, but is it the kind of world we really want? Do the positives outweigh the negatives? Can we even stop this all from happening anyway or should we learn how to live in this new reality? The article went pretty unnoticed for several years until the start of the pandemic and people started to wonder what the world would look like on the other side. Pretty much everyone accepted that things WOULD be very different, but how? Some people believed that there would be a "great reset" where powerful rich people would work to reshape the world for their benefit. One way would be to shift society even further into one where only the super rich actually own anything and all the rest of us rent everything we need from them. Much like in the article. We might well believe we are happy but it would be a guilded cage. Klaus Schwab most likely used the phrase because he saw the utopian side of the article where people have far more access to products and services than under the existing model where we buy and own everything we need. Massively reduced pollution and waste. More efficient cities. A happier population. The cynics saw this as a powerful elite "saying the quiet part out loud". Openly admitting the elite want a world where they literally own everything and we plebs live day-to-day by their good grace, having every private detail of our lives scrutinised by them. https://web.archive.org/web/20200919102818/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is?utm_content=bufferbd339&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

The WEF literally had a PR campaign about this. It's why they are attributed to it. The had an article in Forbes and many ads. They had a lot of backlash and memory holed it. https://web.archive.org/web/20161125135500/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-own-nothing-have-no-privacy-and-life-has-never-been-better-ee2eed62f710 https://www.independent.co.uk/money/why-you-ll-own-nothing-by-2030-a7582111.html https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=nTEAMHP3jQY https://www.amazon.com/You-Will-Own-Nothing-Financial/dp/0063304937