In this instalment I wade into the waters of crypto discourse with some more gifts from Ursula K. Le Guin. You can read it as text here, or listen to the audio version on podcast apps — I hope you enjoy. Comments and suggestions are welcomed as always.
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This December I returned to Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home. It is the kind of book I can only describe as a gift. I have read a few such books: books which seem to ‘light up’ whenever I return to them — John Berger’s The Red Tenda of Bologna, Jorie Graham’s The Errancy, and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabath come to mind.
Listing these texts, it is my tendency to give the title following a possessive apostrophe attached to the end of its author’s name. In this syntax — ‘Author’s Book’ — the book appears to be owned by the author, which makes a certain sense: they brought it into the world; it is their intellectual property.
At the same time, though, writing is not owned by anyone, because words are merely useless symbols if not read and interpreted by a reader; reading is not a thing that can be possessed, but an act: a communication from one person, or group, to another. At the very moment this communication happens, at the moment the text is given by the author to the reader, the author loses control over what the text is, as two different readers will frequently interpret the same poem in different ways. The physical book itself, I, the reader, do own. But my copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy is exactly that: a copy. It is fungible; interchangeable with any other. What matters is the meaning and value of the text within.
Still, governments and institutions sometimes like to pretend they can own text, by taking possession of all the copies, and destroying them; or by banning their publication in the first place. (The internet changes the medium, but the effects largely remain the same).
In Farenheit 451, a dystopia written by Ray Bradbury at the height of McCarthyism, ‘firemen’ go around a future America burning any book they find. Literature is dead, everyone lives in a constant malaise, driving down the highway at 200 miles per hour for kicks. At the end of the novel, however, we discover the ‘Drifters’, an underground group of former intellectuals who have memorised books and keep them alive through oral retellings, as a Hafiz memorises the Quran and becomes its ‘guardian’. A book can be banned, its pages burnt to ash, but as long as its words are told and retold — are communicated and given from one reader to another — it cannot be owned.
I mentioned earlier intellectual property, the legal framework developed to deal with the ephemerality of artistic works, and allow for ownership of them. Developed in its modern form in the Enlightenment England of the 17th and 18th Centuries, it might be thought of as a type of intangible enclosure: not in the physical, geographic commons, but in the commons of ideas. Which is to say that intellectual property allows ideas to be owned like things. As geographic enclosures were a necessary precondition for the development of capitalism, so was intellectual property.
In the sciences, the argument in its favour generally concerns innovation: why would a pharmaceutical company develop a new drug if they could not own its formula exclusively, and thus gain profit it from its production? Without I.P., Pfizer might spend a billion dollars developing a new vaccine, only to have AstraZeneca (not needing to recoup a hefty R.&.D. investment) produce and sell it at a lower cost, thus swallowing the market and stealing all the winnings.
With works of culture, I.P. ensures that artists are paid for their works, thus supporting their continued creation. An author owns the rights to their texts; and can sue anyone who reproduces them as their own without consent.
Of course, artists would have much less incentive or ability to create if their work was constantly stolen; and medical companies can’t front the huge development costs of new drugs without profits from their previous successes (though as the disastrously inequitable global roll-out of covid vaccines has shown, when a crisis impacts us all, such self-interested thinking fails everyone). But we can argue that the conception of ownership offered by intellectual property is an abstract and legal one; and that, therefore, a different conception of ownership is certainly possible.
We have seen so far that text cannot be owned, and that any legal frameworks which proffer ownership over intangible intellectual creations are not based in actual possession, but in abstract powers given by a state and performed by its courts. This form of ownership over ideas grants rights to the owner similar to those enjoyed by an owner of physical objects or land. Let us now reverse that relationship, and explore what happens to ownership when we begin with the impossibility of owning text and intangible ideas, and then apply those principles to physical goods, objects, and space.
In Always Coming Home, Le Guin does just this. A post-apocalyptic ‘yin-utopia’, Always Coming Home is presented as an anthropological study of a fictional people called the Kesh (based on studies of real indigenous groups in northern California made in the early 20th Century by her father, A. L. Kroeber). Sections of poetry, symbols, narrative, diagrams, maps, architectural drawings, author’s notes and glossaries all come together to build the world of the Kesh. The first edition boxset of the book even included a cassette tape of the Kesh’s Music and Poetry made by Le Guin and Todd Barton.
In Le Guin’s telling, the Kesh, as studies of various indigenous groups have found, had a very different idea of ownership to that which we use today, explained by Le Guin at the beginning of a passage of Kesh poems:
The Kesh idea of property was so different from ours that any mention of it entails explanations. What one made, or gained, or owns, in the Valley, belonged to one; but one belonged to one’s House [a spiritual community], and house [where the Kesh typically sleep], and town, and people. Wealth consisted not in things but in an act: the act of giving.
Poets owned the poems they made, but the poem did not really exist until it was given, shared, performed. The identity of owning and giving is perhaps easier to see when what is involved is a poem, or a drawing, or a piece of music, or a prayer. The Kesh, however, saw it as holding equally true for all property.
In short, owning something is impossible, unless it is shared; because something does not truly exist if it does not exist in the community, and how can one possess something that does not exist?
I mentioned earlier that words are merely useless symbols if not read and interpreted by a reader. It is the act of sharing art that gives words value. But even in the construction of that explanation, our received conception of ownership is present: to say ‘it is the act of sharing that gives words value’, is still to ascribe the ‘value’ to the thing: the words on the page. Even though the act is what creates the value in the situation, I have still given the value to the word; not seen the giving as the site of value in itself.
This is what’s difficult to understand about Kesh ownership, or the lack thereof. Rather than legally enshrining permanent value to the transient act of reading, the Kesh engage in a constant reproduction of value, every time a text is read — aloud or in one’s head. In so doing, both author and reader are simultaneously recognised as active agents in producing value, which is seen as temporary: something has value not when it sits on a shelf, but only when it is engaged. In fact, something only exists when it is actively engaged; and, naturally, something that does not exist cannot have value.1
In this I was reminded of a quote employed by various artists of the 20th Century, that ‘a work of art is never finished, only abandoned’. The sense is that perfection is impossible to achieve: one could endlessly edit and re-edit a novel, to never quite find the perfect formation. Unless we ‘abandon’ our perfectionism, though, the book will never be read, and therefore never tell its story. We could also consider ‘abandonment’ here in the lens that the artist is abandoning their work to a reader’s interpretation: it is the reader who will complete the work, by engaging with it and imparting their own meanings upon it.
In the first case, ‘abandonment’ is the moment a work stops being produced and becomes a thing: endowed as an intellectual property, and ready to be sold. The second is more interesting, but it still finds the value of the work in its thingness, rather than in the act of its sharing (if the author abandons their artwork, they have absolved themself of its continuing reproduction and evolution, and have thus condemned it to be a thing only). If we combine this notion with the Kesh view of ownership, however, we might find an alternative model that seems to ring more true: that a work of art is never finished, only given, only a gift.
The initial impetus for writing this post came from a discussion of new cultural ownership models offered by the group of technologies referred to variously as crypto, blockchain, and Web3. Put neatly by Ezra Klein in an interview with Dan Olson, the most hyped value propositions for these technologies currently boil down to: ‘wouldn’t it be cool if you could own x?’. His response: ‘well, would it?’.
To break this down, I want to refer to a video published in January by the YouTube channel Colin and Samir called ‘How MrBeast could make even MORE money’. In the video, the two commentators on the ‘creator economy’ argue for a fractional ownership model of a YouTube creator’s catalogue of videos, giving the example of MrBeast’s $3m viral remake of the Netflix series Squid Game. Imagining that $1m of that budget was funded by merchandise sales, another $1m by an integrated brand partnership, Colin and Samir suggest that the final $1m required to make the video could be raised by ‘selling a percentage of the potential future… earnings of the video’ from advertisements YouTube places before and during it. In this case, 100,000 MrBeast super-fans might pay $10 each to help fund the video, receiving in return a small fraction of its future earnings.
What’s important to understand in this case, is that the super-fans who back the video wouldn’t own a fraction of the video itself, but would instead own a fraction of the video as an economic potential — an abstract asset. However, the value-proposition for those who do invest in the video is not primarily economic (just a light understanding of how unpredictable YouTube revenues are quickly reveals the unlikelihood of any meaningful payout). Rather, as Colin and Samir put it, ‘people care about owning something’.
To ask what exactly that something is, let’s take a step back to see where we have came from. At the beginning of this piece I wrote of Intellectual Property as a legal framework that allows intangible ideas to be owned like things: the value of this ownership was found in its potential to offer a return on investment. This is a structure derived from, and apiece with, traditional capitalism and cultural modernity. The form of ownership Colin and Samir are talking about is something derived more from post-modernity and a late-capitalist condition. It is a sort of meta-ownership: the value of ownership comes from owning itself.
‘Ownership matters,’ Colin says, talking of an original 1985 Jordan sneaker:
It’s rare; and people want to own it, they don’t want to use it. Utility does not mean ownership; you don’t buy the Jordan to wear it. You buy it for what it says about you as a person; and to be connected to other people who care about Jordans in a similar way. The fact that you can even bring it up conversationally that you’re an owner could bring you closer to someone else who also cares…
We see that beyond the traditional categories of use value and exchange value, post-modernity has introduced a third category: ownership value. Where typically I might find use value from a hammer I own, or exchange value from a plot of land I own, the very fact that I own the Jordan sneaker makes it valuable — disconnected from my ability to use it to walk, or exchange it for money. When this condition is applied to NFTs, the disconnection is even stronger. Commensurate to its role in the meta-verse, ownership value is a meta-value; valuable for itself alone.
Compare this against Le Guin’s model of ownership in the Kesh: all the same components are there, but the order is totally reversed. For the Kesh, telling the story, sharing in a resource, creates collectivised ownership of the story/resource, where the individuals responsible for gifting it to the group are acknowledged for their creation. For Colin and Samir, though, ownership is a precondition to telling the story: in order to have the human connection, you need to own the shoe — or, even more abstractly, the fraction of potential future earnings of a YouTube video. Simply being a fan of an artist isn’t good enough, to really be a part of the community you have to own something first — no matter if that something has zero real-world value for use or exchange.
The difference in effect is salient. In the Kesh structure, common ownership is the only possible form of ownership; without the act of sharing the poem (and its being read/listened to by a community), the poem simply does not exist, so there is nothing to own! In the post-modern system, however, ownership itself is made into a value system and the key into the community. Instead of everyone having communal possession over one thing, the ‘fractional ownership’ models proffered by the crypto evangelists do just that: fracture ownership into something highly individualised, besotted with unequal access, in-groups and out-groups.
Perhaps ownership value could best be thought of as ‘jealousy value’, and we might remember that ‘thou shalt not covet they neighbour’s goods’ (even if those goods amount to a link to a .jpg of a carelessly-drawn monkey). Of course in the Kesh conception of ownership, your neighbour has nothing which you could covet: everything they own, you own too.
Let’s return to Ezra Klein’s conversation with Dan Olson, to highlight the absurdity of these fractional ownership structures.
One of the key value propositions offered by Colin and Samir is fractional ownership’s potential to fairly reward artists for their work in an era when revenues per play from platforms like Spotify or Youtube allow only the most popular creators to make a stable income from their work. For owners, there is value in being in a community of like-minded fans, and a moral value in financially supporting work you find important.
The absurdity, as Klein and Olson note, occurs when we realise that all those value-propositions already have solutions in the form of Patreon and other crowd-funding platforms. What’s more, those platforms often offer fans real use-value, in the form of bonus content, and early or exclusive access to events. ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you could own x?’ (whether it’s the future earnings of a YouTube video, a fraction of this blog post, a link to a .jpg file, a custom hoodie worn by an avatar in the metaverse), quite quickly becomes ‘well, would it?’ if we don’t buy into the sacrosanct value of ownership as its own category sans use or exchange.
Colin and Samir do mention Patreon, Samir saying:
Patreon is: ‘I pay, you give me exclusive content; I feel good because I’m supporting my favourite creator.’ That’s a clean transaction.
The next version of it, what we’re talking about, this world of fractional ownership, is going to make that a two-way street: ‘I’m supporting you as a creator, but as you grow, I grow too, because I’m actually a part of this.’
While the values here seem laudable, and in search of genuine community around shared interests, what seems unclear to me is how crypto technology actually helps achieve them. Typically, ownership comes with an associated use- or exchange-value: when you own a house you are granted the power to make changes to it, and to sell it; but the fractional ownership model described by Colin and Samir gives owners no additional power in controlling the direction of a creator’s output, and pure-ownership value necessarily cancels exchange value — you no longer own what you sell, and ownership here is primary. Compare with the fact that Patreon already offers a ‘two-way street’, through access to conversations with the creator, and other fans of the creator. The only thing that blockchain technologies and fractional ownership appear to change is the means of access: instead of Patreon’s ‘clean transaction’, the crypto models introduce a mediating layer in the abstract token of ownership, which has no value other than in the novel meta-category of ownership-value; which is to say it has no value, other than giving its owner the ability to say ‘I own it’.
Does that ownership token bring fans closer to creators, and closer to the kind of mutually-acknowledging author-reader relationships created by the Kesh ownership structures written by Le Guin? Or does it introduce further barriers to human connection in the digital age? Does owning a piece of a human being and their creation invest you in their success and bring you closer to the meanings and emotions they create, or simply alienate you from them and push you further away? In both cases, I’m inclined to believe the latter.
Additionally, it seems very unclear how fractional ownership could offer creators long-term stable income. Once ‘shares’ of a video catalogue are sold-off they can’t be sold again. The creator gets a single influx of cash, but must now pay a significant portion of their monthly advertisement revenue out to fans. Compare this to the reliable monthly cheques provided by Patreon supporters and it seems like a bit of a raw deal. Crypto technology might allow for creators to take a cut of any future transaction of the share, but that doesn't solve the issue of reliability — and for owners of shares, what’s the motivation to sell? Especially when their identity in a community is founded around their ownership, as Colin and Samir suggest it might be.
The issues Crypto hypemen are trying to solve are often admirable ones: problems of platform centralisation, free expression, and fair compensation for content-creators (othertimes, the hypemen are pure profiteers). Yet so often they seem either caught up in the promises of the technology for the technology’s sake; or powerless to stop it. Samir ends his note on Patreon by saying:
That… is just the way the internet is moving: this world of Web3, of crypto, of the Blockchain, it’s just opening up this element where audiences and creators can all share in the same thing… That’s the next chapter of this.
With Web2, corporations like Facebook took ownership of our personal data, and sold it to fund dreams of ‘bringing the world closer together’. We have all seen the failure, and the costs, of that project, and perhaps all yearn for a fairer, more communal internet and world. Supposedly, this is what Web3 will deliver, but Klein offers us a warning: if all crypto amounts to is ‘wouldn’t it be cool if you could own x?’, where x’s only value is the ability to say ‘I own it’, then we are 'buying too much into the logic of commercialisation in an effort to solve a commercialisation problem’.
Just as you can’t own writing, you can’t own a community; the values of both are produced and reproduced as we engage and reengage with them together. And just as intellectual property didn’t change the reality of owning intangible ideas, Crypto won’t change the reality of being in communities.
But it wants us to believe it can — and with assets as fantastical as web links to .jpg files of monkeys, currencies that can’t be exchanged, and the not-yet-existent future earnings of a YouTube video, it needs our foolish belief more than anything else. The tool it has to win that belief is the jealousy power of ownership value. We should choose to call its bluff; and to hold that a story is never finished, never owned; only given, and given again, as a gift.
In a sense, this is a philosophy of reverse-solipsism: ‘nothing exists without others confirming its existence’, where solipsism would have that the only thing I can know to truly exist is myself.
Additionally, the role of technology and media here is important and something I hope to return to. In short, it is no coincidence that intellectual property was developed alongside the rise of mass-reproduced printed text and the move away from oral and performance culture.
You Can't Own Community