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Ownership is a more nuanced concept in a world of complexity. It's a bit like a 12-year-old emperor: he's not really the leader because he doesn't understand wh

Ownership is a more nuanced concept in a world of complexity. It's a bit like a 12-year-old emperor: he's not really the leader because he doesn't understand what's going on. If you want to own something, you need to understand it. Consider open source software. Why is compiled code not good enough? Because it's too hard to understand, so you're at thw mercy of the company that does understand it. Open souce puts others outside the company on a more even footing for understanding the code. But complexity and the rate of change in products really gets in the way of understanding. Especially for anything involvong software, which is almost everything. You can see it even with open source software that has become such a giant maintenance burden that there's no way you can reasonably fork and maintain it without a pretty major investment. The only hope of restoring the concept of ownership is to simplify and slow down. In many cases, this means a regression to simpler times, but not all. We can reach much better trade-offs than exist currently, but it will take a lot of work and education. Let me give an example: the notion of buying something seems simple now, but it's actually a contract in the context of a lot of statutes and even more case law. Why can't signing up for a web service be accomplished without an unreadably-long contract? It can, but we need to develop the right statutes and case law and expectations to enable it.

npteljes 4y ago
It does raise the issue of the 12-year-old emperor, but nevertheless, the right should be granted by regulation. People don't understand lots of things and entrust themselves to different entities to make their life easier. But they should not let go of the rights that allow them to take the matter into their own hands. As long as we're on the topic of children, they have human rights too, for example, and while I don't imagine they exercise them often by themselves, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have them in the first place.
Brian_K_White 4y ago
No regression or simpler times needed. The right to own is orthogonal to what you do with the thing you own. The right to choose who I trust to operate my thing, and why, is just as important as the right to operate it directly myself. Even if I can't write all the code in my doorbell, I am still harmed by an inability to choose who's code runs on the doorbell, and still harmed even if I do have a choice but none of the available choices are open source because some artificial process prevents it. It requires no simpler times to simply choose freecad instead of autocad, etc. It doesn't even require deep knowledge to make that choice either.

npteljes 4y ago

It does raise the issue of the 12-year-old emperor, but nevertheless, the right should be granted by regulation. People don't understand lots of things and entrust themselves to different entities to make their life easier. But they should not let go of the rights that allow them to take the matter into their own hands. As long as we're on the topic of children, they have human rights too, for example, and while I don't imagine they exercise them often by themselves, that doesn't mean they shouldn't have them in the first place.

Brian_K_White 4y ago

No regression or simpler times needed. The right to own is orthogonal to what you do with the thing you own. The right to choose who I trust to operate my thing, and why, is just as important as the right to operate it directly myself. Even if I can't write all the code in my doorbell, I am still harmed by an inability to choose who's code runs on the doorbell, and still harmed even if I do have a choice but none of the available choices are open source because some artificial process prevents it. It requires no simpler times to simply choose freecad instead of autocad, etc. It doesn't even require deep knowledge to make that choice either.