Courtney Milan  🦖

One of the reasons this is getting such a rise is that the books *do* go out of print and today that means authors take control of properties that are not getting attention. At this moment in history, the long tail of books finally belongs to the author, not the corporation.

Every author I know: oh fuck I think that I can finally get the rights reverted on that book from 15 years, FINALLY, I AM FREEEEEE!

People to me on That Thread: you do not seem to understand that books go out of print, let me explain this to you.

We must avoid enacting super popular policies in order to *checks notes* remain popularhttps://twitter.com/UrbanAchievr/status/1367924573329559553 …

In good news: goat cheeses play really nicely with my lactose intolerance.

Property rules can absolutely be moral--I'm not trying to imply otherwise, because we've had some horrifically immoral property rules specifically around taking ownership of other people's land or of other people.

But the only reason you "own" a house or a car is because everyone around you is like, "yeah, that is yours and it means I don't go into it unless you say I can." If everyone around you decided your house was communal property it would *be* communal property.

If the world you want to make requires you to get to the point where you say "well, just get rid of corporate executives" then very nice! sure! I love it! But we should maybe do that FIRST.

If what you want to do is advocate for an entirely different scheme of property management, you should do that, but if you do it piecemeal, people will be annoyed as fuck.

It is nonsensical to talk about what property rights should be in a *different* world, because property rights are a collective agreement in *this* world.

99% of the incredibly annoying conversation that keeps breaking through my mute is based on people trying to imagine that all of this shit is happening in a vacuum or in some other world and trying to come up with a "right" answer that doesn't take into account...this world.

This is not the only way to short-hand decide how to divvy things up, but it is the one we use, and so the question then becomes, what's the best way to handle this particular right? This question CANNOT be answered in a vacuum.

Our particular framework for dividing resources means that we decide that with regard to a certain thing, certain people get a set of rights that we have defined. We call that, in shorthand, "ownership," but that set of rights is always determined by society at large.

This is the particular framework for dividing resources that our particular culture has hit upon, and so the question is not "what is my right? what do I deserve?" but "what makes sense in the grand scheme of things for everyone?"

There's this thing people do where they try to distinguish certain kinds of property as right and natural and honestly (she says, discarding 99% of libertarian theory) I hate that.

All property is a creation of the state and common agreement. All of it. There is no inherent "property" value to anything in the universe except that we've collectively decided it's a useful framework.

This aphorism may make sense in a genre where the purpose is to make your readers mad and/or angry and leave them feeling the world is a worse place than when they started, but this is not the genre I write in.