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For my podcast this week, I read my Mar 2019 @locusmag column, "Terra Nullius," about the way that Locke's property theory ("I found this stuff nobody was using, added my labor, now it's mine") is an act of erasure and sometimes a prelude to genocide.

locusmag.com/2019/03/cory-d…

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The germ of the column came from the bizarre tale of the @AlohaPokeCo, a company started by non-Pacific Islanders in Chicago that then threatened Hawaiians who operated poke restaurants whose name included the word "poke."

washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2…

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These guys are perfect Lockean grifters, because their claim implies that "aloha" was an unimproved natural resource that they mixed with their branding endeavor and converted to property.

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It's a ghastly microcosm for the whole genocidal enterprise of settler colonialism. For settlers to square the morality of stealing indigenous land, they had to first declare the land to be uninhabited ("terra nullius"), and then claim ownership based on their "improvements."

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And it reveals the extent to which all of Locke's property theory is grounded in erasure: there's nothing in the world that isn't in relation to others. There's nothing that's just lying around, waiting for Lockeans to pick it up and turn it into property.

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To make Locke work, you have to zero out everyone else's claim. In particular, you have to zero out claims that don't assert exclusive property rights - if no one can authorize you to buy something, it isn't property, so you can just take it.

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This is the thread that runs through all our property relations, but especially "intellectual property," whose incoherence can be traced directly back to this phenomenon.

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Edgar Allan Poe invented mystery stories. We can either all pay his estate a royalty every time we write a mystery, or we can pretend his invention wasn't an invention. There's no middle ground for Locke.

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To make things more complicated, Poe invented the mystery story more or less simultaneously with several other authors who had no knowledge of Poe's work. There's a reason for that, which @kevin2kelly describes in his 2010 book WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS.

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Kelly describes something he calls "the adjacent possible." The basic idea behind inventions pops up all the time, suggested by the underlying principles that are combined to make invention. But inventions can't be invented until they're possible.

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So lots of people can observe the twirl of a maple key and the action of a wine-screw and muse about something that looks like a helicopter, but no one can make a helicopter until we've got the full complement of helicopter-adjacent inventions.

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But as those inventions - metallurgy, internal combustion, aerodynamics - emerge, the idea of a helicopter gets more and more obvious, and more and more people think of them and try to invent them.

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Inevitably, when the helicopter is born, there are overlapping claims to the invention, from all the people who successfully combined all the adjacent stuff that had been invented.

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These inventors want to be Lockean titans, but to achieve that, they need to zero out all the stuff that came before. Like the mystery writer who denies Poe's contribution, they assert metallurgy and internal combustion were unimproved nature they mixed with their labor.

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There's a power realpolitik here: if you want to zero someone else's claim, you'd better be able to trounce them when they strike back and cry thief. So while the Lockean delusion may be widely distributed, it's most successfully realized when it's wielded by the powerful.

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Which is why the Beatles can appropriate R&B and call it inspiration, but hiphop artists can't sample the Beatles and declare them to be labor-blended raw material that is now their property.

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I like the Beatles. I like hiphop that remixes the Beatles. I don't think the answer is to create a property fence around R&B, declare some R&B artist to be its true owner and make everyone else beg permission to make R&B.

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I think the right answer is to erase Locke. Mixing labor with stuff DOES create an interest, but it's not an exclusive interest. Invention isn't the work of a titan, it's the emergent property of a moment. Above all, recognize the power dynamics lurking beneath the surface.

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I turned this column into a speech and delivered it as a speech at the @internetarchive's Grand Reopening of the Public Domain event in January 2019. You can listen to that here:

archive.org/details/Closin…

and watch it here:

archive.org/details/Closin…

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Here's the podcast episode:

craphound.com/podcast/2020/0…

and the MP3:

archive.org/download/Cory_…

and my podcast feed:

feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podca…

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