Is Ownership an Illusion?

Every now and then, a new article on Second Life will pop up, and people will start arguing about whether or not intellectual “property” is, in fact, property. What the argument means is that there are people who own virtual land in games, and they argue that they “own” that land in the real world. Linden Lab, the company that owns Second Life, recently changed its user agreement to indicate that they own their property and that the players only get to use it as Linden Lab allows it. Well, in case you don’t know this, people have spent thousands of dollars buying property in that land and developing it. For them, they’re somewhat pissed. But it’s a show down that is now going to the court systems of the real world in the United States (California, actually, as Linden Lab is located in San Francisco, California). The court system, however, has been very apprehensive about taking cases of this nature, because in case you don’t realize it, a decision on this issue would be one of great magnitude and importance, and no one wants to be the precedent for this sort of litigation.

But you’re probably wondering, who cares? You don’t play Second Life, and chances are you probably don’t play anything else, like World of Warcraft to really care any way. Well, neither do I, but I do find the issue to be one great importance because it is touching on an issue that is very dear to me, and that’s the idea of ownership in general.

You see, I’ve been convinced for a long time now that ownership is really an illusion, something we convince ourselves of being tangible, only because we’ve convinced enough of our neighbors to buy into the fantasy. It’s partly why I’ve never looked at property as an investment. I’ve never bought into the whole idea that it’s actually mine. It’s kind of hard to think that way when the property you’ve bought is subject to taxation by the government that automatically indicates that the property actually belongs to the government and I’m just living on it. I mean, if it was MY property, then no one should be able to benefit from my ownership. It should be mine, straight out.

But it’s not. The government claims that it is authorized to charge me money if I happen to own a bit of property in ITS jurisdiction. If I don’t pay them, they can forcibly take that property from me and give it to someone else. Also, if the government decides it wants to build a tea garden where I happen to have built a gazebo, they can just take it and offer me whatever THEY decide they want to offer me for it. There’s a whole amendment to our Constitution that pretty much says they’re not supposed to do that, but when it comes to government following its own laws, well there’s an exception to everything. When it benefits them, it’s an exception. When it benefits me, it’s a breach of law.

This is a problem that goes way back to before our country was even founded. Kings used to think that they owned all of the territory and that the peasants were just there to work the king’s land. We’re not that far off from where we used to be, even though we took the Lockeian direction and claimed that land we own is now something that belongs to the people and individuals. But it doesn’t. Nothing is really ours as long as someone with more power wants it. If someone with economic power wants your land, he or she attempts to buy it. If that doesn’t work, he or she then attempts to take that land through legal maneuvers, like suing you for some “crime” that you have done to that individual, like growing your weeds too far over a fence or something equally ludicrous. If that doesn’t work, then quite often a business will turn to government to declare your land a public land grab and then take it that way. It happened in San Francisco when I was living there. The government took land that was owned by individuals because they wanted to develop it for “the poor”. When they completed their land grab, businesses lobbied government for it and then took ownership of the same property for private development. The people who complained were pretty much told to shut up, first by loud mouth private interests and then by baton-carrying police officers. Well, the same thing happens all over the country, and whenever you hear of government planning to “clean up” an area, expect a land grab to happen soon after as the richest elements of that society then profit off of the misery of those who were told to move off their previously owned land to make way for “progress”.

What is interesting about this whole thing is that with the collapse of the housing industry, the illusion is a lot more present than it has ever been before. There is currently a huge land grab taking place all across this country, as the rich are now buying up the land that had to be cast aside by those who could no longer afford to make their payments that were too much for them to pay in the first place. It was all a house of cards waiting to fall, and someone removed the queen of spades from the bottom of the deck, and rather than have the whole thing collapse, the whole house is teetering now, just waiting to cave in on itself. Yeah, so much for an overused metaphor….

In the very near future, we should see a lot of interesting tales as the reality of what has taken place starts to make its way into the public realm. A lot of this was able to continue as long as no one ever questioned how it could keep maintaining itself, but the era of manifest destiny has been over for a very long time. There are no more trails to travel with lots of land as far as the eye can see. We reached the ocean, and ever since then there’s been the realization that expansion is over; consolidation is never as much fun or as opportunistic for all involved. Now that we’ve turned back inward on what we passed on the journey to reach the water, we’re left with the realization that there’s nowhere else for us to go, and all that is left is what we have already seen. Mix that in with the reality that ownership of land is just an illusion, and there’s a very interesting powder keg preparing itself for something. What that something is might be much more interesting as it begins to reveal itself in our future.