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So, I am struggling a bit with some of the terms we use online lately, mainly with the concept of ownership. What does it even mean? Be aware, this is a bit of a stretch, and me just capturing loose thoughts.
I just read Byun-Chul Han’s book "Non-Things," and he lays out how we are moving from a world of things into a world of non-things. In the digital world, we mainly deal with non-things. Information, data, etc., are non-things, but if they are non-things, it means they do not have the properties we expect or understand from our common world around us.
Which kind of reminds me of the struggle I have with the term ownership. In Web3, ownership is a big word, and there was this amazing piece from Molly White that just explored the nuance of what we even mean by ownership online. Ownership can mean the right to sell, ownership means the right to use, ownership might mean the right to alter, ownership might mean the right to access, etc., but all those different rights or permissions are just different facets of something we call ownership. What I mean is ownership online is a loose term, a term we use to understand something, but somehow I just feel the term doesn’t really fit.
One of my favorite science fiction stories is "Flatland." To a certain degree, it might be one of the earliest science fiction works that I am aware of. "Flatland" invites us to a two-dimensional world, where we meet a square. Everyone in Flatland, as the name says, lives in this flat world; there are circles, and there are squares, and there are lines, etc. That is the world that the square is aware of. One day, though, the square is visited by a sphere that comes from a 3-dimensional world. So the square doesn’t understand his two-dimensional world anymore, because the sphere can shapeshift. Imagine a sphere slicing through a two-dimensional plane, so sometimes it's not there, sometimes it's a circle, but a circle that can change its size, sometimes it's just a dot. We immediately can visualize this; we immediately understand, of course, because we are three-dimensional beings. In the book, one day the sphere lifts the square out of his world, and suddenly the square sees the whole of Flatland as it is, a two-dimensional plane, but upon return, he would not be able to convince others, because they still lack the vocabulary.
Thinking about this made me think about ownership. When I think about the internet, sometimes I feel David Bowie was right, the internet is alien, maybe the internet is a 4-dimensional being, maybe one that is just visiting us, and we are the squares in Flatland, confused and fascinated by its shapeshifting abilities.
Why am I saying this? The more I think about the internet and what we do, I struggle to find the right words and metaphors. As designers, we love to explain and make things accessible through metaphors and analogies, and in all honesty, it often works fairly well. The Trashbin or Folder are great metaphors until they are not. The more we are online, the more the physics, the understanding of time and space we have from our outside world doesn’t translate to this inside world. There is no real physical online, proximity works differently, things can coexist, multiply, etc., it's this weird quantum dimension we try to capture online.
So when I start to think about ownership, I am stuck; sometimes I am just this square, the one that uses metaphors and analogies from my world to describe it, but the more I peek into the fourth dimension of the “internet,” they are breaking and don’t make sense.
Does our concept of ownership mean anything in a non-thing space, if digitally things don’t have any traditional properties, is a non-thing, then maybe ownership is non-existent itself too?
I entered this space as I truly believed in ideas of having ownership, but the more I traverse this multi-dimensional space, the more I try to understand how space and time are different online, and that non-things have different “metaphysical” properties, I wonder if there even is a concept of ownership or if it is something entirely else.
When I work on social networks and reputation systems lately, I started to wonder what does it really mean to own a post, what does it mean to collect this post? You don’t really own anything; all you really do is capture on our shared clock (the blockchain) that you had a relationship with that very thing, so is online ownership really just a relationship? But when I get lost in this rabbit hole, I wonder, how do I, as a designer, design for it? We lack the language around it.
A while ago, someone proposed that the concept of “chat” is a new pronoun, as in “hey chat,” how do you think about this thing? It's this different entity. I do start to wonder if it's one of our first words in our more dimensional vocabulary.
If the words and metaphors we use do not really translate for interacting with the internet, this four-dimensional alien, how do we create a shared new language then? I guess I should not rewatch "Arrival" that often.
