Ownership

Brought to you by your friends at the The Browser Company — and by every member who tested it along the way.

The founding Macintosh team had a lot of pride in what they were building. They each had their names etched into the chassis of the Mac to prove it.

The build culture of today is commonly summed up as, “move fast, break things, ship often, fix later.” Conversely, thanks to Apple, people now have an expectation of high quality and thoughtful design from the products they choose to use. This cross-roads of build culture and audience expectation can make it challenging to feel proud of what you ship and the story you tell the world as you chase a mythical convergence where it all makes sense. In this regard, it’s likely fortunate that names often aren’t attached. But if you did, you just might ship superior products. A more interesting question may be to ask those building a product, “Who wants to put their name on it?”, and actually put their names on it. You might be surprised by what you decide to ship or re-evaluate based on the response to that question.

With the beginning of the exit from mining, the colliery apartments were gradually privatized. The houses, in which several families used to live, were divided into two semi-detached houses. At some point the new owners began - each for himself - to design their property. The result was a curious mix of styles in the semi-detached house.

The "cheap" web is a solarpunk philosophy of web design.

• Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over.
• Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless.
• Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders, etc.
• Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be possible on a Wii.
• Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power.
• Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking.

RENE: Tell me what we have. Of value.

GAEL: Whatever we've bought in cargo so far. I don't know what you want me—

RENE: Anyone can buy goods. What do we really have? What do we sell?

GAEL (realizing): The route.

RENE: Yes. The navigation is our property. To copy a man's route is to steal it.

In order to properly organize, retrieve, and preserve massive amounts of data (which we all generate nowadays simply by being online) we need ways of tagging, commenting on, sorting, filtering, slicing, linking, searching, etc. A folder is static, representing one way of looking at data, but most information is useful in many contexts.

The rise of graph and database-like features in popular tools like Notion or Obsidian is a sign that the simple filesystem has failed us. And that failure has pushed us towards other solutions which require sacrificing ownership of our data.

If an average consumer wanted to organize information like they might in Notion while maintaining ownership and storing their data locally, I literally do not know of a solution that doesn’t involve administrating a database. That’s crazy, right?

Embed authorship in text while preserving its readability and portability.

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

Over the past few months, I’ve been thinking a lot about intellectual property and the underlying moral and legal issues. In blogging and tweeting about these thoughts, I’ve tended to use the word “borrow”, but at times I’ve used the word “steal” to assert the implicit moral judgment.

...In dancing around the moral and semantic differences between borrowing and stealing, I’ve been missing the greater point. Elliot used the word steal, not for its immoral connotation, but to suggest ownership. To steal something is to take possession of it.

When you steal an idea and have the time and good taste to make it your own, it grows into something different, hopefully something greater. But as you borrow more and more from other products, there’s less and less of you in the result. Less to be proud of, less to own.

TiddlyWiki is a unique non-linear notebook for capturing, organising and sharing complex information
Use it to keep your to-do list, to plan an essay or novel, or to organise your wedding. Record every thought that crosses your brain, or build a flexible and responsive website.

TiddlyWiki lets you choose where to keep your data, guaranteeing that in the decades to come you will still be able to use the notes you take today.

We are building a 1:1 scale virtual Earth that will not only allow you to play, explore and experience, but also provide you real ownership of your digital items with the freedom to trade almost anything with others for E$ and more.

A full size replication of our planet Earth where you can own your own land. Land that corresponds with the same location in our physical world and can be used to mine resources, build on, play on and more.

Related to The Management Strategy that Saved Apollo 13.

But in the podcasting world, creators can (assuming they work out the business deals necessary to do so) actually take their ball and go home, because the underlying "feed" — the special file that podcasting apps look at to know when there's a new episode — is something they can actually move over to a new system or a new host, without losing all their subscribers or followers. Indeed, this idea of having a "portable" audience is so appealing that it's even been revived in the new wave of open format-based social networks that have arisen.

This walk across private land was not unusual. Thousands of distance walkers in Britain, regularly do the same thing , which is different from what people typically do in the United States. If you wanted to walk across America, you’d have to do it on a combination of public trails and roads and you certainly couldn’t cut across Madonna’s property.

In the United Kingdom, the freedom to walk through private land is known as “the right to roam.” The movement to win this right was started in the 1930s by a rebellious group of young people who called themselves “ramblers” and spent their days working in the factories of Manchester, England.

The boundary between engineering, design, and product management is blurring. Some of us used to have a mental model in which roles and responsibilities dictated how things work—that designers do one thing and engineers do another, for example. Increasingly, more people are crossing team lines to problem solve together...Now, it’s not about who “owns” what—it’s more of a collective endeavor. And the roles have become more interlocked, and I think that’s fundamentally a good thing.

Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

He tried to deal with the concept of love as distinct from possession, and couldn't separate them...if anything could help him to understand, it was the desert.

...He followed the movement of the birds, trying to read something into it. Maybe these desert birds could explain to him the meaning of love without ownership.