Status: 75% written, kind of meandering; def needs restructuring
The virtue of ownership
Thereâs the kind of ownership that startup founders embody & idolize, which I too find very inspiring. âThink like an ownerâ. An owner is driven to superhuman lengths, energized by the prospect of working on a project, responding to every email and tweet and reddit comment, evangelizing the product at all times.
Ownership makes capitalism work. When you own a thing, you can change it, make it better. Youâre incentivized to improve it because the benefits accrue to you. A store owner cares, a hired employee cares less, and a passerby doesnât care at all.
Related to ownership: the Catholic virtue of âstewardshipâ. While everything is originally a gift from God, and everything will ultimately end up with God, in the meantime itâs up to us to make good use of these resources. The Parable of the Talents describes the master bestows each servant a large sum of money (a âtalentâ) before going off on a trip, and the servants are expected to invest that money well, not simply bury it in the ground for safekeeping.
Properties of ownership
Ownership is about exclusivity. When I own this object, it means that nobody else owns it. I can lend it or give it to others, but that choice is mine. Why is exclusivity important? Perhaps, it helps with incentive alignment, helping me care about the stewardship of the object. Perhaps, it helps others orient to this object: âoh yeah, that belongs in Austinâs roomâ.
Ownership is about coordination across time. Itâs about tracking that this objectâs orientation to its owner will remain the same. When I buy a backpack right now, that backpack is designated to be mine thereafter â I am making life more convenient for my future self.
Ownership is socially constructed. It exists as a joint shared delusion across many brains and systems.
Identity is about ownership. âAustinâ can be decomposed into things I own: my body; my money, my positions; my memories; my relationships; my tribes; my values. As far as I can tell, thereâs no piece of identity that isnât wrapped up in ownership.
Owning stuff
[todo]
Owning relationships
At this point, everyone knows that owning things doesnât bring happiness; rather, itâs relationships and experiences that matter. Weâll get to experiences in a bit; what does it mean to own a relationship?
The clearest example of this in my life is my relationship with Rachel. I feel quite possessive: Rachel is mine, is owned by me. This is such a common frame for a romantic relationship that it seems barely worth noting. But: what does it mean that Rachel is mine? That she wonât sleep with anybody else? That she has to care about my happiness and well-being? That she has to think about me every day? Every minute?
Another common turn of phrase: Ada is mine. In some sense I own her â jointly with my wife, of course. As owners, Rachel and I decide what she eats, what she learns, where she is, how she can act.
Owning experiences, owning knowledge
So for example, the point of âtravelâ is to pick up new experiences. What does it mean to own those experiences? Maybe: to be the person that is walking through this new city, tasting this new food. And later, to be the person that has the memory of that experience? I can convey this to others later, telling them stories about my travel experiences, but they and I regard the experience as exclusively âmineâ still. Why is that?
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Ownership itself is predicated on knowledge. In practice, I canât use or sell a particular thing if I donât know that I own a thing (because Iâve forgotten, or perhaps someone gifted it to me without my knowledge).
Owning projects, or: do the projects own you?
Having âa project of oneâs ownâ (cf Paul Graham) is one of the best feelings in the world. When youâre excited to get out of bed in the morning so you can start work; or find your thoughts drifting back to the project while in the shower. You and the project end up melding.
Ownership & stewardship introduce obligations. Itâs not all upside. If I want to keep owning a particular project, then Iâm on-call for issues related to that project â eg refunding customers when they complain, or restoring service when the database goes down, or writing angry defensive posts when people insinuate that my event is bad.
Ownership has limits, though
Sometimes, ambitious people I know joke about âowning galaxiesâ. I wonder: what does it mean to own a galaxy? What would it even mean to own a country? How can a single person even begin to comprehend all the things that happen across the miles and miles of land, let alone modify them, or reap the benefits of the thing?
Thereâs a Chinese saying about rule of law: âThe sky is vast, the Emperor is farâ (怩é«çćžé ). While everything is nominally under the Emperorâs jurisdiction, in practice, he is too far away and occupied with different matters, making space for local bureaucrats to actually have ownership over local matters.
Hayek understood this in âOn the use of knowledge in societyâ. Because any individual central planner is unable to know everything and own everything, markets are required, using price signals and ownership to coordinate.
Another way ownership is limited: diminishing returns to having more money, more friends, more stuff. Have you ever had the experience of buying something you thought you needed, then later opening an old cabinet at home to discover that youâd already owned a copy? In what sense, then, did you âownâ that item, that cabinet?
Or with relationships: I often feel like, with every new person I meet, Iâm invisibly forgetting somebody else. The total amount of friends I can have is fixed, zero-sum. It really dims the prospect of meeting new people
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If I were a perfect owner, Iâd see all the synergies between things, have the ability to recombine things, put things together, locate them in the right places. Even though Manifund, Mox, Manifest are âmineâ in some sense, I often feel like an insufficiently capable owner, not making obvious connections like âManifund team should have an office at Moxâ.
(This seems similar to how an LLM has ridiculous amounts of knowledge contained in its weights, yet struggles to autonomously combine knowledge to produce new insights, in the way that is required for scientific research.)
Maybe better ownership is all just bottlenecked on memory? And if I could acquire more memory, then I could truly own more stuff?
One way to route around this is to add layers. I could hire assistants who I âownâ, who then manage the stuff on my behalf. Employing people is one variant of this. This seems to work better for owning physical things (Mox) or digital things (code), and harder for
Another is to use mind-extension systems. Note-taking apps. spaced repetition software. That does require more time though.