One of the “givens” that I pretty much have come to accept as normal is the belief that if you bought something, you owned it. If you bought a pair of shoes, it was yours and you could do what ever you wanted with it. If you bought a pack of cigarettes, you could smoke them or throw them away. It was your possession and you could do what you wanted with it. Unfortunately, this is no longer true in the United States.

It all began with housing. The days of full-ownership of a house in America are long, long over. And I am not talking about a mortgage either. I am talking about taxes, and regulations, and fees and requirements. If you have to ask permission, then you don’t own it. If you have to pay more money on it, you don’t own it. If someone can change it or alter it without your permission you don’t own it.

Ownership is the bedrock of freedom.

Unfortunately it no longer exists in the United States.

And what is much sadder is that all Americans don’t realize this loss; this loss in the ability to own things, and to use them as you feel fit. They see it as normal. “Of course, you need to ask the local Home Owners Association permission to remodel your house.” “Of course, you cannot smoke cigarettes in a restaurant, or on the street or in a park…” “Of course, you need to pay the upgrade fee on your software program. You don’t really own it, don’t you know.”

This encroachment is sickening to me.

People! If you cannot own things, you are not free. Do you know who else cannot own things?

Slaves.

That’s who.

Back in the day, I had a library of books. No, I am not exaggerating. I had my walls plastered floor to ceiling with books, and my entire house was cluttered with my tomes and books. I loved those things, and I lost them. This story of how they came to disappear is noteworthy in-itself, but, let’s not get sidetracked. With the advent of computerized software, you can have entire libraries that can fit inside an object no bigger than the palm of your hand. Great huh?

Maybe not so.

I once had a iPod with perhaps 10,000 songs on it. I had collected music from all over the internet, mostly “Limewire”, but I also used other services. Then one day, the system reset for a software update. It erased my entire collection! Why? Why in God’s name did this happen?

I will tell you why.

I did not buy the songs from iTunes. (Which is the monopoly that Apple has constructed around it’s iPod platform.)

Was the iPod my property?

Apparently not.

Now the purist might say that I needed to read the fine print in my purchaser’s agreement. And to that I must counter… with this…

You do not own anything that requires that you read “fine print” that defines how you must use that object.

Ah. Let that sink in.

Remember that personal ownership is a fundamental pillar of freedom. If you cannot own things, free and clear, you are just renting them on loan.

And it’s not just me speaking. The United States government and the courts have reinforced this belief. You don’t own much of anything. In fact, it is even against the law to collect rainwater! I mean there is something seriously wrong if you cannot own the rain that falls on you from the skies above.

Let’s talk about books.

Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar

“The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine,” Doctorow said. 

This is a reprint of the great article titled “Paper Books Can’t Be Shut Off from Afar”. Published on Jun 30, 2019 12:00PM EDT Maria Bustillos. All credit to the author.

Private ownership—in particular the private ownership of books, software, music and other cultural information—is the linchpin of a free society. Having many copies of works of art, music and literature distributed widely (e.g., many copies of the same book among many private owners, or many copies of the same audio files, torrents or blockchain ledger entries on many private computers) protects a culture against corruption and censorship. Decentralization strategies like these help to preserve press freedom, and individual freedom. The widespread private ownership of cultural artifacts guarantees civil liberties, and draws people into their culture immanently, persistently, giving it life and power.

Cory Doctorow’s comment on Friday at BoingBoing regarding private ownership of books is well worth reading; he wrote it because Microsoft is shutting down its e-books service, and all the DRM books people bought from them will thus vanish into thin air. Microsoft will provide refunds to those affected, but that isn’t remotely the point. The point is that all their users’ books are to be shut off with a single poof! on Microsoft’s say-so. That is a button that nobody, no corporation and no government agency, should be ever permitted to have.

“The idea that the books I buy can be relegated to some kind of fucking software license is the most grotesque and awful thing I can imagine,” Doctorow said.

At this very moment, governments are forbidding millions of people, Chinese people, Cubans, Belarusians and Egyptians and Hungarians and many, many others all over this world, from reading whatever they want.

So if there is to be a fear of the increasing adoption of e-books such as those offered by Microsoft, and to a far greater degree, Amazon, that’s by far the scariest thing about it. Because if you were to keep all your books in a remotely controlled place, some villain really could come along one day and pretty much flip the switch and take them all away — and not just yours but everyone’s, all at once. What if we had some species of Trump deciding to take action against the despicable, dangerous pointy-heads he is forever railing against?

Boom! Nothing left to read but The Art of the Deal.

I don’t intend on shutting up about this ever, and I’m sure Doctorow won’t either, bless him.

---

In 2010, techno-utopianism was in full swing, with e.g. Nick Negroponte going around saying that physical books would be mass-produced for only maybe another five years (yeah, sorry guy). His reasoning seems to have had something to do with the fact that books are hard to send to Africa.

Anyway my husband gave me a Kindle for my birthday that year, and I loved it a lot. Thousands and thousands of books fit on this pretty, if potentially sinister, little machine. I’d just go over to Project Gutenberg and vacuum stuff up every which way, because I have no literary discernment whatsoever and will gladly spend the afternoon reading Agatha Christie or really, literally almost anything.

Project Gutenberg is now up to more than 59,500 free e-books, all out of copyright and so classics, mostly. And no need to feel the least bit guilty as you might even at a thrift shop, where whatever you buy, it’s going to take up room on bookshelves that you know you don’t have; these books took up no extra room at all.

I bet you will be surprised to hear when Project Gutenberg first started. 1971 (!) is the true answer, and could they ever destroy every Final Jeopardy contestant with that one, I bet.

Its founder, Michael Hart, was a most unusual and interesting man. The ultimate anti-corporatist. Like Yoda, Mr. Hart doesn’t appear to have possessed much glamour or power on the outside, but he was brimming with these and other virtues on the inside.

He didn’t care two pins about money, wouldn’t take a salary for years and years, and acquired the few bits of stuff he seemed to need at garage sales.

In the 1970s, nobody knew that computers would eventually be used for the mass storage of culture. It hadn’t occurred to anyone yet that the computer would be useful for anything aside from just computation. It was so shockingly, incredibly good at that! There was such a lot of computation that needed doing, so computation was first in line.

Now it is clear as day that whoever controls computer storage will effectively control the media commons.

There are a lot of champions in this fight, but Michael Hart saw it all coming about half a century ago and started typing his fool head off, dozens and dozens of whole books, long before OCR was a gleam in a programmer’s eye.

Hart did more to secure the future of the public domain than anyone else in the world, I believe. Project Gutenberg’s widely distributed books cannot be taken away—and when they’re downloaded and stored on private devices and media, it’s like insurance for Western Civ.

My first few times on Project Gutenberg I downloaded a lot of rare early Wodehouse (highly recommended: The Swoop! or, How Clarence Saved England) and also a lot of Thackeray, Gibbon, pretty much all of Mrs. Gaskell and, just by accident, Émile Gaboriau’s La Vie Infernale — the fruitiest, most marvelous 19th-c. French melodrama (in two parts: The Count’s Millions and Baron Trigault’s Vengeance. I just love those.) Plus Shakespeare and the King James Bible and that sort of stuff.

I am no fan of Amazon, and even back then I resisted spending money there, but I did buy an e-book copy of Infinite Jest, which is far and away my favorite modern novel.

A few days later, I was having a little dispute with my husband over whether or not Wallace misuses the word “ilk” in that book, which with the Kindle’s search feature took about twenty seconds to settle (A: not really; the solecism appears just once, in the quoted speech of Madame Psychosis.)

It’s all thrillingly searchable, and browsable, plus once you get a book on your Kindle (or Nook, or equiv.) you can highlight things and also make your own notes. By now scholars, researchers, historians and journalists will want both a searchable ebook copy and a paper copy, I would think, of anything they’re really interested in.

I also learned that having an e-reader meant that one might quite easily wind up buying more books than before, if anything, because the getting of books was on one’s mind more.

So all that is the upside of owning e-books.

But my Fahrenheit-451-paranoia was fanned into a giant flaming ball of fear-napalm when I looked into the personal ownership of the files and books on my own Kindle. And things have only gotten a lot worse since then.

Almost exactly ten years ago, you may remember, Amazon came stealthily along and deleted e-copies of 1984 (no seriously, they did) and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles — copies they’d already paid for and downloaded — because it turned out that there was a rights problem with the e-publisher.

Jeff Bezos wound up apologizing all over himself and taking it all back and promising never to do that ever again, but the fact remains that Amazon has some kind of access to your Kindle files and can literally remove them, if they feel like it, which is downright creepy, and if it were your computer you would not like it one little bit.

Having learned this, I went along and had a closer look at the then-current Kindle License Agreement.

There was some simply petrifying stuff on there. For starters, then as now, you don’t “own” Kindle books, you’re basically renting them. (“Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider.”)

Amazon’s current terms of use now specify explicitly that they can look over your shoulder while you read. Check this out!

Information Provided to Amazon. The Kindle Application will provide Amazon with information about use of your Kindle Application and its interaction with Kindle Content and the Service (such as last page read, content archiving, available memory, up-time, log files, and signal strength).

They can change the software on you whenever they like, or just shut it down completely, without so much as a by your leave:

Changes to Service; Amendments. We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, including adding or removing Subscription Content from a Service, at any time without notice.

That is how a totalitarian state might go about confiscating books, if they wanted to. There is nothing in this agreement to stop Amazon from modifying the Kindle software to make it impossible for you to read any of your own files on the device.

Such a step is not forbidden to Amazon by this agreement; they are under no apparent obligation to protect any data you might be storing. That’s not to say that there aren’t laws, at least in some states, that might allow you to sue for damages; I don’t know. I’m just saying, this agreement doesn’t require Amazon to protect your data.

A bad government could just grab the controls from them and have at it.

Changes to Service; Amendments.We may change, suspend, or discontinue the Service, in whole or in part, including adding or removing Subscription Content from a Service, at any time without notice. We may amend any of this Agreement’s terms at our sole discretion by posting the revised terms on the Amazon.com website.

Or they might decide to shut just your account down:

Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Service, and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service without refund of any fees.

Keep in mind these are your books that you bought or collected. Can you imagine a bookseller or publisher asserting rights over the contents of your bookshelves in your house? That’s basically what we’re talking about, here.

After reading all this back in 2010, I rang the (excellent, and very polite) Kindle customer service up to learn more, especially about privacy issues. One thing I wanted to know was exactly how much access Amazon had to my private, personal Kindle files (such as .txt and .pdf files that I’d made myself.) But after being bumped up through a couple of layers of supervisors, I didn’t get very clear answers. For instance, on the question of Amazon’s remote access to my personal stuff. “We don’t have access to your files,” I was first told. But can you see my personal files? And if you wanted to delete my personal files, as was done with the Orwell books, could you do it?

“We don’t do that.”

Eight or nine years down the road, we can be pretty sure that if a tech behemoth suddenly feels like doing something horrible, they just will do it. Please buy paper books.

---

A portion of this piece appeared in somewhat different form in 2010 at The Awl.

Conclusion

I used to have an account on Tumblr. I enjoyed it for the strange and beautiful pictures that I would collect there, and when people started to use it to distribute some high quality porn, I collected those images as well. I really liked that webpage and social network.

Then it was bought up or sold to Yahoo!. Every assurance was made that promised that nothing would ever change and that the private collections of pictures would remain intact.

Then came the war on porn. Yahoo! suddenly, yes after saying that they wouldn’t, decided to wholesale delete images, accounts, data and histories. And all my lovely photos about America in the 1930’s, pictures of military conflicts, fantastic and unusual works of art, and yes my on-line porn collection was vaporized in a nanosecond.

Foolish me.

I believed that when a company promised to do something that they would at least try to keep their word.

Three years ago, was my twenty year anniversary of my membership on the Free Republic website. Over the twenty years that I was a member I was one of the most prolific posters with over 10,000 articles that I had posted (and which readied me for the role that this Metallicman venue provides). And then, one of my articles did not meet the desires of one of their censors, and without notice, and any kind of appreciation they deleted my entire account. Jim Robinson probably didn’t have any idea that they did it. But there it was. All my FR contacts, my notes, my articles (no backups either) and my opinions and comments, all deleted.

Poof.

Gone.

Look. I get it. I’m a “big boy”. I should have known better than to put my trust and faith in others. I should have made complete hard-paper backups, and had electronic versions in portable storage media. I was naive.

And when I was “retired” and saw what happened to my life, my possessions and my histories, I saw that I was a “big nothing”. I only existed at the pleasure of others. I only lived in whatever lifestyle that I could scrounge up at the pleasure of others, and what I owned, down to my underwear was all at the mercy of what others might decide to do.

The only way to change this course that the United States is on is to terminate it’s existence catastrophically. It needs to be sudden, and abrupt and a replacement government needs to take it’s place. This sounds so awful, but it need not be.

I advocate that the Federal government be abolished. And the individual states regain their original roles, and maintain their original existence as it was initially intended prior to 1776.

We can let the individual citizens of any given state decide what limits that they want to place on the ownership of property. Not those in California, or Washington DC. And people would no longer be citizens of the United States of America, but would be the sovereign citizen of Pennsylvania, or of Maryland, or of Colorado, or of Wyoming.

The sovereign citizen movement is a loose grouping of American litigants, commentators, tax protesters, and financial-scheme promoters. 

Self-described "sovereign citizens" see themselves as answerable only to their particular interpretations of the common law and as not subject to any government statutes or proceedings. 

In the United States, they do not recognize U.S. currency and maintain that they are "free of any legal constraints". They especially reject most forms of taxation as illegitimate. 

Participants in the movement argue this concept in opposition to the idea of "federal citizens", who, they say, have unknowingly forfeited their rights by accepting some aspect of federal law. The doctrines of the movement resemble those of the freemen on the land movement more commonly found in the Commonwealth, such as Australia and Canada.

-Wikipedia

So says Wikipedia.

For now.

Then they will arbitrarily change it yet again.

But, you know, it’s so easy to be misunderstood. And for me, it’s better not to “fight city hall”, or “beat a dead horse”. You live life to the best of your ability, and if you find that you are not able to live life to your satisfaction then you “move to greener pastures”.

Which is what I did.

I live in China, and I do own my houses. I don’t rent them. I don’t have mortgages on them. I never pay taxes on them, and I am not subject to any rules or regulations regarding them. Nor do I need to ask permission to renovate them.

That is what freedom is.

Stop.

Take a realistic appraisal of what you really own. Do not include anything that requires payments, fees, regulations that you must abide by, or that is subject to inspections, or random investigations. If you are an American you will discover that you actually own very little.

You own, functionally, just about the same as what a Roman slave would own.

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