hopping rocks

I'm not sure how I feel about ownership of ideas. ideas serve to structure action, and I don't think we should be beholden to the order of publication for how we structure our actions.

what I do know though is that the society I live in has been structured on the assumption that ideas can be owned for a very long time, and has allocated social and financial resources on that basis. adjacent to – and perhaps because of this, attribution has been hoarded by particular classes of people as a resource in its own right. it wouldn't be right to decide that actually attribution doesn't matter anymore without also working to redress that lopsided distribution of resources.

at the same time, the process of generating ideas-worth-owning has been structured so that it's very hard for people outside of those groups to participate in that economy of attribution. that is to say, I'm not part of a university research group. I don't have a publisher. I'm fortunate to be able to buy myself books and have the free time to read them – but that's at least partly separate from what I do for a living, and I haven't been inducted into the rituals of citational alchemy.

all of which to say – I will do my best to point to sources where I have them, but I am not enmeshed within an ecosystem that makes me aware of things I haven't personally read, and I have no desire to reference so scrupulously as to never publish anything. I'm not deeply concerned with the novelty of the ideas here so much as their utility – and to those who have developed that utility, I'm immensely grateful.