34 Comments

Wow, I am SO excited about your book, Nia (if I may). I think of ownership and property all the time, so it's awesome to have another nerd in the club. (Or maybe I am joining your club?) Anyway, can't wait!

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Thank you! I'm excited, too, and VERY excited to meet more nerds in the club. Which is definitely not my club; everything I read has already been covered better by others, it seems. But it's a club that is really important and frankly a privilege to be a part of because these things--as you know--determine the shape of so much of our lives!

And yes, everyone calls me Nia. ☺️

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Count me in as a first subscriber. I'm grateful every time you post that I found you!

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I totally feel the same way! Wasn't it Sarah B. who brought us together? So grateful.

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Sounds like such a great book; looking forward to reading it as you write it!

re: length: speechinminutes.com tells me that 10,000 words is about 77 minutes of audio. I listen to many podcasts of this length every week. If releasing edited versions is too much effort, is an audio recording less?

re: data as commons: I’ll probably be attending dwebcamp.org in August. I’m sure the crowd there would love to learn from you and discuss these ideas.

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This looks fascinating! I don't think I could manage to organize myself down to it this year (that's right when my kids start school), but would really love to know what people are thinking and learning. The data portion is probably my weakest area and the one I'm going to have to do a lot more research on. This article was one of the better ones that helped me start thinking about data ownership: https://bostonreview.net/articles/who-owns-our-data/

but I think I also read something by Cory Doctorow about it. Will have to find it. He's so prolific it's hard to keep track!

That idea of releasing on audio is fantastic. I'm going to experiment with that. I was thinking of doing some audio in any case, maybe of my dad telling some of his own stories in his own words. Will have to learn how to edit audio!

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Looks like a good article; saved it to read later. I’m sure Cory Doctorow has written a lot about it too, haha. I can try to send along any interesting resources or links I come across while at DWeb Camp.

Glad you like the idea of trying audio! It can be a lot to figure out for sure. If you’re in the Apple ecosystem, GarageBand is free and fun. Grab a good microphone and you’re set! https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-usb-microphone/

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I am in the Apple ecosystem :) Will try! It'll take me time, but I think it's fun to incorporate different media for narrative.

Yeah, maybe further down the line we could set up an interview for some of the research you do, too. With my walking book, I really relied on people who knew what they were talking about more than I do ;)

I am in perpetual astonishment at how much content Doctorow produces. It's a lot and even though I don't read more than half of it, I don't want to shut off the firehose because there is frequently something really insightful or enlightening.

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'Malchik Time' - Productivity warping the time/space continuum.

Girl, you sure know how to fill a day!

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People say that but I think I just give a weird impression -- I always feel like I half-ass everything and am perpetually several projects behind!

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Sorry, not buying it.

I'm reading your book, nothing half-assed about it.

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I had a VERY good editor!

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Credit must be given where credit is due however, a Very good editor needs a Very good author too.

P.S. enjoyed the book.

One of my favorite passages: " The deeper we bury our fears under the dings and distractions, the further we distance ourselves from the connections that defined our evolutionary path to being Homo sapiens... And to marvel at what we are capable of when tested."

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I have to admit, with the exception of a few months here and there, the whole thing was a very joyful process. I obviously love reading piles of stuff and talking with researchers doing interesting things and then spending hours alone trying to shape narrative of it all. That's the real gift of a solid book contract -- to have the time and space to just do that. (Theoretically anyway. Not many book contracts actually provide enough of an advance to make it a reality. But it does help.)

Very kind of you to read -- thanks! Very glad you liked it :)

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This is gonna be pretty cool. Looking forward to it!

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Thank you for hanging with me!

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Well, it's like they say, I've been hangin' around this town corner.

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!

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I'm looking forward to it, Nia, and I'll be honored to be among your first subscribers.

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Thank you, Greg 🧡☺️

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Nia: "I'm thinking of doing a pai — "

Me: "Here is all of my money."

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Haha, don't try that but if you do I'll just buy you All the Burgers when we get together!

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🍽

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🍔

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Ownership sounds like an awesome meta-lens. There are so many sweeping treatments of capitalism, or ecological crisis, or colonialism, or community, or Big Tech. But this grounds all those concerns in a concrete social institution, which every reader is intimately familiar with on both the micro and macro level. It can be approached and traced empirically (as opposed to something more amorphous like, say, individualism). I'm sure there have been plenty of books touching on ownership and equally sure that none of them have come at it from the angle you would be coming at it.

I think I mentioned this once a long time ago, but you might appreciate some of Jedediah Purdy's writing (This Land Is Our Land etc.). He's more of a legal scholar and political philosopher, but some of what he talks about seems not entirely removed from what you're describing here.

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I have that book on my pile and need to read it! Or maybe it's on my list of books to order. Somehow I didn't when it came out but keep running into mention of it.

I tried to go at this (private property and the commons) from a different angle when working on the original book proposal, but it just kept *being* there, like an enormous immovable boulder. It wouldn't leave, so I figured I'd better stick with it. Yet it saturates every aspect of our lives so much, as you point out here, that it can be hard to look it straight on.

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I'm really excited about this and look forward to supporting you in your writing journey! Such a multi-faceted topic to explore.

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Thanks, Anne!

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I can’t wait for the paid version Antonia. The flawless way you contextualise big philosophical questions into real world contexts is sublime. Ownership has to me a strong colonial meta narrative which I find intriguing

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I feel the same way about your writing! It always slows me down in the best possible way.

And yes re the colonial meta narrative! I think there is a lot more of that than I even realize, and bet that I'll barely scratch the surface of my own understanding by the end of this project.

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I could not be more delighted to see the shape of all this. Can't wait. INCLUDING CHAPTER 8, HOORAY.

>>"I’d like to make sure that the content remains something to look forward to and have time to discuss"

Short chapter excerpts around a particular sub-theme? Working like more bite-sized talking points?

I'm also thinking of how Krista Tippett does the thing with episodes of the "On Being" podcast, and wondering if you could use it somehow, where there's the entire interview as an optional downloadable episode, and also the shorter, heavily edited down 'normal episode length' interview - one for the busy masses, one for the deeper-diving, fully commited folk....

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These are good ideas, too! I think I'd have to get a really good editor to help with that. It can be so hard to see your own thing from the outside but I like the idea of providing shorter versions to share, plus possibly audio.

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This is a super relevant question that no one asks - thank you...

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Thank you! As a friend put it to me when the original proposal was turned down, perhaps ownership is so fundamental to the structure of our lives and society that it's hard to see it as a proposition, much less a question.

That said, Eula Biss did recently publish a lovely essay about private property in The New Yorker that looks like it touches on many of the same themes. I wouldn't be surprised if a book comes out of it.

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