own.

The institute of owning remained a major — but gradually weakening — social regulator for most of history; now (“decidedly past its prime”) the only mode of own still active is that in “owning a pet”: accepting a responsibility for an entity, consciously enloving it, doing what you can to “help it be.” Owning is fuzzy, divisible (a scale from “strongly own” to “have a tiniest own” in something), not even contingent on ones will — you may end up an owner without your explicit volition; extremest cases of own are weak by the norms of the past, with uninvited volunteering, partition of responsibilities (gardening, museuming) transparently natural; a primary owner may have something of a final say but few would go against a clear outside consensus.  ■    Smaller-than-human-scale tangibles are rarely owned as such: compiled, they are as infinitely shareable as poems; nor is owning applicable to things that cant be fully reowned to someone else, like your home or your arf. This leaves a narrow class of ownables — “rudiments of the traditional own” that are popular but hard to reproduce (cant “go grow one for yourself”): mostly historic or natural artifacts, ownables work so long as their catalog is limited and public; with bigger or better known ones, ownership easily collectivizes — from a museum exhibit in the owners home to a historic site that, at best, can be rented for rituals or conventions. ■    Ownership disputes, as much as possible, are resolved by voluntary concessions — or by a coin toss. Land, as sea has always been, is everyones to whiz by or intake up close — but a gardening or settling claim is decided by a weighted consensus of neighbors and superarea owners, so deadlocked lots where key players block status change arent uncommon; uniquely attractive places (shores, other window sills) are maintained, collectively, as public parklands but closed for permanent settling. Claims on a contested ownable such as a castle tend to root in history and lore: whoever has the most complexity (childhood memories, love, art) out of something owns it almost by definition; for a potentially exfringing chunk of public resources (land, space, energy for a science or art project) an ad-hoc board weighs the merits against the impacts, with the claimants will “critical to the point of playing money.”

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