i believe (the book's at home & not in front of me) it was ticketmaster david weinberger laughed at regarding a clearly (at least retrospectively) misguided lawsuit wherein the recipient of free advertising & customer traffic complained & insisted the helpful navigation-links stop at once, & when i first read cline's post, i thought "oh, isn't that quaint, the little paper makes the same big-corporation mistake." then i read dianna's post about outward gestures, & collin's encouragement that we dig a little deeper into that, & realized that somewhere in here is what i hadn't yet articulated that i was getting at with all this talk about piracy:

(this is an unordered list on purpose. i can't pull it together. but with this handful of cards, can anybody else?)

♥ there's a total confusion here about who's stealing what from whom. the complainers are upset because they're being given-to--customers, advertising, attention--not taken-from. the complainees aren't so much pirates in this picture as robin-hoods--& robin-hoods robbin' nobody & giving to the rich as well as the poor. but because what they're doing wasn't anticipated, authorized, run through the proper collection of committee-channels, it looks... roguish. dangerous. unruly.

♣ i started this intending to point out that perhaps we're just confused because of telephones: we don't give out our phone numbers, so we think at first perhaps we should guard our urls as well. but the reason we don't give out phone numbers is because we don't want to be intruded-upon by telemarketers--we don't want anything--in this example our time--taken from us. if all the telemarketers in the world stop by our websites, or visit the nervous newspaper above, or consider buying tickets from ticketmaster, not a single dinner will have to be interrupted. nothing's being taken.

♦ we don't know how to punish unruliness when nothing's actually going wrong. our default is to complain categorically, and i think maybe our categories have gotten away from us. while skateboarders crashing into little old ladies is certainly something we want to avoid, persecuting skateboarders for skating at the mall after all the little old ladies have gone home seems just... silly. but they're unruly. rogueish. they're not doing anything wrong, but they're doing something that could be wrong, & maybe that's bad enough?

♠ we're used to being gatherers, & to being very protective of who gathers near us, because we're used to countable objects. if i have three apples, & you take my three apples, i'm hungry, dammit. but if i have a pretty picture of three apples on my website, and you take it, and you share it with six thousand people, there are six thousand people with three apples on their websites & i still have my three apples. we're used to scholarship & learning & self-enrichment/enlightenment being about gathering. read this, keep these notes, make a folder for that, make sure that book is in yourcarrel & not someone else's. no one's ever asked me before--as a student, that is--it's most of what i do as a teacher--to contribute to the class by putting things out--by commenting on others' ideas, by leaving half-formed thoughts lying around to be commented on rather than hoarding them until the end of the term.

it isn't working. i'm out of cards. i mean something here, but i'll be damned if i can figure out what, at the moment.