Matemate-ā-one literally means I will die and return to the land. But figuratively, it means I am related through all my kinfolk to you and to all your kinfolk through the land. I feel this so deeply that I am my land. I am my kinfolk. So, I reach out to you with unconditional love because we are of the same land.
Erin Matariki Carr, River Collective, Aotaeroa, NZ.
Beneath the uncertainties, the violence and incoherence of modern culture, we carry a bone-deep yearning for union between earth and sky, between body and breath, ceremony and rain. A time when all land was shared, when wealth was not measured in things. Was that ever the past? Is it a possible future? Time has increasingly brought ownership to such a point that its latest and most invasive iteration, the digital industrial complex, intrudes into our deepest sense of being. Property is the most ubiquitous representation of separation itself; the digital universe is the natural progression of property power. It now encroaches beyond boundaries we hardly sensed into our innermost sense of personhood.
Earth itself has long been an instrument of power, exclusion, and disenfranchisement. Until very recently, planetary balance was an afterthought. With extraction placing all life in planetary debt, with property-power cleansing our memory of systemic balance, the self-terminating ontology of the property system becomes an unaddressed moral hazard of a human future. In the form of deforestation alone, property is among the most significant drivers of ecological collapse. The logistics of extraction, corporate opacity, lack of accountability and containment limit every possibility of a transition to a different worldview. The elaborations of property law sanction externalities and draw boundaries around kinship, community, language, resources, and shared history. Property is an instrument of coloniality masquerading as benefit.
Having largely forgotten undivided, relational existence, and having convinced ourselves that animism is better rejected than integrated, the property regime is the emblem of our primary relationship with Earth. For centuries, culture has claimed nature as unrealized commercial potential. When humans set foot or imagination into unknown territory, real or engineered, new property has been ‘discovered.’ An instant is extracted from time. Property establishes individuality, stature, dignity, power, and privilege.
Technology has accelerated property-power. The extreme instrumentalization of Earth futures now claims impunity for doing the same to humans. Property limits participation by leapfrogging the diversity of values and voices that want to be heard in adjudicating its use. The mirage of technological neutrality is essential to the continuity of the property system, which now employs increasingly extreme measures to marginalize dissent, including, when necessary, by violence.
The objectification of the world is the original rupture. The story of the Garden, the Fall, the apple, and the serpent are ancient archetypes for the union of existence and the realization of other. If they had not already existed, the Biblical story would likely never have been written. The original claim to physical property can only be called a theft. But primordial union is not diminished by abstraction, condition, or a contrived legal justification. The current crisis is within our own psyche, beyond the reach of technology, a tension between the irrepressible impulse to restore union and to reweave a divided world that actively resists it.
Having largely poisoned the material commons, property now reduces the cognitive commons to an algorithm, creating dependencies that divert us from self-knowing. Property is the biggest bullet in duality’s gun, ricocheting as so much self-harm every time the trigger is pulled. It resists every notion of reclaiming the commons, in law, politics, and social relations. Property is a structural fault in the body of belonging. Commercial and intellectual property function as empire. Property becomes possibility management, a metaphor of propriety carrying the imprimatur of self-perpetuating inevitability surrounded and protected by libraries of law, ethics, and morality, all complex rationalizations for a dying ontology of severance. Monuments to forgetting.
Property is at the heart of every economic, political, territorial, human rights, legal, climate, and energy conversation. In each of these domains, it is the rationale for every attack on the primordial commons, the metaphysical world-as-subject. The body of nature (our nature), its genius, depth, and variety, the respiratory cycle of nature itself, is under constant assault. Whereas property should serve the collective, culture now serves property, as if the continuity of all existence is just a made-up story. Ownership may believe it can deny intrinsic union, but reality cannot be turned inside out that way.
If we are truly and irrevocably entangled with all life, then every formulation of Earth as a utility is a corruption. The Earth, in an absolute sense, is incorruptible because belonging is the structure of reality itself, already true! It is We cannot extricate ourselves from it because nature is indifferent to human mythologies. The integrity of the biosphere will always move toward balance. Ownership and now especially the extension of ownership into property futures is now the principal means of accelerating imbalance.
The purpose and value of ‘improvements’ on nature is the center of debate. Leveraging knowledge to seek unregulated use of property betrays the principle of knowledge itself, that its Platonic purpose, anamnesis, is to remember unity, not to forget it. Property is not merely rupture; it is institutionalized forgetting. But reality remains undeterred. The union of the planetary system is irrevocable and implacable. That is why blowback is inevitable. Despite centuries of domination, penetration, repression, and extraction, nature will have its say.
Recognizing the unity of the Earth system does not render us inert. Quite the contrary; we join the teeming nature of nature. Our bodies already belong to the world as unique expressions of Earth intelligence. A forest is a model of caring…the ‘wood wide web that actively cares for its community.’ Mother Trees, the most connected in a forest, already distribute resources through underground networks. A Douglas fir growing in the shade of a canopy, unable to [sufficiently] photosynthesize, is sent carbon by the mother tree through that fungal network. Not because of an algorithm or a rule, but because care is foundational to the distributed intelligence of the network. Care is not imposed. It is the living architecture. Humans have yet to crack the formula that spontaneously generates a collaborative ethic.
Counter-narratives to the property regime claim privatization is the root of economic inequality, racism, environmental destruction, and radically asymmetrical political representation. Privatization undermines the privilege of all humans to share in what a relational ontology offers. A recovery of common stewardship might bring the benefits of what collective imagination will never relinquish: trust, a shared vision, and a commitment to the welfare of the whole. At least we would have a choice.
A relational ontology does not mean individual creative expression fractures union. On the contrary, relationality is not a concept. It is intrinsic to the tensional integrity of life, the ground of perception and conceptualization! Belonging is its expression. In the field of intrinsic belonging, let all creation bloom! But let us remember that everything we are or do is sourced in the organic unfolding of Earth intelligence. The human mind can be an instrument of contraction, incrementally slicing off portions of the whole for itself, or it can be a conductor of rituals of inclusion and spacious engagement. This is why the property regime grinds toward its doom.
Creativity is an atemporal river of belonging. We all swim in it. Intellectual property wants to stop the flow. It is foundational to the economics of separability. But you can’t step into that river even once because it doesn’t stop just for you. If retaining ownership of your own thoughts has meaning, which it should, we would put limits on the capture of the cognitive commons by requiring material homage to the commons instead of just damming the river. To accomplish this, we would have to re-define the commons. The phenomenon of AI confronts us with the necessity to articulate more precisely what the commons truly is. As it stands, each of us who interacts with AI is facilitating the models to capture more and more cognitive territory, more of what they can then sell back to us.
If we defined the commons, we would not find a true boundary between soil and cognition. Cognition, intelligence, our reflective capacity, and creativity are a common inheritance, what we already belong to. If we are unable to define a boundary between the two, to determine what can and cannot be owned, then the entire logic of ownership falls apart. Either everything can be owned or everything is the commons. We’re not here to split hairs. The concept of property is that we are not truly of this Earth. Only by that logic does the partition and ownership of the commons (material and perceptual) become conceivable.
There can be no division of Earth separating a fraction from the whole. Each part is already the whole. Nor is there an individual separable from the world who could own such a parcel. We are stewards of our own consciousness just as we are of the land. For anyone to profit from ownership without reciprocation violates the truth of belonging. We are our kinfolk. This is not a mere philosophical abstraction or New Age fantasy; the frontiers of biology and quantum physics say so. From an Earth-centric view, ownership is a hallucination.
The unity and integrity of all our relations is not a plaything for private ends. The motivation to alter (develop, improve) may be intrinsic, but to do so at the expense of belonging, consent, or reciprocity is a denial of reality. The continuing human/nature duality remains the most confounding and tragic aspect of human planetary presence. We do not yet know ourselves. If we did, we could never conceive of parceling the integrity of Earth, let alone tolerate the damage it leaves in its wake.
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