From Ran Prieur ...

November 20. One of the repeating themes of this website is that top-down control is self-defeating, and top-down control with positive feedback is aggressively self-defeating. The elephant in the parlor, the giant control/feedback mechanism that no one sees, is the concept of "owning" something that you don't use. When someone owns something that they don't use, their attention is focused not on how to use it better, but on how to own more. If you've ever taken out a loan, the bank owned the money that you were using, and you were required to use it in such a way that the bank's realm of ownership increased. You probably live in a place that a bank or landlord owns, and you have to pay mortgage or rent, through which the owner gets richer and is able to own more. Interest and mortgage and rent are simply social customs that say, "Those who have less must give to those who have more, so that power can be concentrated and control can increase" until the whole thing becomes unstable and collapses.

That collapse has begun. The takers are now so rich, and the givers so poor, that the givers can no longer afford to pay the monthly tribute that our culture requires you to pay to merely occupy space. This appears in the physical world as more and more homeless people and abandoned houses. We have homeless people and abandoned houses because our culture is psychotic. In five or ten years, the situation will become so absurd and desperate that our individual habits of docility and submission will break down, and ordinary people will have a strange and radical thought that was completely obvious to all their ancestors from the first land animal until the first fence: the only person who "owns" a piece of land is the person who is actually occupying it. And since we all occupy land, we are all owners, and therefore we can factor out the whole concept of "owning," and just say, "we live on this land."

Right now this movement is still on the fringe. Here's a site, Homes not Jails, that advocates for squatting and "adverse possession," which is the last legal shred of the traditional custom that land belongs to whoever is able to respectfully live there.