Yes, that sounds like a good deep intuition of a statement. The method is the goal, the medium is the message. Like a any graphic cursor that uses an inverted field is a XOR cursor.
Ever since Autodesk had to pay $25,000 to "license" a patent which claimed the invention of XOR-draw for screen cursors (the patent was filed years after everybody in computer graphics was already using that trick), at the risk of delaying or cancelling our Initial Public Offering in 1985, I've been convinced that software patents are not only a terrible idea, but one of the principal threats to the software industry. As I write this introduction in 1993, the multimedia industry is shuddering at the prospect of paying royalties on every product they make, because a small company in California has obtained an absurdly broad patent on concepts that were widely discussed and implemented experimentally more than 20 years earlier.Such patents are inherently Marxist, by that I mean using imaginary property in way that is incredibly destructive to real private property, and doing so despotically. The most vicious and unprincipled wins.
Patent Nonsense, John Walker, May 10th, 1993
The big eat the small, and the small have no protection.
A patent must be novel, inobvious and useful.
This clearly failed two of the three...
“Yes, that sounds like a good deep intuition of a statement. The method is the goal, the medium is the message.”
Too bad they can’t be as oh so clever as you: “Such patents are inherently Marxist, by that I mean using imaginary property in way that is incredibly destructive to real private property.” Talk about psuedo-intellectual gobbledygook (and gratuitous name-dropping, to boot).
“imaginary property”
This is something that sticks in my craw, so I’ll zero in on it. What property isn’t “imaginary”? Real, material, physical, tactile stuff, I’d guess you say. Well, leaving aside for the moment all the immaterial things you can own without which there’d be no civilization, let’s take it as given that you can only own physical things. Does that somehow make property less imaginary? Hell no.
Property is about the relationship between you and your things. Not the physical relationship, either. If it were, we wouldn’t need the law, as Might would determine ownership. Your car, your land, your whatever would cease to be yours once you weren’t touching it. But that’s not the case. Property exists because we imagine it to be yours even when you’re not in possession of it.
In summation, all property is imaginary.