Legal self ownership: how would you go about owning yourself (in the eyes of the law)?

What is self ownership?

Self-ownership is a central idea in several political philosophies that emphasize individualism, such as liberalism and anarchism.
Discussion of the boundary of self with respect to ownership and responsibility has been explored by legal scholar Meir Dan-Cohen in his essays on The Value of Ownership and Responsibility and the Boundaries of the Self. The emphasis of this work is in illuminating the phenomenology of ownership and our common usage of personal pronouns to apply to both body and property; this serves as the folk basis for legal conceptions and debates about responsibility and ownership. Another view holds that labor is alienable, because it can be contracted out, thus alienating it from the self. In this view, the choice of a person to voluntarily sell oneself into slavery is also preserved by the principle of self-ownership.[1]

Right-libertarian conceptions of self-ownership extend the concept to include control of private property as part of the self. According to G. A. Cohen, "the libertarian principle of self–ownership says that each person enjoys, over himself and his powers, full and exclusive rights of control and use, and therefore owes no service or product to anyone else that he has not contracted to supply."[4]

Anarchists, left, and right libertarians all agree on the value of self ownership. Self ownership isn't just a political principle but also a legal concept serving as a foundation for other concepts to built up from. So the concept of property ownership starts with self ownership in theory as the self is the primary property. Securing the right to self ownership is at the core of all property rights protections and everything else is merely an extension from the concept of self ownership. Your body, your labor, your time, you may use as you see fit, offer services as you deem appropriate, as long as in the process you're not violating the rights of other people. This is of course at the core of many ideologies but it is also the core of how individualism works in general.

If you own yourself then would you sell shares in yourself to investors?

Atleast one person who owned himself decided to do exactly that and launched an IPO selling shares in himself. For reasons I don't quite understand, he did not maintain at least 51% control which means he's perhaps sold himself into slavery for only $1 a share?

He isn’t alone in this theory. Upstart.com, a company founded last year by Google exec David Girouard, offers a bit of capital in exchange for a cut of a college graduate’s future earnings. Other startups, like Pave and Thrust Fund, solicit investments in entrepreneurs for a return on their future ventures. (And of course David Bowie, European soccer players, and a minor-league baseball player have all sold shares of their earnings.)

But Merrill has taken it further. He felt that more people would invest in him if they knew they were going to have a say over which projects he pursued. To enable this oversight, he paid a developer 500 shares and $500 to build a website that allowed shareholders to vote on his priorities and projects. The developer also coded a trading platform so Merrill’s stock could be bought and sold after the IPO. Anybody could now get a piece of him; you just had to click a Buy button on KmikeyM.com (the site is an abbreviation of Merrill’s full name: Kenneth Michael Merrill).

Is this a good idea? On some level most people already are influenced by others and selling shares only formalizes (quantifies) that influence. On the other hand to sell 51% would mean slavery and anyone who values self ownership could never sell more than 49% of themselves under any circumstances.

Does people as product violate self ownership principles?

To the individual who seeks to be a self owned (autonomous) person then is it a violation of that goal to make oneself a product for another entity such as a corporation? If we only have the rights which we can define under the law and enforce then if the person is self owned then how can they be a product without first licensing this away? And as a result we have the nightmare terms and conditions which are written in boilerplate legalese which give companies the permission to do what they will with the information they gather. This allows the company to in a sense own the digital derivatives of the individual and in cases outside of Steemit the individual is not compensated.

Steemit is not at all perfect. While Steemit does compensate us for our works and our information in some way, we at the same time lose control of it. In a sense it is a permanent store to the blockchain which on one hand is kind of cool but on the other hand is a machine which cannot forget for better or worse.

Or do you view self ownership in a less corporate way?

What about in the personal life? Self ownership has a place there as well. A person owns themselves starting with their body. Legal consent is a necessary concept because if a person is to share their body with another individual (interpersonal sexual relations) it requires consent. While I'm not going to go into the debate as to what exactly qualifies as consent as this is extremely complicated I will say that consent is always necessary because as an individual who owns his or herself. So we can see that self ownership is also the key to consent in human interpersonal relations. Additionally people get life insurance or health insurance which again is another kind of legal method of protecting the primary property an individual owns (their own body) or in the case of life insurance to protect the interests of others who depend on them if something tragic should happen.

And the most important question, how would you go about it?

Assuming you value self ownership and understand the law how would you choose to formalize your self ownership rights? Technically securing self ownership via blockchain technology is valuable but how would you go about legally guaranteeing you can maintain this ownership indefinitely no matter how big any tech company gets or what services they might try to offer in exchange? In my opinion one of the security guarantees at least in the blockchain space is to always put the individual user above all when discussing security because individual rights are what a blockchain in the best case scenario is meant to secure. Valuing security in this way, Steemit is only as valuable to the individual as Steemit is able to secure individual rights. Bitcoin is only as valuable to the individual as it is able to secure individual rights. So at the end of the day all blockchains are a means of securing individual rights in the technical sense to an individualist who believes in individualism.

References

Davis, J. (2013). Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share. https://www.wired.com/2013/03/ipo-man/, 28.

Naffine, N. (1998). The legal Structure of Self‐Ownership: Or the Self‐Possessed Man and the Woman Possessed. Journal of Law and Society, 25(2), 193-212.