The Collapse of Ownership

Chapter 5 ended on a question that the next stage of this argument cannot avoid. If something can act in ways that produce value, adapt, and surprise the people who set it in motion, can anyone truly own it? That question was philosophical in Chapter 5. It becomes practical in Chapter 6. Ownership has always been more than a legal claim. It is one of humanity's oldest and most quietly effective inventions, a compression algorithm for the messy question that sits behind every complex system: who is responsible for this? When the systems we build can act, that compression begins to fail.