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why didn’t Tim Berners-Lee patent the web? 
not all economic models are obvious ones > internet has a ‘californian-hippy-culture-free-information structure’, share freely, no intellectual property , Berners-Lee supports this > gift economy (freely donate stuff without assumption of return) > nobody owns the patent to HTML
example of ‘manners’ > you can’t patent a social protocol

We’re used to the idea of the internet being characterised as a democratic, open, non-hierarchical technology and space: is Galloway arguing something that fundamentally challenges this?
the internet is a distributed network where the nodes can interact with eachother despite how far away they might be

protocols etc > how does this relate to the internet?
– virtual and the actual (anything has before it a set of futures, only some virtual futures will come to be and become the actual> the virtual is ‘true’ but the actual is ‘real’)
– expanding possibilities that are very ‘true’ but only some of them will become ‘real’ or actualised > we can’t know which will come to be and what will happen

databases and narratives > Cowbird > create an account, contribute a story (photograph and page of text) > database form for narrative (collects or lists ‘stories’ according to their subject matter, eg. ‘sunrise’) > links things according to place, age, user, subject
narratives are intentional cause and effect sequences> a list is not a narrative
databases separate our content from presentation