
Mark Zuckerberg Sued Native Hawaiians for Their Own Land [video] - uladzislau
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6_RyE6XZiw
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josephpmay
Haven't watched this specific video, but from what I've read previously he's
suing so that the courts can determine who owns the land so he can fairly pay
them. Many people own tiny slices of land that they don't have any practical
use for (because of how Hawaiian land gets passed down through generations),
and Mark owns the vast majority of the island, so he's trying to fairly
compensate the remaining land owners.

Also, he apparently dropped the lawsuit after the uproar.

[https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/27/zuckerbe...](https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/27/zuckerberg-
drops-kauai-land-suits-hawaii-quiet-title/97152332/)

~~~
_jal
I'd just note that, while I'm nowhere near an expert on the topic, a big part
of the problem generally is a fundamental cultural disconnect. Native
Hawaiians had a more communal ownership model that appears to strike mainland
US culture as fundamentally illegitimate. It tends to manifest now when a
billionaire is annoyed that there's no one seller to go to when they want
their island. In the past, it was plantation owners.

This is of course nothing new; one argument for displacing mainland Native
Americans was that they didn't grok the virtues of private ownership of land.
(In reality, the rationalization never matters; in such things, might quite
literally manufactures right.)

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Native Hawaiians had a more communal ownership model that appears to strike
> mainland US culture as fundamentally illegitimate_

You're projecting agreement where there isn't any. The State of Hawai'i could
pass a law placing these lands into public trust. Hell, the current owners
could get together and do that themselves. That isn't happening because some
want to keep the land, some people want to sell, and some might want something
else, but nobody is sure who can do what with what.

> _one argument for displacing mainland Native Americans was that they didn 't
> grok the virtues of private ownership of land_

The courts, here, are trying to assign ownership to the natives. This is
strengthening their claims to their land, not diminishing it.

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khazhou
WHY do we have an economic system that allows an individual to own almost an
entire Hawaiian island, by virtue of owning majority share of an advertising
platform?? The employees certainly don’t get an island of their own, nor the
owners or workers at any vendor data centers, or the power plant workers, or
the crew that laid fiber or built the routers and wifi access points that get
FB onto your screen? This giant funnel that plows billions of dollara into the
pockets of a tiny number of people, because they have the piece of paper that
says “I own this” and everyone down the line was just ok with it.

We should not allow billionaires.

~~~
colechristensen
Remember to compare what you don't like about one system with what you
wouldn't like about the other. Socialist societies aren't without centralized
extreme power, and how you get and keep that power is arguably much worse.

You also don't need to be socialist to fix the inequality problems.

And simply, there are too many mathematical power laws in any society to
prevent the few from having a lot. The intensity is what you need to change.
It's difficult.

~~~
khazhou
Totally agree and I shouldn’t invoke socialism because that introduces a huge
number of other issues which I’m not referring to. My target is the outrageous
inequality of wealth and ownership.

~~~
colechristensen
The thing is, when you take away "ownership" in the capitalist sense, de facto
ownership and wealth still exists, just with different names.

Societies that aren't hierarchical don't really exist on any but the tiniest
scales excluding some situations where individual units are nearly self-
sufficient.

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iAMAGuest
Look while it might sound horrible of a billionaire to do so, the way the
titles work is quite difficult.

You buy the land from someone, and then 6 months down the track a relative
turns up and claims they own part of the land etc etc. So pre-empting this, it
is better to sue first than be tied up in court cases with people turning up
over the next 20 years.

~~~
wavefunction
>it is better to sue first than be tied up in court cases with people turning
up over the next 20 years.

Better for who though?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Better for who though?_

Settling land ownership disputes early and clearly is in the common interest.

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Mz
I will state upfront that I think Zuckerberg is an asshole for doing this. But
the reality is that there are a lot of problems with the way native land gets
structured legally.

Customary land accounts for 97% of land in Papua New Guinea. This is basically
tribal land. There are more than 800 languages spoken there and about 40% of
residents still support themselves in a traditional subsistence tribal
lifestyle. In some sense, it is a success in terms of protecting native
traditions.

It also means only 3% of the land can be developed. You cannot get a mortgage
if a bank cannot take possession of the land. This barrier to accessing funds
is a huge obstacle to real estate development on most tribal lands in any
country.

Papua New Guinea has terrible intractable poverty and some of the worst
domestic violence in the world. The violence there is so bad it is comparable
to violence typically only seen in war zones. Violence and poverty tend to
fuel one another. People trapped in poverty commit violence because they are
frustrated and angry. Violence both destroys resources and makes it unsafe and
unwise to try to invest money in development.

Historically, agrarian cultures and more modern cultures tend to displace
hunter gatherer societies. Hunter gatherer cultures support only very low
population levels. It takes a lot of land to feed each individual under this
model.

In order to return to a hunter gatherer model for the world, billions of
people would need to die. Modern agriculture is what makes modern life and
population levels at all feasible.

Holding the land as a group sounds like a nice ideal, but it has a really poor
track record for actually fostering some kind of high quality of (modern)
life.

I don't know what the answer is. I am some small part Cherokee. I have kind of
a romantic attachment to the idea of preserving native culture and practices.
But this particular real estate practice seems to do more harm than good.

I wish I had a brilliant answer for how to preserve native land and also
foster development. But those two things seem to be diametrically opposed and
fundamentally incompatible.

Someone who knows a good answer, pretty please step forward and tell me
otherwise. I would love to learn that I am wrong.

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NelsonMinar
Hawai'i has a different history of land title than most of the United States.
This Wikipedia article isn't great, but has the basics.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_M%C4%81hele](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_M%C4%81hele)

~~~
xupybd
I'm always unsure how to view historic land ownership. It seems a very recent
development that humanity has stopped stealing land from one another and it's
been great.

But now that we're not doing it anymore, many compare historic actions to
today's values and say they were wronged. In many sense they were wronged but
there is not a person on earths who ancestors didn't have land stolen from
them. It's only the land that was most recently stolen that causes issues.

Given the amount of time that has past and the complexities around the issue I
just don't see any solution that could be considered fair. Someone has since
purchased the stolen land and views them selves as the rightful owner but the
person that should have inherited the land also has a claim to it.

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ringaroundthetx
Yeah its almost like we need a different word than "sue" which universally has
negative connotations.

He named them in court to force a discovery process because _governance
structure_ in Hawaii has no infrastructure to track titles. Hawaii's executive
branch has no tool, and Hawaii's legislative branch isn't going to undermine
its constituents, so Hawaii's judicial branch is all that there is.

He offered them money for the land when they were able to be identified.

He did it through an LLC and some people regretted it when they found out it
was actually the "rich white man" instead of a fellow farmer like they
assumed.

Now as for tact? It was calculated and poorly executed. Analogous to when a
billionaire landlord tries to evict all the public housing tenants who are all
disenfranchised minorities "because they are renters! the law is on my side!".
Actions have consequences.

