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Free Culture Satire

Complete Tools

People who see or construct the need for a market friendly name to replace “Free Screwdrivers” can look at incidental features or epiphenomena of screwdriver freedom for inspiration. Screwdrivers are a kind of tool. And restricting their use makes them functionally incomplete. So a good market friendly replacement for “Free Screwdrivers” would be “Complete Tools”.

This will cause confusions of its own. How exactly do you ensure a tool is complete, surely any tool that has been manufactured is complete when its manufacture is finished? What happens if you are using a screwdriver as a tool other than the one it is meant to be (e.g. as a lever or chisel), is it still a tool?

This will also spread confusion further into society. Artists will start using paintings as ironing boards and producing ever more elaborate gesamtkunstwerks. Activists will protest at corporations that don’t sell Swiss Army Knives. Philosophers will produce lengthy tracts attempting to combine functionalism with completeness under Lacan or set theory.

Despite all this confusion, those who abandon the Free Screwdrivers banner and brand as zealots any who fail to agree with them will not get any richer than they would have otherwise. Sadly for them, nobody wants to be associated with complete tools.

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