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You may already have heard of the
Tree That Owns Itself.

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It's had a Wikipedia article since 2006.

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There are lots of news articles about it,

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and a Tumblr post that has, as I record this,
more than 800,000 notes.

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Not views, notes.

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And there are already a lot of YouTube videos
about this.

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Someone visits this tree in Athens, Georgia,

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and tells the story of how a local landowner
with fond childhood memories

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wrote a legal document bestowing
the tree's ownership onto itself

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sometime in the early 19th century.

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And then, they'll go into a discourse
about how, under the actual law,

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there's no legal basis for that
so the ownership is unclear.

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And then they'll talk about how everyone just
agrees to behave like it is the law,

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even though this oak tree isn't even actually
the same tree?

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The original one fell in the 1940s
and was replaced.

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And finally, they'll talk about how all law

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is ultimately based on the
social contract that each of us follows.

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What they don't talk about is
the other tree that owns itself,

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which is about 200 miles that way.

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In the city of Eufaula, just over
the border into Alabama,

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there is another oak tree
with a nearly-identical story.

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It was a city landmark.

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The local council bestowed
the tree's ownership onto itself,

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and everyone just rolled with it.

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And when the tree eventually fell in a storm,
a new one was put here,

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and everyone just agreed that it
counted as the same tree.

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But this tree does not have a Wikipedia article.

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It isn't even referenced on the
other tree's article,

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at least not as I record this.
There aren't dozens of YouTube videos about it.

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Information about this tree has been buried
under all the search results and news articles

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dedicated to the tree over in Georgia.

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For some reason,
that one has better publicity.

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Maybe it's because that one was first,
by about a century,

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but given that both of them were deeded decades
before the internet,

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I'm not sure that's
too much of an advantage.

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More likely, it's the same reason that many
different ideas take off while others don't:

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it's all about who you know.

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The tree in Georgia is in a big college town,
home to the University of Georgia,

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and home to students who will arrive from
out of town, learn the story, and then leave.

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Eufaula, here? While it's a really pretty city,

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it has a fraction of the population and no
big reason for out-of-towners to visit.

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Stories don't tend to spread
as well from places like this.

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Heck, maybe there are other trees out there in other
small towns where the same thing's happened,

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but I couldn't find any references to them under all
the noise made by the one that everyone noticed.

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If you want a metaphor for how success on
the internet and, heck, anywhere works,

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then these trees are it:

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it's not always about
how good your story is.

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It's about how many people are
willing and able to pass it on.