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"If Planet Earth is to survive in the coming decades as we know it, we must find new ways to protect our planet from the unsustainable growth imperatives of neoliberal economics and politics. This will require a new architecture of “green governance”―laws, public policies, and social practices that can honor human rights and commons-based management of natural resources large and small"
"The LiquidFeedback mission statement concludes, “All the experience we have gained over the past months shows people participate if they think it makes sense and representatives at least acknowledge the will of the participants rather than arguing with silent majorities.” It concludes with a ringing line from Thomas Jefferson: … every man is a sharer… and feels that he is a participator in the government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day.” "
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Commons are not simply resources we share—conceptualizing the commons involves three things at the same time. First, all commons involve some sort of common pool of resources, understood as non-commodified means of fulfilling peoples needs. Second, the commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities—this of course is a very problematic term and topic, but nonetheless we have to think about it. Communities are sets of commoners who share these resources and who define for themselves the rules according to which they are accessed and used. Communities, however, do not necessarily have to be bound to a locality, they could also operate through translocal spaces. They also need not be understood as “homogeneous” in their cultural and material features. In addition to these two elements—the pool of resources and the set of communities—the third and most important element in terms of conceptualizing the commons is the verb “to common”—the social process that creates and reproduces the commons.
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The identification of “new enclosures” in contemporary capitalist dynamics urged us to reconsider traditional Marxist discourse on this point. What the Marxist literature failed to understand is that primitive accumulation is a continuous process of capitalist development that is also necessary for the preservation of advanced forms of capitalism for two reasons. Firstly, because capital seeks boundless expansion, and therefore always needs new spheres and dimensions of life to turn into commodities. Secondly, because social conflict is at the heart of capitalist processes—this means that people do reconstitute commons anew, and they do it all the time. These commons help to re-weave the social fabric threatened by previous phases of deep commodification and at the same time provide potential new ground for the next phase of enclosures.
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"As part of a workshop on Creative Commons, I'm doing a short presentation on Open Data and The Panton Principles this week to various members of our staff. I thought I'd share some of the resources I've consulted during my preparations. I'm using textmining of journal articles as a example so I'm including a few resources along those lines as well."
"So what does a hunting economy have to say about our times?
Bowles proposes that the Internet has created all sorts of digital resources that are as fugitive and difficult to own as wild game on the hoof. No one can really make a software program all by themselves (it takes a lot of people to make one), and it is difficult to own software privately (because it is so easily copied and therefore very expensive to “fence in” as private property). "
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The question for our time, Bowles proposed: “Is software application more like a kudu or a cow?” Meaning, can software really be practically owned, like a cow? Or does it just make more sense for it to be shared, like a kudu?
Bowles speculates that technological advances (such as software and other digital innovations) and new types of “between-group competition” can over time make new types of property rights regimes more attractive. Strict private property rights may not make as much sense if software and social networking websites and other online information resources resembles kudu.
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So what sorts of governance systems emerge in the simulations?
Bowles found that if property rights are well defined, then the “bourgeois” faction will prevail and become an “evolutionary stable strategy,” meaning it will resists displacement by other approaches. Moreover, the winning group (of bourgeois individuals) will then provide the cultural model that losing agents will emulate. However, if property rights become ambiguous – perhaps because new technologies make them more problematic – then the “civics” can feasibly ally with the “sharers” to become the default equilibrium strategy.
Based on his simulations, Bowles found that communities can handle ambiguities of property rights more readily than state- and market-based systems, but they tend not to prevail when there are already inequalities among people. Interestingly, the digital economy creates both – substantial ambiguity and contestability about property rights (think digital music, film and text), but also high levels of inequality (because in networked economies, dominant players enjoy strong feedback loops and benefit from winner-take-all dynamics).
"When we discuss economies of abundance in the digital age, we’re assuming the low-cost production of very large finitudes. Plastic is this kind of thing, it’s the least expensive physical simile for a large range of objects. It also has the strange quality of sometimes having a lifespan that is five or six times that of an ordinary human. In this ecological age where we are newly surrounded by economies of abundance, what shall we do with our infinities? We can no longer send them away when we’ve annihilated distance through technology. The plastic as “plastic” waves to us from the gyres in the ocean. It will swirl there for our children and our children’s children. What ever shall we do with our infinities?"
"Sharing and community seem to be attributes of a positive morality. When we see the commercialization of these qualities, we believe their moral quality suffers. We react to the commercialization of Christmas by attempting to retrieve what we imagine is an historical original experience. We react to the automation of sharing and community by Facebook by turning off our connected devices and attempting a direct connection without digital mediation.
Bad people are greedy, they aren’t willing to share. They don’t form cooperative communities where resources are shared to the benefit of the whole group. To some extent, this is how we determine who is bad and who is good. What would it mean if “sharing and community” were detached from our ideas about positive morality. Both movies and murder are better with community and sharing. Perhaps we should stop for a moment and ask: what’s the meaning of the word “better” in the previous sentence?"
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In the first article, titled “Traveling Light in a Time of Digital Thievery“, Nicole Perlroth writes about the travel routine of Kenneth G. Liberthal of the Brookings Institute. When he travels to China he makes very strong assumptions about the agency of the Network in that locality. Here’s Perlroth’s description of his protocol:
He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns.
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The second article is by Michael Wilson and is called “In a Mailbox: A Shared Gun, Just for the Asking.” Police forensics labs are finding more and more ballistics matches for “community guns.” A single gun is used by many different criminals in many different crimes.
"While networked computational tools can assist us in expanding the scope and breadth of the sharing we do with groups and individuals, it’s our ability to navigate the new social customs and ceremonies of the Network that will determine how far all this spreads. It’s a counter-cultural idea, instead of placing the highest value on independence and individuality, it takes us down the path of interdependence and coexistence. And this brings us back to this idea of a growth medium. As the old year ends, and the new one begins, I’m imagining an as yet unpublished Whole Earth Catalog filled with tools and perspectives on how we might grow this new crop in the fields of the Network. It’s a thing that “is” what it describes."
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When you look at the imposition of the real-time social media model on to the corporate enterprise, you’ll see the same model. The valuable patterns are reserved for management. The corporate enterprise will spend a lot of money attempting to absorb this new model of television in the coming year. It will allow each corporation to become its own media company. It should be noted that a person is not ‘social’ when using corporate social media behind a firewall. An employee is a human resource to be profitably deployed, not a person. The idea isn’t to empower people, it’s to provide data to management. The pattern data belongs to the central management structure and it will be used to create and refine the workings of a well-oiled machine–of which the employee will be a replaceable part. The entire benefit accrues to the survival, growth and sustainability of the corporation, not to the individual person. Can you imagine a social media revolution within a corporation that drives the current C-level executives from power? The power structure within the corporate enterprise will use the system to maintain and refine their power, all the while, selling the use of the system as a democratization. For instance, it’s unlikely that unions would be allowed to use a real-time corporate social media system to organize workers and collect violations of work rules.
"As Morton points out, in the age of ecology there is no clean transaction you can walk away from. The fact that everything is connected isn’t something you can turn off when it’s inconvenient. There’s always something still owed, a remaining debt. Morton describes this as the viscous quality of the hyperobject, the more you know about it the more it sticks to you. And as Graeber shows, capital fails to capture the full extent of a transaction because it doesn’t fully represent the object. In the social context of the transaction, there’s always a remainder, the market never fully clears. At the level of capital and pricing, the numbers always add up, but the object of the transaction is broadcasting on multiple frequencies. And if you hold the concept of capital in abeyance for just a moment, you’ll find there were many more parties to the transaction than you had assumed, and if you listen closely, you can hear that the non-human has continued its relationship with you. "
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One of the laugh lines in Morton’s talk is “anything you can do I can do meta.” The idea behind this quip is to characterize the move to “undermine,” or in Graham Harman’s phrase, to “overmine” an opponent’s position. Either some atom is the basic building block to which all things can be reduced; or some system is the foundation from which all things extend. Generally what is taught in the Academy are the particulars around these atoms and systems. In his talk, Morton reviews the historical progression of these “particulars” in an effort to get to the present ecological moment. The strange thing about Morton’s talk is that he’s not trying to lay out a new complex conceptual framework that wraps up everything that precedes it. Instead he brings up a series of examples of the rift between appearance and essence—the remainder that each of these conceptual transactions always generates as it tries to snugly fit around the contours of the real. For students trained in memorizing and recapitulating particulars, the process of discarding conceptual frameworks to see more clearly must seem counter intuitive. In a line of thought that operates in a space without a center or edges, sometimes it’s difficult to know when it’s arrived at it’s topic. And further, once there, what is the listener meant to take away? What kind of transaction is this?
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He really ought to know that even with the protection of tenure and considerable autonomy, most faculty in most higher education put in long hours because they believe in their profession. So what’s going on here?
I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy.
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What’s lost? Well, in a word, quality and individual attention except for the precious few that can pay for the full luxury version of such services. The rich still had their suits tailored at Savile Row after everyone else was buying a mass-produced shirt. But in this case, those values might be more precious and important to the larger human missions of education, medicine, psychiatric treatment, auditing and so on. That’s really what you lose: the sense of vocation, of calling, of dedication to something bigger. The new publics of liberal democracy understood that education, medicine, law, accounting and so on were important to their resilience and thriving in a way that artisanal consumer products were not.
"By losing the free and open Internet, and free and open devices to interact with it — and even such ordinary things as physical books and music media — we reduce the full scope of both markets and civilization.
But that’s hard to see when the walled gardens are so rich with short-term benefits."
"In one of our workshops, participants hit upon the idea of colonization as a way to describe how we became separated from the commons. Our culture is saturated in the market paradigm. The concepts of consumer, ownership, private, worth, and profit define how we think about ourselves, our relationship to each other and everything we encounter. It displaces all other ways of making connections and finding meaning. "
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