David McGavock's List: Digital Commons

• Ostrom's landmark 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, explains how these principles play out in different contexts
• The great virtue of the commons is that it can be a responsive, effective way to manage a resource in the public interest without command-and-control regulation and legalisms.
• Perhaps the most vivid example of this scenario is the Internet.
• Thanks to a shared set of non-proprietary technical protocols that let different types of computers interoperate with each other, the Internet has become the largest, most robust commons in history.
• her work clearly speaks to the ways that people can self-organize themselves to take care of resources that they care about.
• A key reason that all these Internet commons flourish is because the commoners do not have to get permission from, or make payments to, a corporate middleman. They can build what they want directly, and manage their work as they wish.
• Net neutrality is a key reason why the Internet has been so phenomenally generative. Because the Internet functions as a commons, it enables anyone to find others, strike up a collaboration and generate useful stuff without first having to pay a premium fee, raise capital or persuade a corporate gatekeeper that the idea is marketable.
• It's an idea that Elinor Ostrom has spent her career documenting: With an appropriate policy architecture, the commoners can take charge of their own problems and devise their own rules and social norms to manage their shared wealth.

6 more annotations...

• how quickly things become polarized in this era, the bad-trip bizarre extremes suggested by the Tea Party and the Palinites.
• “running obsolete code” socially
• How much of this is the bias of a binary medium, and how much of it is attributable to the biases of the people who program our technologies
• Initially “anyone can program reality” via written text,
• invention of the printing press assigns more control to those who control the means of production/replication
• In the era of mass media, there’s a sense of mainstream knowledge that’s vetted carefully by editors and publishers who share similar biases and assumptions.
• In the era of computers and the Internet, we’ve seen the evolution of a more decentralized, diverse “social” media
• How free are we from a the centralized set of biases associated with mass publishing?
• Rushkoff argues that there are biases in the way things are programmed – programmers have biases or they’re directed according to the biases of others.
• bias followed by commandment
• 1) Time: “Thou shalt not be always on.”
• 2) Distance: “Thou shalt not do from a distance what can be done better in person.”
• you have to be clear whether you’re using the technology where it’s most effective, or simply conceding to its inherent bias.
• 3) Scale – the net is biased to scale up. “Exalt the particular.” Not everything should scale. This makes me think of E.F. Schumacher’s “Small is Beautiful.”
• 4) Discrete: “You may always choose none of the above.”
• 5) Complexity. “Thou shalt never be completely right.”
• Real scholarship acknowledges, embraces, and digs into that complexity.
• 6) Anonymity. “Thou shalt not be anonymous.”
• By default, we are incomplete in an environment that is mostly textual and binary communication. In this context, it is liberating to adopt a strong sense of identity.
• 7) Contact. “Remember the humans.” Content is not king in a communications environment – CONTACT is king.
• 8) Abstraction. “As above, so below.” Text abstracted words from speech. Invention of text led to an abstract god. Also led to treating economy as if it is nature – but it’s not, it’s a game. Don’t make equivalencies between the abstracted model and the real world.

  • Reminds me of Alan Watts and his description of money in "Does it Matter"
• 9) Openness. “Thou shalt not steal.”
• We’re seeing a transitional economy where value and compensation are being redefined, and where especially the value and exchange of social capital is increasingly more relevant.
• 10) End users. Here the bias is toward making all or most of us end users rather than programmers. “Program or be programmed.”
• The user and the coder are farther apart. He argues that we should all understand programming, be able to build our own tools or configure tools other have built so that we have more control over the digital environment.

23 more annotations...