David Bollier

The recent political struggles between Hollywood and networked culture underscore a profoundly disruptive fact:  exclusive ownership rights are no longer as valuable as they once were.  What really matters is the flow.  Increasingly, knowledge and other intangible things are more valuable when they can circulate -- when they can be freely copied, shared and modified via open platforms.

Finally, we have a big, meaty book that takes on this issue. Open Design Now:  Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive offers lots of specific stories and penetrating analysis by leading practitioners of “open creativity.”  The book will make heads explode in certain executive suites around the world, but it will also inspire talented artists and amateurs to enter the exciting world of co-creation and social design. The stories show that online collaboration is not just for software; it’s a larger, more powerful force that now designs and builds cars, mobile phones, furniture, images, computer hardware, and much, much else.

Open Design Now was produced by three Dutch organizations – Creative Commons Netherlands; Premsela, “the Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion”; and the Waag Society, a foundation that “develops creative technology for social innovation.”  Not surprisingly, the book has a bold, sleek, attractive design for its 18 essays, 21 brief case studies, and a “visual index” showing dozens of innovative trends in design.  

While a great many commons seek to develop alternatives to conventional businesses – and even to bypass markets altogether – the struggle to democratize capital should not be lost in the shuffle. Popular ownership of capital assets and business enterprises is still a great strategy for building the commons and advancing the public good. Fortunately, there's a growing enthusiasm for this approach.

One of the most eloquent advocates for socially friendly forms of capital ownership – the French call it the “social economy” – is Gar Alperovitz, a historian and political economist at the University of Maryland and a founder of the Democracy Collaborative.  Alperovitz's 2005 book, America Beyond Capitalism, was recently re-issued, presumably because it speaks to the political moment. How can we make economic progress when banks and large corporations are simply looking out for themselves? How can we reduce wealth inequality when government is captured by corporations and the affluent?

Alperovitz showcases the history and great potential of co-ops, worker-owned companies, and urban land trusts. He notes the constructive role that is played by municipal utilities, state-owned banks and state-chartered trusts such as the Alaska Permanent Fund. There are also dozens of cases in which states use their investment dollars to help communities, use government procurement to help worker-owned businesses, and provide venture capital to startups.

Wow! The save-the-Internet protests by Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, Boing Boing and hundreds of other websites marks a watershed moment in the evolution of networked political expression. Millions of Internet users learned that Congress actually can cripple the open Internet in the manner of authoritarian regimes, albeit in the name of copyright law.

Such mass politicization is powerful stuff. Within 24 hours, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid postponed a scheduled vote on the “anti-piracy” Web censorship legislation known as SOPA and PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act). The abrupt turnabout was widely regarded as a face-saving move for the benefit of Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, a key sponsor of the bill.

Although protests had been building for weeks, the one-day shutdown of popular websites suddenly made visible a huge, alternative universe of citizens who are usually ignored in Washington, D.C. Suddenly the Old Guard could not broker their self-serving, insider deals in the shadows. Suddenly the Web demonstrated its power as a new sort of theater for organizing and representing the public to confront conventional governance.

I propose that the New York Times start a new feature called “Enclosure Watch.” After all, they report on one form of enclosure after another nearly every day. It's the story of our times.  Why not consolidate the effort and give the topic some real focus and depth -- to name it as enclosure?  This idea occurred to me after reading two opeds on consecutive days, each on the same place on the page, detailing two old, familiar enclosures.  

The first involves the mining industry's massive plunder of the public's mineral wealth in the West. The second involves a proposed lockup of taxpayer-funded scientific and medical research. Both are brazen ripoffs of the public by a “free market” system that dares not live up to its own ideological creed.  And both are achieved through gross imbalances of political power.

The Mining Act governing the extraction of gold, silver, copper, uranium and other metals from public lands in the West was enacted in 1872, when Ulyssess S. Grant was president. Yes, that's right: a law passed 140 years ago remains in force.  It privileges the mining of hard-rock mining over all other uses of federal lands. The law authorizes private mining on public lands for $5 an acre, with no royalties for what is actually extracted, and little concern for the environmental consequences.

It's a pleasure to see Professor Leo Burke is getting some attention for his pioneering work in teaching the commons at..... a business school. In a wonderful profile, Notre Dame Magazine describes Burke's adventures in developing a commons curriculum for students and business executives at the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame University. The courses are arguably the first and only such pedagogy about the commons in the world of business. The profile, “A World That Works for Everyone,” was written by Jay Walljasper, my former colleague at On the Commons.

Full disclosure – Leo's a friend. He and I worked together last year in developing an online course, “Introduction to the Global Commons,” which is expected to be available soon on the United Nations Institute for Training and Research website.  When I met up with Leo, he had already launched the Global Commons Initiative at Mendoza College of Business, and was teaching both executive MBA and undergraduate courses in the commons. Leo has also assembled a commons curriculum for the School of Commoning in London.

Why should a business school teach the commons?  Carolyn Woo, until recently the Dean of the Notre Dame business school, told Walljasper:

If only the rest of the world could emulate the Government of Rajasthan in India in adopting public policies to promote the commons! As the Times of India reports, “Rajasthan has become the first state in the country to have drafted a policy underlining the importance and the need to preserve and secure common land (commons) in rural areas.”  There may be other such government policies around the world, but they are few and far between.  The Rajasthan policies are a real breakthrough.

The Rajasthan government is in the process of identifying which grazing lands, common ponds and their catchment areas, playgrounds and other resources shall be treated as commons. Its new policies aim to decentralize governance, encourage conservation and proper ecological stewardship, assure fair access to and use of the lands, and facilitate public participation in all aspects of managing commons. 

Unbeknownst to millions of people recovering from their celebrations the night before, New Year's Day is a mini-celebration nested within a more famous holiday. Who among us realized that it was.... “Public Domain Day.” This is the date on which copyrights are supposed to expire on millions of works from a previous generation. It's the date on which the proprietary controls lapse and creative works become born again as public domain artifacts that can be freely used by anyone, for any purpose.

Alas, nothing entered the public domain this year. In fact, nothing will enter the public domain until January 1, 2019, thanks to the twenty-year extension of copyright law that Congress enacted in 1998 at the behest of Disney Co. and other media giants. This may explain why Public Domain Day remains so obscure! Nonetheless, the redoubtable host of Public Domain Day – the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School – annually commemorates this date to educate the public about the theft of works that rightly belong to them.

For this year's “celebration,” we learn how the public domain has been impoverished through excessive copyright terms. Last week the Center provided a wonderful survey of the cultural heritage that remains locked up. “What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012?” it asks. The answers include the films The Body Snatchers, Rebel Without a Cause, Lady and the Tramp.  Then there are all the books from that 1950s that you could copy and share for free: Vladimir Nabokov's Lollita; Rudolf Flesch’s Why Johnny Can't Read; J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, the last book of his Lord of Rings trilogy; and Edward Steichen’s famous book of photographs, The Family of Man; among many others.

How does Marxism relate to the commons and peer production? My friend Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives, offers a penetrating, big-picture analysis in an interview with Jean Lievens (originally posted on TANIT, Toward a New International Tendency, but also at Social Network Unionism). 

It's now clear that postmodernism is a dead-end if only because it was more of a cultural stance than a serious analysis of economic production and social relations. Meanwhile, “class warfare” is making a resurgence, yet few people really aspire to rehabilitate communism or socialism; the historical models are simply not credible. So what are the realistic alternatives to capitalism and its known pathologies? And what role will the commons and peer production play in challenging capitalism?

Bauwens explains how peer production is moving well beyond the virtual world to include physical manufacturing, and how a certain class of business enterprises – “netarchical capital” – is positioning itself to exploit the powers of digital networks and collaboration.

If you listen closely (turn off that iPhone and stop checking your email!), you can hear a quiet rebellion against the too-muchness of daily life. I'm talking about the over-stimulation of electronic media and the exhaustion that comes from being always connected. This topic has been getting more attention lately, which suggests that perhaps we have hit a saturation point. People want to learn how to unplug – and re-gain some measure of their humanity.

I first became aware of this trend in 2009, when Professor David Levy of the University of Washington came to speak at Amherst College. (See my blog post here. ) Levy is a rare, committed voice of centeredness in the digital cacophony of our time.  An active meditator, he has spent years thinking about how media technologies are contributing to our society-wide attention-deficit disorder.

He points out that we have precious little uncluttered time nowadays. We live in a world overrun with email, Twitter and Facebook messages, always-on smart phones, pagers, text-messaging, and countless other media inputs. Silence and contemplation have disappeared amidst an overwhelming barrage of electronic inputs, both voluntary and force-fed. This has resulted in greater distraction and stress in everyday life, and a diminished capacity for creativity and thoughtfulness.

As we begin a new year, I thought it might be fun – and possibly useful – to try to identify where commons activism might make some breakthroughs in 2012. I won't venture specific predictions, which can easily miss the mark. But I do think we can usefully talk about areas of “quickening innovation” for the commons. Here's my list, along with brief explanations and speculations:

Digital and complementary currencies. As conventional national currencies crater and as digital networking technologies become more sophisticated, new sorts of commons-based currencies are emerging to fill the void. There is quite a bit of innovation going on in this space. Some new currencies are locally based; others are digital systems that can function globally. The rise of Bitcoin is only a hint of what may be coming down the pike. (See the terrific New Yorker profile of Bitcoin on October 10, 2011.) I am particularly fascinated by the Ven, a new international digital currency that is backed by real assets (about which I will blog shortly). In the meantime, a good way to acquaint yourself with the possibilities of alternative currencies is the book, Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies With Local Currencies, by Gwendolyn Hallsmith and Bernard Lietaer.

Crowdsourcing as a source of capital formation. I see two trends that appear destined to converge: one is the growing use of cooperatives, community land trusts, worker-ownership and social enterprises to democratize wealth and empower communities; and the second is the expansion of crowdsourcing as a way to raise capital for specific projects if not companies.

The first topic, the democratization of capital, has received renewed attention thanks to the re-publication of Gar Alperovitz's book, America Beyond Capitalism (Democracy Collaborative Press). The second topic, crowdsourcing as a new means to capitalize projeccts (and not simply elicit donations or group suggestions), has received less attention, perhaps because any successful equity crowdsourcing project will need to comply with securities law. Still, the efficiencies of equity crowdsourcing are irresistible – and its synergies with traditional forms of democratizing capital are obvious. This may be wishful thinking on my part, but I expect to see some developments here in the coming year. (Here's a great P2P Foundation overview of existing crowdsourcing projects.)