David Bollier

Whatever you may say about the marketing firms that help large corporations sell us products, they generally tap into world-class artistic talent.  They also make it their business to track breaking cultural trends aggressively in order to capitalize on them.  How interesting, then, that a New York City design firm, Collins, has produced a gorgeous little book, The Triumph of the Commons:  55 Theses on the Future.  I find it immensely attractive and artful, if conspicuously incomplete.  I also find it fascinating that a respected NYC design firm would have a fairly sophisticated understanding of the commons (at least, digital commons).      

But given the firm’s blue-chip clientele, which includes such corporate giants as Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, Sprite, Dove and Microsoft, one must wonder:  Is this the beginning of the corporate cooptation of the commons?  Or merely a sign that the corporate world is starting to realize that it must respond to people’s palpable yearning for the commons?  Another question:  How much daylight exists between a marketing/design firm and its corporate clients, which tend to be more interested in monetizing and enclosing the commons than in defending it? 

Collins is clearly a firm that has a grip on the Zeitgeist.  It describes itself as “a multi-disciplinary design firm specializing in igniting mass collaboration.”  It adds, “The next generation of great brands will emphasize not mass communication but mass collaboration.  That means transforming your brand into a platform where communities discover, make and share new value in cooperation with your company.”  Very astute.

Collins sees this line of thinking as naturally leading to the commons.  The Triumph of the Commons, which it self-published late last year, is an “exquisite corpse,” a method of creating art pioneered by the Surrealists that relies upon the sequential, collective assembly of images or words.  As Wikipedia describes it, an exquisite corpse is made when “each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb adjective noun”) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”  Thus, one artist draws on one quadrant of a piece of paper, then folds it over – and another adds to the drawing without seeing what the first artist already drew.  A third artist follows, and so on.

If you’re in London or nearby, don’t miss the opportunity to hear commons scholar James Quilligan present a twelve-part seminar series, “The Emergence of a Commons-Based Economy,” starting Monday, May 7.  If we’re lucky, there will also be a live webcast of the talks.

You can see the schedule of seminars and register for them here. A fuller description can be found here.  Each talk will focus on a specific topic, starting with “Democratizing the Global and Political Commons.”  It will be followed by talks on the political economy; financial innovation and the commons; property, value and the commons; organizational practice and the commons; among many others.  (See pie chart.)

It is rare for economists and other champions of the marketplace to step outside of their worldview and see it as an ideological value-system.  How refreshing, then, to see the Wall Street Journal run a favorable review of Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, What Money Can’t Buy:  The Moral Limit of Markets.  The review, by Jonathan V. Last of the conservative Weekly Standard, notes that economistic thinking has exploded over the past generation, superimposing market criteria on countless aspects of personal and social life. 

In 1988, only three stadiums had the names of corporate overlords.  Now more than 100 companies have bought “naming rights” to stadiums.  I was shocked to learn that “brand extension” has even reached the level of requiring the announcers for the Arizona Diamondbacks to call home runs “Bank One Boomers.”  The degradation of a venerated national pastime shows how very deeply the tendrils of market thinking have penetrated.

This is only the beginning.  List writes:

"Today you can purchase your way out of waiting in line for rides at many amusement parks. There are express lanes that allow us to buy our way out of traffic. Many schools now 'incentivize' performance, paying students if they read books or do well in school; some schools now sell ads on children's report cards. Cities routinely sell advertising space on public property, ranging from parks and municipal buildings to police cars. In each of these cases, long-held ideas about inherent worth and common ownership have been displaced by the simple morality of the market. There are, Mr. Sandel notes, practical concerns with this shift, affecting matters such as equality: 'The more money can buy, the more affluence (or the lack of it) matters." But the higher concerns are philosophical and spiritual, about how we ought to value what he calls sweetly "the good things in life.'"

While Bradley L. Garrett may be an anthropologist by training, he prefers to call himself an “urban explorer” or better yet, a “place hacker.”  He recently came into public view after secretly climbing to the top of the Shard, the tallest building in Europe (1,061 feet/309.7 meters), in London.  He evaded security systems and at 2 am climbed to the top of the building, still under construction, earning a spectacular view over the twinkling London nightscape.

The night's adventure garnered wide media exposure for what is legally known as an act of trespassing. Garrett doesn’t consider this mere adventurism, although he concedes it is a thrill.  Rather, he sees himself as a thinking-man’s explorer of the meaning of urban ruins – derelict industrial sites, closed hospitals, abandoned military installations, sewer and drain networks, foreclosed estates, mines, and ruins of all sorts.  Garrett considers it ethnographic research into the physical detritus of modernity – and a statement about the scarcity of public spaces in cities for discovery, camaraderie and fun. 

As a video about place hacking notes, it’s all about the “psychogeography of place.”  It's about the desire to transcend the contrived, commercially constructed facade of the city to reach a rawer, more authentic sense of urban life.  And it’s about creating a community of fellow adventurers who share in discovering and investigating secret or derelict spaces.  Aficionados call such spaces T.O.A.D.S., “temporary, obsolete, abandoned or derelict spaces.”