David Bollier

There's some interesting stuff going on over at Shareable.net, the website-salon-activist venue that explores the outer frontiers of DIY, collaborative consumption, urban life, and the commons, all with an accent on innovations being pioneered by hackers, twenty-somethings and urban activists.

The website had a recent series on the history, growth and variety of crowdfunding projects, including a separate look at crowdfunding of social change. The site's tracking of new forms of collaborative consumption – tech-enabled forms of sharing, lending, bartering, and borrowing – is especially good. A classic example is AirBnB, a service that is the paid equivalent of Couchsurfing which lets people earn income by renting extra rooms in their homes to travelers.  Other examples include the operating system Ubuntu, ride-sharing, libraries and online reputation systems.

In a timely gambit planned months ago, Shareable is teaming up with the Parsons Desis Lab to host an event, Share New York, on Nov. 19-20, to discuss the challenges of making it in today's troubled economy. As the site bills it, “SHARE NY is designed to give you the tools, knowledge, and connections to help you create your own future – one that is more affordable, sustainable, and connected within a new economy that thrives on sharing.” The event hopes to bring together students, social innovators, designers, and entrepreneurs who have “created their own jobs and are pioneering new ways of working, living, and creating.”  More info here.

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Enclosures of culture are inherently difficult to see because they are so seemingly isolated, gradual and invisible. A great example is the commercialization and commodification of play, one of our most instinctive and important human activities, especially in childhood.

So what happens when a giant octopus of a sports industry begins to professionalize and regiment the natural inclinations of play? What happens when a commercial harness is put around our sense of fun and recreation and goofing-around, so that it can become a powerful money-making machine? What happens to ethics and sportsmanship? What happens to the experience of childhood?

These were among the topics discussed at a small conference convened in September 2009 by the Lake Placid Sport Forum in cooperation with the Aspen Institute. The event was one of the more fascinating side-trips that I have taken as a rapporteur. Coming from a wonky political background, I had never personally encountered so many deeply committed athletes in the same room.

Hanging out at a small conference center and private home in Lake Placid, New York, I met Mark Messier and Mike Richter, two legendary former hockey stars with the New York Rangers. I also met Olympic track star Al Joyner and hockey player A.J. Mleczko, among other serious athletes. While each of these people were incredible physical specimens, they were, more to the point, incredibly committed competitors with an almost spiritual focus on the beauty of sports competitions and play itself.  At the conference there were leading sports journalists from Sports Illustrated, ESPN and Business Week. And there were a variety of coaches at all levels (professional, college, amateur), sports physicians and psychologists, journalists, community leaders and parents.

The protests of #OccupyWallStreet in lower Manhattan are a refreshing break from the kabuki rituals that now pass for American democracy. Finally! Some unscripted reality of sovereign citizens exercising their freedoms of free speech and assembly, defying the tacit rules of the mainstream media and speaking from conviction, not tactical calculation.  Like its kindred public protests in Cairo, Madrid and other cities, Occupy Wall Street finally broke through to mass consciousness via a citizen-posted video on YouTube that went viral. It showed the NYPD spraying mace on a peaceful, defenseless young woman confined by the cops in a pen of portable orange fencing.

The protesters have done a fantastic job of self-organizing their little community in Zucotti Park (formerly Liberty Plaza). As NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof reported  yesterday, “The square is divided into a reception area, a media zone, a medical clinic, a library and a cafeteria. The protesters’ Web site includes links allowing supporters anywhere in the world to go online and order pizzas (vegan preferred) from a local pizzeria that delivers them to the square.” The protest is a stellar model of civic virtue and self-governance, proving once again the instinctive nature of commoning.

Now that the protests are spreading to Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, among other cities, we shall see if the political classes can contain the pent-up frustrations and resentments that have been ignored, indeed scorned, for the past three years. (Some Wall Street financial types reportedly drizzled champagne on the protesters from their office building windows.)  While corporate profits soar after an unprecedented series of taxpayer bailouts, neither Obama nor Congress have strained themselves to help the millions of people victimized by the banks, oil companies, insurance industry, pharmaceutical industry and their corporate brethren.

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Two new special reports on the commons just came out, and both are chock-full of interesting presentations and essays. The first is published by Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO), a decentralized collective that promotes social justice economic alternatives. The latest issue of GEO is devoted to “Collective Action: Research, Theory and Practice: Celebrating Elinor Ostrom and Her Work.”

The editors of GEO write:

An important shift is underway in academia and it seems to be building momentum. It is a spreading inter-disciplinary interest in empathy, cooperation, and group-level behavior that seems to be converging in networks both within and outside of university structures....Cooperation is now a core issue of our times, and because of the ferocious energy of many in the social sciences, it is re-emerging into the spotlight of public attention.

Theorists and researchers of cooperation and collective action share the values and passions of practitioners, but, as Marx put it so eloquently, the point is to change the world not just to understand it. And for this endeavor, researchers and theorists can inform and even transform how we do collective action in real life, and we can be a cornucopia of experience for more understanding of the questions they are puzzling over.