David Bollier

Our modern mental maps of commons are woefully inadequate, in part because we have forgotten the history of commons and its once-flourishing folk culture. 

Leah Gordon, an English photographer, writer, and filmmaker has set out to fix that through a deep dive into the history of English commons. The result, produced with two collaborators, is her fascinating and beautiful book, Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance. Her two partners in the project are Stephen Ellcock, a renowned visual curator, and writer Anabelle Edwards, who has studied alternative lifestyles that reject the modern market/state and its culture. 

Common People is a stunning visual portrayal of English commoners over the centuries. It looks at their everyday struggles, feelings, creativity, and cultures, bringing the human vitality of that world alive in ways that print usually does not. 

The book draws upon dozens of captivating paintings, etchings, and folk relics from English history as well as many contemporary photographs of commoners who carry on premodern traditions. The photos, taken by Gordon and Edwards, provide revealing glimpses into the eccentric, glorious, and sometimes unsettling realities of commoning as a culture.

There is the tradition of The Burryman, for example. For 1,000 years, on the second Friday in August, the English town of South Queensferry has selected a man to dress up in a costume covered with about 11,000 itchy plant burrs, with openings only for his eyes, nose, and mouth. The role can only be played by a man born there and “requires deep commitment,” said Gordon. The Burryman then walks a ceremonial nine-mile route while carrying flower-covered rakes, along with two attendants, and is frequently plied with shots of whiskey along the route. The origins of the tradition may have been to bring good luck to local fishermen or to commemorate the hiding of Scottish king Malcom III from the English, through this disguise.

With so many social movements seeking system change – cooperatives, commons, Doughnut Economics, peer production, relocalization and more – things quickly get confusing. There are so many different vocabularies, political premises, and theories of change swirling about. How can we possibly work toward a coherent, common future? 

Jeremy Lent’s new book, Ecocivilization, is a significant beachhead in answering this question. It demonstrates that a feasible future is possible precisely by drawing upon the rich pluriverse of possibilities. Lent’s book is therefore a relief to encounter. At last, a bold, empirically grounded vision of how diverse players could construct a post-capitalist world.

I’ve known Jeremy and his thinking in previous books for eight or ten years, especially through The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. The Patterning Instinct, published in 2017, distills a vast scholarly literature to describe humanity’s search for meaning – from the time of hunter-gatherers to early agricultural civilizations to modern societies and religion traditions. The Web of Meaning, published in 2021, explores how traditional wisdom and modern science could together provide a new narrative for modern humans. (My 2021 blog post and podcast interview with Jeremy about The Web of Meaning, can be found here.) 

Naturally, I was excited to learn more about Ecocivilization, a book that Lent had been working on for five years. So I asked Jeremy to join me on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #74) to talk about his journey in writing the book and to discuss its arresting themes. 

Understanding how online communities function is a particularly vexing challenge. For example, is a wiki best understood as a volunteer club and nonprofit organization? Or does it more closely resemble a business that organizes the wisdom of crowd -- or tames the unruliness of a mob? It becomes even more complicated when you consider that wikis have porous boundaries, enabling people to become either formal members or casual lurkers. 

People trying to grasp how collaborative spaces work often turn to the literature of the commons. It has a lot to say about the dynamics of collective action and sharing wealth, after all. But does the stewardship of land or water really resemble the stewardship of online information by quasi-strangers scattered around the world?

These are the sorts of conceptual challenges that tug at Benjamin Mako Hill, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and scholar of digital collaboration. Mako, as he’s usually called, brings special talents to this inquiry. He’s not just a scientist and scholar, but a committed free software activist and hacker who has made significant contributors to the Debian and Ubuntu projects, two versions of the GNU/Linux computer operating system. He advises the Wikipedia project and has received a prestigious US National Science Foundation grant to study the governance and lifecycles of knowledge commons. 

I was curious to learn more about the social life and governance of digital commons, so I invited Hill to join me on my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #73). Mako told me how digital communities go through different developmental stages, which affects their strategic choices as commoners. He also described how fledgling commons must often struggle to gain public credibility and new contributors – but later, they must develop ways to protect against hostile forces seeking to monetize or control their collective wealth (code, curated information, webs of relationships).

When he first began to study digital commons, Hill wondered why some of them become really big and successful, such as Wikipedia, while the vast majority of them don’t. He soon realized that most collaborative websites start out with a very basic challenge, How do we attract people? 

The western world has long promoted “development” as a high-minded mission to bring capitalist markets and growth to impoverished areas of the world. But what if development were seen not just as a matter of creating markets, but of strengthening social collaboration and sharing in meeting needs? In short, what if development agencies were to support commoning? 

One major national development agency – the French Development Agency, or AFD – is actively experimenting with this very challenge. For the past five years, Stéphanie Leyronas, an AFD research fellow specializing in the commons, has been working with an internal expert network at the agency to investigate how it might support commoners in the Global South. The goal is to improve commons-based stewardship of land, access to water and energy, urban spaces, digital platforms, and the so-called collaborative economy. 

To learn more, I spoke with Leyronas for my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #71). 

It was refreshing to hear how AFD has been attempting to create a modest “laboratory of the commons.” In the process, the small AFD team has come to understand that the commons requires a shift of mindset and development strategies.  

As Leyronas put it in our interview, “Donor action is really guided by project logic. Goals are predefined and indicators [of success] are fixed. We usually have evaluations in advance or at the end. But commons evolve very differently. They follow long-term, open-ended processes with deliberation and adaptation.” 

In a recent talk to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Leyronas explained how supporting the commons requires that development programs engage with the “relational logics” of a community. It has to focus on how people relate to each other, learn to cooperate, and care for natural systems. There must be time and space for commoners to experiment, to develop a collective solidarity and stewardship of shared wealth; to collectively learn; and to integrate practice & reflection, even at small scales.