David Bollier

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.

This is the fifth and final section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here and at Natasha Hulst's Substack. Previous sections appeared in sequence immediately before this one, at these links: Section 1. Introduction & Reframing the Economy Around Bioregioning; 2. Commons as Relational Provisioning and Governance; 3. Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning): Living Systems as Generative; and 4. Toward Socio-ecological Markets.

5. Relationalized Finance:  Bridging the Chasm

As should be clear by now, the core puzzle that relationalized finance seeks to mitigate or resolve is actually an ontological and cosmological clash that takes place in everyday circumstances. It’s a struggle between different notions of value and meaning. It’s the glimmer of a worldview that steps away from many premises of liberal-capitalist-modernity. Does humanity consist chiefly of rational, self-interested individuals seeking material gain through market exchange, and exploiting nature as a (dwindling) resource that stands separate and apart from humans? This is the cosmology of contemporary finance. 

Or does humanity consist of interdependent, cooperative individuals nested within collectives, which themselves are nested in complicated ways within an animate Earth of countless living beings engaged in a symbiotic, evolutionary dance? We need a finance in sync with this world.

Without some adaptation of conventional finance and its implicit cosmology, capitalist finance will continue to inflict harm on nature and communities. It will continue to financialize life-systems as assets, and in so doing, superimpose an alien matrix of value and extractive production on them. So a key goal here is to help commoners secure much greater equity and control over their shared wealth, and to help them avoid becoming beholden to distant investors, lenders, and state authorities with their own empire-building priorities. 

This is the third section of an essay, "Relationalized Finance for Generative Living Systems and Bioregions," by David Bollier and Natasha Hulst. The remaining two sections will be published tomorrow and Saturday. The full essay can be downloaded as a PDF here. 

3. Toward a New Theory of Value (and Meaning)

In rethinking how “nature finance” should be structured, the distinctive modes of value-creation in commons and bounded markets are often misunderstood. Standard economics sees market exchange, money and growth as the only significant engines of wealth-creation, a process that finance purports to facilitate. It is therefore difficult for conventional finance to understand that there are many other distinctive species of “value” that ecosystems and organized commoning generate. 

The word “value” brings to mind money and markets, but the value generated by nature is quite different in an ontological sense. The bounty brought by rainfall, fertile soil, and biodiversity cannot truly be expressed through quantitative proxies, prices, algorithms, or markets because this “wealth” doesn’t exist in static, objectified forms or essentialist identities. Humans may equate fish with food and trees with lumber, but of course fish and trees play many other ecological roles in sustaining life.[12] The value of living entities subsists within their symbiotic relations – the dense web of interdependencies that generates abundance in a robust, self-sustaining system. This matrix is far more complicated than standard economics or markets can begin to represent.

While it’s possible to see abundance in objectified units (a bushel of apples, a hectare of land), the reality is that this value arises only as part of dynamic, evolving living systems whose actual value eludes quantification and monetization.[13]It may take “thirty leaves to make the apple,” as Thich Nhat Hanh wrote, but businesses, fixated on the marketable fruit, have only a narrow, economic self-interest in the leaves, roots, tree trunk, orchard, ecosystem, and weather. 

Inspired by feminist economic theory, J.K. Gibson-Graham proposed an iceberg image to suggest how much of “the economy” actually subsists outside of formal markets, remaining largely invisible and treated as inconsequential. The behaviors enumerated by the illustration below suggest how much economic work takes place in non-monetized forms, outside of wage labor and production for capitalist markets. These robust circuits of value-creation, often marginalized by standard economics and finance, can be seen in the generativity of living systems with sufficient organization: ecosystems of diverse organisms, agroecological farming, permaculture practices, online communities of collaboration, mutual aid networks, gift economies such as blood banks, scholarly disciplines, and artistic circles, timebanking collectives, and so on. Their contribution to “the economy” is enormous, but it is typically understated or ignored.