enclosure

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? 

Seed sharing has been a venerable tradition since the dawn of agriculture. Sharing has been a way of honoring the renewal of life, developing new seedlines, and maintaining a farmer’s independence while helping other farmers.  Modern capitalism, armed with new technologies and legal powers, has savaged this tradition of seed-sharing, with disastrous results.

For the past several decades, large biotech corporations have aggressively engineered seeds and the design of seed markets to make them proprietary monopolies. This has had profound consequences for farmers and global agriculture:  legal bans on seed-sharing, a loss of biodiversity, less innovation in seed breeding, and higher prices that threaten sustainable agriculture and the economic sovereignty of farm communities, especially in the Global South. 

To explore the current state of seed-sharing movement and its battles against proprietary seed, I spoke with Jack Kloppenburg  of the Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) in my latest episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #63).  

As a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1985 (he’s now a professor emeritus), Kloppenburg has been at the forefront of seed-sharing issues for forty years. His 1990 book, First the Seed, was a pioneering look at the political economy of plant biotechnology, a theme that he later explored in Seeds and Sovereignty, about the corporate capture of genetic resources. 

Even though the oceans cover 70% of the Earth's surface and provide half the oxygen we breathe, they tend to be "out of sight, out of mind," especially in landlocked nations or regions. It's therefore important to recognize that the market/state system is hard at work ravaging this sector of the natural world, too. Industrial-style fish trawlers are overexploiting fisheries, pushing many to the brink of collapse, and mining companies are chewing up the ocean floor in search of oil, gas, nickel, cobalt, manganese, and rare-earth minerals.

How might the commons address these horrific market enclosures? In my latest podcast episode of Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #28), Guy Standing, an economist and scholar of the commons at SOAS University of London, offers some specific, practical answers. Standing has just published  The Blue Commons: Transforming the Economy of the Sea, a book that synthesizes vast amounts of complicated maritime histories, international law, and ecological science to explain how commoning could curb the market/state's irresponsible, life-destroying treatment of oceans.

Standing sees the ecological destruction of the seas as the predictable result of 'rentier capitalism'. This is the economic system that privileges expansive property rights, financialization, and industrialized exploitation of "resources" over all else. Corporate interests working with governments like to call its rip-and-run practices "blue growth" -- but it is actually a story about the tragedy of the market. 

Companies systematically attempt to "de-commons" coastal fishing communities, claim patents on deepsea lifeforms, and exploit offshore mineral deposits. The South African company De Beers Group, for examples, uses a fleet of specialized ships to scrape the sea bottom in search of diamonds, leaving deep scars and disruptions in marine ecosystems.

The following opinion piece of mine was published by Al Jazeera English on April 26, 2020, and is re-published here with AJE's permission.

When astronaut Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in 1969, it was seen as an idealistic leap into the cosmos – a “giant leap for mankind.” A few weeks ago, the real estate developer who improbably became US President has legally declared that he sees the Moon in far less elevated terms. He signed an executive order that authorizes private, commercial uses of the Moon and other “off-Earth” “resources” like Mars and meteors. Heavenly bodies are now seen as underleveraged assets meant to generate profits. 

Invoking competitive threats from Russia and China, US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has called on government to support budding space businesses by rolling back regulations and coordinating government aid. He highlighted the gee-whiz possibilities of space tourism (a “Trump Tower Moon,” perhaps?) and the idea of converting solid ice on the dark side of the Moon into hydrogen and oxygen that could be used  as fuel propellant for rockets bound for Mars. It would amount to “turning the moon into a kind of gas station for outer space,” Ross said.

The Trump administration is also exploring the feasibility of “the large-scale economic development of space,” including “private lunar landers staking out de facto ‘property rights’ for Americans on the Moon, by 2020,” as well as the right to mine asteroids for precious metals. If it all sounds like the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, said Ross with evident self-congratulation, well, that vision “is coming closer to reality sooner than you may have ever thought possible.”

Since Donald Trump’s career has been built on claims of “truthful hyperbole,” skeptics might reasonably see this space fantasy as the empty bravado of the Huckster in Chief. Still, we need to ask a fundamental question: Who owns the Moon, anyway?

Here are two nice bookends for understanding British politics over the past eight centuries: The Charter of the Forest at one end, which from 1215 (until 1971!) guaranteed commoners the right to access to their common wealth for subsistence. And at the other end, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who in 1981 ushered in a draconian regime of neoliberal capitalism that has eliminated those rights by stealing and privatizing common wealth.

In his recent book, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth, Guy Standing, an economist at SOAS in London, brings together both end-points of this history. The focus is on enclosures, but the point of the book, its manifesto, is to reclaim the commons, chiefly understood, in this context, as public assets and services.

The commons has had a recurring role in the “deep history” of the United Kingdom, but generally it has been treated as something over and done with. It is not generally regarded as a timely political issue that affects everyone. A big salute, then, to Standing for finally providing us with a full-bodied treatment of British commons in both their grand historical sweep and their importance in contemporary politics. He has synthesized so many diverse strands that have made (and unmade) the commons over the centuries – law, land, property rights, economics, culture, knowledge. It all helps illuminate how vital commons are to a fair, well-functioning society. 

Appropriately, Standing begins his account with a chapter on the Charter of the Forest, the first legal guarantee of commoners' right to subsistence. Standing’s history of the Charter of the Forest is surely one of the most succinct and vivid that I’ve read of this near-forgotten portion of the Magna Carta. The account is not a dry history of strange people who lived a long time ago; it’s a compelling account of the first instances of many patterns of law, human rights, and political struggle that define our politics today.

Standing writes:

“To a certain extent, the Charter can be regarded as an outcome of the first class-based set of demands on the state made by, and on behalf of, the common man (and woman), asserting the common or customary rights of ‘freemen.’…It was a truly radical document, guaranteeing freemen the right to the means of subsistence, the right to raw materials, and to a limited but substantive extent, a right to the means of production.”

I’ve always been amazed at the things and activities around which commons have been unexpectedly developed – noncommercial theater, humanitarian rescue maps, specialized scientific microscopes. Little did I suspect that I would encounter a commons based on....human excrement. Even more surprising is that this valiant little commons, dedicated to using the human biome to benefit everyone, may soon be enclosed by Big Pharma. Yes, there is big money in turning our shit into branded, proprietary product.

First, a little background (from an excellent NYT article on the topic). OpenBiome is a Cambridge, Massachusetts stool bank that provides people with bottles of a “mud-colored slurry” used in fecal transplants. In recent years, physicians have made the amazing discovery that transferring the microbiota of healthy donors into the guts of people with certain illnesses can rescue them from death’s door and cure them. OpenBiome assists in this process by collecting stool donations from the public, processing them in safe and reliable ways, and making them available to patients and doctors for F.M.T., or fecal microbiota transplantation.

Tens of thousands of people suffer from the bacterial infection Clostridiodes difficile, or C. diff, for example. Fecal transplants have proven to be effective in 80% of these patients. Some feel much better within hours. Working as a nonprofit, OpenBiome helps such people by producing between 900 and 1,000 fecal transplant treatments each month, for about $800 apiece.

Since 1834, when slavery was abolished on the Caribbean island of Barbuda, land there has been owned as a commons. The entire population collectively owns and controls the land, not private owners and developers. That may be about to change – with all the catastrophic results usually associated with enclosure.

After Hurricane Irma devastated 90% of the island’s buildings last year, it forced virtually all 1,800 residents to relocate to nearby Antigua or cities like New York and Toronto.  International investors, working with Prime Minister Gastone Brown, a former banker, decided it was a ripe time to invoke the Shock Doctrine. This is the idea popularized by journalist Naomi Klein to describe how the market/state collusion to exploit national crises to ram through predatory neoliberal policies, which would otherwise be fiercely resisted by the citizenry. 

In a great piece of reportage in The Intercept (January 23, 2018), Naomi Klein and Alleen Brown describe how the island government is taking advantage of the diaspora of Bardua residents. With no one around, it is an opportune moment to try to privatize the land and eliminate the communal ownership that has existed in Barbuda for nearly 200 years. A senator on the island described the communal ownership as something that was “born in the bowels of slavery and continued to grow in the post-emancipation world.”

The ostensible goal of the privatization policy is to provide a humanitarian response to the hurricane by facilitating outside investment and development. But the real goal is to open the door to investors and developers, who have long resented the democratic limits on development on Barbuda. They are eager to buy up pristine Caribbean land at bargain-basement prices and spur standard-issue Caribbean luxury resorts and ancillary businesses. The most notable such investor is actor Robert De Niro, who plans to build a luxury complex called Paradise Found Nobu.

Half the challenge is to rip the mask from the face. Now that has happened. After months of the Troika’s unrelenting, unrealistic demands on the Greek people, it has become clear what this conflict is really all about:  maintaining the supremacy of the neoliberal market/state alliance. The Greeks must be punished for wishing to explore serious alternatives. 

Creditors, having conveniently socialized their losses through taxpayer-funded bailouts, are now using their hammerlock on state power to keep the lid on neoliberal austerity. That’s their only plan:  their idée fixe. Democracy?  Political stability?  Social or humanitarian need? Secondary details. This negotiation is not about reviving the Greek economy, which has only worsened after five years of enforced fiscal austerity and credit-dependency (which is why it’s absurd to continue with the same policies). It's about which vision of the future shall prevail. 

Syriza, armed with a democratic mandate to reject further bailouts and austerity cuts, is locked in a fierce struggle pitting raw financial power and neoliberal policies against democratic sovereignty and a nascent vision of something better. We know who generally wins such struggles (e.g., Chile in 1973).  Will it be different this time?   

A lot rides on whether the Greek people, in the face of desperate circumstances, are willing to stand up to reclaim their self-determination or whether abject realities will simply force them to surrender and become a colony dependent on European creditors.

The Troika surely wants to send a strong cautionary message to the citizens of Spain, Portugal, Italy and other European countries with problematic finances. If that means imposing further unemployment, social disintegration and trauma on the Greeks, without offering a credible plan for the country’s economic revival, the Troika and its European backers are clearly willing to go there.

The Economist magazine captured this insane choice with a darkly humorous cover, “Acropolis Now.” Angela Merkel enters the “heart of darkness” of subduing the Greeks, only to discover the unanticipated costs.  “The horror, the horror.”

The past thirty years have seen a massive patent grab to control agricultural seeds and the crops that are grown, not just in the US but around the world.  In the name of progress and greater yields, seed companies introduced proprietary GMO and hybrid seeds, slowly squeezing out seeds that are more common and shareable. This is exactly what Microsoft did in software, using Windows to marginalize competing software systems, and this is what bottling companies have done to water, trying to supplant tap water with heavily marketed branded water.

Some folks at the University of Wisconsin have launched a new effort to fight this trend in the seed market through what they call the Open Source Seed Initiative. The project last week released 29 new varieties of broccoli, celery, kale, quinoa and other vegetables and grains, all of them licensed under the equivalent of software’s General Public License (GPL), which is what has allowed GNU/Linux to remain in the commons. 

The license, known as the Open Source Seed Pledge, lets anyone use the open source seeds for whatever purpose they want – provided that any subsequent seeds produced are also made available on the same basis.  The idea is to bypass the built-in bias of proprietary control in the patent system, and assure that the new seeds will be available for anyone to grow, breed and share in perpetuity, without the fear of someone imposing intellectual property restrictions on later uses of the seeds.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison news office quoted horticulture professor and plant breeder Irwin Goldman, one of the authors of the pledge, as saying:  “These vegetables are part of our common cultural heritage, and our goal is to make sure these seeds remain in the public domain for people to use in the future.”  Last week Goldman released two carrot varieties he developed, named Sovereign and Oranje, at a public ceremony outside of the university’s microbial sciences building.

What would the world look like if we began to re-conceptualize food as a commons?  Jose Luis Vivero Pol of the Centre for Philosophy of Law at Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium has done just that in a recent essay, “Food as a Commons:  Reframing the Narrative of the Food System.”  

The piece is impressive for daring to imagine how the world’s estimated 668 million hungry people might eat, and how all of us would become healthier, if we treated more elements of the food production and distribution system as commons.  Instead of managing food as a private good that can only be produced and allocated through markets, re-conceptualizing food as a commons helps us imagine “a more sustainable, fairer and farmer-centered food system,” writes Vivero Pol. 

One reason that the commons reframing is so useful is that it helps us see the ubiquity of enclosures in the food system.  We can begin to see the galloping privatization of farmland, water, energy and seeds.  We can see the concentration of various food sectors and the higher prices and loss of consumer sovereignty that comes from oligopoly control. 

Enclosure is snatching shared resources from us and preventing us from managing them to maximize access and good nutrition.  This is often known these days as “resource grabbing,” as companies and national governments race to seize as many abundant, cheap natural resources as they can on an international scale.  This is one reason for the many pernicious enclosures of land commons in Africa and Latin America in recent years. There is a huge exodus from traditional and indigenous lands as China, Saudi Arabia, Korea, hedge funds and others buy up natural resources.  These enclosures are moving us “from diversity to uniformity, from complexity to homoegeneity, and from richness to impoverishment,” writes Vivero Pol.