podcasts

I always find it invigorating to have interviewers ask me about the commons. Their questions force me to see the commons from other perspectives and raise still other questions. So if you enjoy the back-and-forth of a conversation, here are five recent interviews that I've had with podcasters and the editor of a British magazine. Our discussions focused on the governance of online collaboration, the future of education design, and how commons can speak to environmental challenges. 

Revolution.Social, with Rabble Evan Henshaw-Plath. Episode #13, posted October 8. “The commons and why open platforms aren’t enough.” Rabble is a leading activist programmer and expert on social media focused on the governance design of digital platforms to maximize commoning. He previewed this episode saying: “When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing that that's a false binary, and that there is a better way: The commons.” 

Future Learning Design podcast, with Tim Logan.  A social change / institutional design podcast. Posted November 3; 46 minutes. Tim Logan writes: “For the last 250 years we've gotten used to compulsory standardised schooling being provided at scale by either the state, as public government schools, or by the market, as private fee-paying schools. I'm fascinated by the question of what alternatives there might be to this binary choice. Home-schooling networks, 

How can cooperatives serve as vehicles for social change, especially in online spaces?  What practical interventions could check the anti-social behaviors of Big Tech?  These are two questions that I explored recently with Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, in Episode #8 of my podcast, “Frontiers of Commoning.”

Nathan is a long-time journalist and scholar focused on social-change movements of resistance, nonviolence, and system-change. Much of his work has focused on the new opportunities that cooperatives and digital technologies can provide in today’s world. He has been especially active in promoting platform cooperatives as a vehicle for moving beyond predatory business models like Uber, Airbnb, and TaskRabbit.

For Schneider, the history of cooperatives is a source of great inspiration and practical instruction.  “Cooperatives are nothing new,” he told me, citing Gandhi’s embrace of coops as a strategic tool to emancipate Indians from the British. “But it is a form of doing business that has shaped our world that doesn’t get enough credit.” For example, people often don’t appreciate that coops were a big element of the civil rights movement, he said.

Martin Luther King Jr. supported African-Americans in starting credit unions, in part because cooperative banking enabled them to become more independent from oppressive local circumstances.  “I interviewed a civil rights elder in Mississippi,” said Nathan, and asked him if coops were around in the 1960s. And he said, ‘Who do you think was getting people registered to vote?’”

Sharecroppers always risked getting evicted from the land if they dared to assert their civil rights or become politically active. But members of coops are secure enough to take risks and join movements, he said. “This is a geography of our world that we don’t see.”

Every few weeks, I seem to give extended radio and pocast interviews about the commons, and write occasional talks and essays that find their way to the Web. Here is a quick round-up of some of my more notable recent media appearances.

Writer’s Voice on Patterns of Commoning. One of my favorite interviewers is the skilled and sophisticated Francesca Rheannon of the syndicated radio show Writer’s Voice.  In early August, she aired our half-hour conversation about Patterns of Commoning,  the book that I co-edited with Silke Helfrich that profiles dozens of successful commons around the world.

Progressive philanthropy and system change.  In June, I had an extended interview with Steve Boland, host of the podcast Next in Nonprofits. We talked about progressive philanthropy and system change, a dialogue prompted by my April essay prepared for EDGE Funders Alliance on this same topic.

The importance of public squares.  The Hartford, Connecticut, public radio show, The Colin McEnroe Show, featured me and two other guests talking about “Democracy in the Public Square," on April 28, 2016. I focused on the tension between the government as the lawful guardian of public spaces, and the moral authority and human rights of the people to congregate in public spaces.

Now here’s a fun audio experience – a 56-minute podcast, “The Deeper Magic of the Commons,” which functions as a kind of introduction to the commons by several eminent commons historians and commentators George Caffentzis, Massimo de Angelis, Peter Linebaugh, along with Dr. Bones, and yours truly. 

Besides conveying some great history, the podcast is an audio treat. The interviewer and producer, James Lindenschmidt, is a sonic engineer who cleverly splices in all sorts of short audio segments and atmospherics to the podcast.  Lindenschmidt is producer of the Crafted Recordings Podcast and resident audiogeek for Gods & Radicals, “A Site of Beautiful Resistance.” 

The website explains itself this way: “We think that resistance should be beautiful, because the idea isn’t to replace a violent world with more violence, or a dreary world with more drearyness, but to replace what has become destructive and cruel with something beautiful and life-affirming.”

On his podcast show Levevei, Norwegian host James Alexander Arnfinsen interviews me for about 49 minutes, on Episode 106 of his podcast show.  It's called “The commons as an approach to governance, sustainable resource management and social well-being.” The show was recently re-posted by Resilience, a website hosted by the Post-Carbon Institute.

Arnfinsen's interview with me covers a wide variety of commons-related topics.  He's a host who clearly cares about the commons and who has done some homework on it. Arnfinsen helpfully provides a running abstract of the interview on the webpage for the podcast.  Here’s his summary of the first third of the interview:

(2:00) David starts of by sharing his own story on how he became interested in the commons, and he points to the advent of the internet and the disillusionment with neoliberalism as two important factors that inspired him to research this particular field. For him it was clear that the commons paradigm was a viable solution to resource management and governance, while also being a way for people to co-create and self-organize the economic and social structures that are needed in a thriving and living community (as opposed to either top-down government or market driven policies).