David Bollier

Commons and Commoning: A Progressive Vision of a Good Society

I delivered the following remarks last week at the Oxford Real Farming Conference, in Oxford, England, on January 5, 2024. It was part of a session in the Oxford Town Hall with the noted British activist-scholar-commoner Guy Standing, entitled, "Commons and Commoning: A Progressive Vision of a Good Society."

Below is my prepared text. A video can be found here (starts at 3:35 timecode). Guy Standing's excellent talk, reflecting a British perspective and themes from his books, The Blue Commons and The Politics of Time, can be found at the same link (starts at 30:30 timecode). There is audience Q&A with Guy and me following our talks.

Established systems don't welcome fundamentally new ideas – even when they desperately need them, even if people are clamoring for them. Entrenched systems see new ideas and logics as disruptive. They see them as threatening and even incomprehensible. And yet, as Albert Einstein famously said, "Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them."

We're at an impasse today because contemporary institutions keep bringing the same mindset to solving problems that need some fresh and strikingly different approaches. The many problems afflicting agriculture and the food system today are fundamentally similar to those afflicting the rest of society. They are just another theater for rentier capitalism, which relies on market/state collusion, extractivism of nature, and systemic precarity for many ordinary people.

I don't want to denigrate the need for critique because the prevailing market/state system must be properly understood in all its awfulness. But what we most need is creative experimentation in developing a new, more wholesome paradigm. So my remarks will focus on how we can make some ambitious, creative leaps forward, and how the commons – as a discourse, social practice, ethic, and worldview – can be very helpful in meeting this challenge.

agriculture

food

commons strategies

Read more about Commons and Commoning: A Progressive Vision of a Good Society
Log in or register to post comments

Reimagining Economics Education

Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann, an international secondary school educator and curriculum developer, had long been appalled by the dismal state of economics education for young people. Students at middle and high schools learn about a "degenerative economic system," as she puts it, in which "the economy" is framed as something separate from society and nature. With little sense of contemporary realities, economics courses assume that endless economic growth is desirable and possible. It focuses on businesses and markets, ignoring the vital role that household care and the commons play.

Brandsberg-Engelmann decided to do something about these deficiencies. Inspired by Kate Raworth’s pioneering book Doughnut Economics, Brandsberg-Engelmann instigated a collaborative project to create a comprehensive Regenerative Economics syllabus. She wants young people to learn about economics as if the planet and people really mattered – and to showcase many fresh new schools of economic thought.

On my podcast Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #46), I spoke with Jennifer to learn more about this important work-in-progress.

Like Doughnut Economics, the Regenerative Economics syllabus focuses on a core framework: how to keep the economy within ecological limits while meeting minimum social needs.

This focus naturally elevates all sorts of topics that introductory economics courses marginalize or ignore: feminist critiques of care work and households; strategies for preventing the ecological "externalities" that standard economics blithely accepts; the psychic, social, and cultural ramifications of capitalist economics; and the range of alternative economic perspectives now emerging, such as degrowth, the "circular economy," "doughnut economics," commons, and related movements.

Read more about Reimagining Economics Education
Log in or register to post comments

The Right to Repair and Other Forms of Peer Creativity

Can creativity flourish and remain within the control of commoners? Or will businesses inevitably capture creativity and convert it into private property to make money?

Copyright and trademark law are certainly designed for those purposes. They presume a market identity for creators of art, software, and new knowledge. And in fact, the corporate world routinely vacuums up creativity that's developed through commoning – images, music, know-how, social sharing.

Yet history tells another story. It shows that creativity naturally thrives in commons, and need not enter the marketplace to find support or fruition. Commoning is an ideal vessel for the collaborative development of new ideas. The process may involve direct cooperation or merely proximate respect and influence, but in either case, introducing property rights and profit-making can seriously mess up the collective collaborations that yields innovation.

When I learned about Professor Aaron Perzanowski, a legal scholar at the University of Michigan Law School, I decided to quiz him about his work on my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning (Episode #45). I wanted to learn more about the bottom-up, social dynamics of creativity, how commoners sustain them, and the inevitable collisions with intellectual property law.

Perzanowski's 2017 anthology of essays, Creativity without Law, edited with Kate Darling, goes into great detail about this topic. The essays show that, contrary to the premises of intellectual property law, artists share. They come up with new ideas by working within a community of peers. They are not solo geniuses,but "nested-I's" working within a community.

Chefs constantly come up with new entrees and desserts even though they don't have copyright protection for recipes. Fashion designers dream up "new" and revamped dress designs all the time, and the industry flourishes, even though any garment can be copied by anyone. (It's the trademarked name that remains proprietary.)

creativity

law

right-to-repair

Read more about The Right to Repair and Other Forms of Peer Creativity
Log in or register to post comments

Two Years After We Lost Silke

Whenever my late colleague Silke Helfrich and I were poised to discuss a vexing, complicated question about the commons, she would change her tone, pause, and abruptly demand: “Go!”

That was my cue to launch into an exposition of the perplexing issue we needed to tackle. It might be the role of language in making and understanding commons…. or the problematic relationship between state power and commons…. or the shift of ontological perspective that commoning entails.

Go! And so began our reflections and debates and attempts to make sense of Big Topics.

I always felt as if Silke and I were a pair of skiers poised at the starting gate at the top of a dangerous, icy mountain. “Go!” would signal the beginning of our headlong plunge down into steep and unpredictable terrain. Could we slalom through it all at breakneck speeds without falling over, and emerge victorious?

We usually did. It was absolutely frightening -- and exhilarating.

One day, out of the blue two years ago on this date, November 10, 2021, I received a terse and alarming email from Jacques Paysan, Silke’s partner. He wanted me to immediately know that Silke had had a “fatal hiking accident.” Details to follow, he promised.

Wha…?! Stunned and desperate for more information, I tried to comprehend the shocking implications of those three words. My long-time friend and collaborator – the brilliant German activist-scholar who had helped me make sense of the commons as a modern social form – was…gone?

At that point, we had worked together for fifteen years in a transatlantic partnership of Zoom calls and occasional in-person meeting, studying the commons. We had gotten so entangled in each other’s jointly developed knowledge of the commons that we had evolved a kind of parallax consciousness on the topic.

For those readers who didn’t know about Silke, here is the remembrance that I wrote shortly after her passing. (She had accidentally fallen during a morning walk in the Lichtenstein Alps while attending a conference.)

Silke would have been so thrilled to see what has happened in the Commonsverse since the publication of our 2019 book, Free, Fair and Alive, and since the nominal end of the pandemic. She would have been impatient to make better sense of the unfolding drama and needs of this moment. What sorts of new conversations, research projects, partnerships, and interventions must be launched?

These days I still throw myself down icy mountains. I still hope to reach the bottom safely, and with new knowledge of the mountain and new insights about myself. But I confess that it’s a very different experience these days without Silke’s exuberant, joyful yelp encouraging me to plunge ahead: “Go!"

Read more about Two Years After We Lost Silke
Log in or register to post comments

The Commons Explained in 15 Minutes

When I was in Amsterdam in September, I visited an area of land at the edge of the city, Lutkemeerpolder, on which activists are trying to create an urban farm and nature center. They call it Voedselpark Amsterdam, or Food Park Amsterdam. The land is owned by the city, but unfortunately, Amsterdam’s center-left political establishment refuses to retreat from its plans to build a warehouse distribution center on the ecologically sensitive land. (More about this controversy here.)

On that beautiful day, my colleague Natasha Hulst arranged for filmmakers Pablo van Wetten and Ivo Schmetz to do a video interview with me.. It was part of their larger project exploring the idea of “collective property.”

The fifteen-minute video interview focuses on the basics of commons and commoning, Along the way, I also discuss some contemporary issues affecting the development of commons and the fight for the Food Park.

You may also wish to check out this blog post by Natasha Hagenbeek of the Amsterdam commons group I Can Change the World With My Two Hands. Natasha reflects on the nature of commons and collective property as part of the "collective property" film. If you understand Dutch, check out the video interview with her!

Amsterdam

urban agriculture

video

Read more about The Commons Explained in 15 Minutes
Log in or register to post comments

Comics about the Commons: 'Seeing Beyond the Map'

In a novel popularization about commons, the Centre for Future Natures at the Institute of Development Studies in the UK, has published a compelling set of comics, "Seeing Beyond the Map." The two comics, presented in the style of an old-style pulp comic book, are an amusing educational experiment in alternative cartography.

The stories unpack many mystifications about the commons, including the so-called "tragedy" parable, while offering a more accurate conceptual map and narrative of the commons. (You can download the 14-page PDF here.)

In a blog post introducing the comics, Amber Huff, Principal Investigator at Future Natures, writes,

"Maps tell stories about relationships. They can tell us how to get from here to there (relationships between places), explain a theory or concept (relationships between ideas), show cause and effect, or show changes and flows over time and space….

"We generally trust maps to represent something in the ‘real world’. But maps aren’t just objective tools. Maps use abstraction and representation to tell stories about the world and these stories are always embedded with power relations. Maps can direct what we see and don’t see in it and how we should move and behave in it."

Applying these insights to the commons, "Seeing Beyond the Map" challenges the standard capitalist, colonial maps that depict commons as zones of commodities and non-white people to be exploited, and instead shows how commons are places of generative living relationships and care.

commons

history

comics

Read more about Comics about the Commons: 'Seeing Beyond the Map'
Log in or register to post comments

The Breakthrough Insulin Device Developed by Commoners

I've seen a lot of commons over the years, but I was amazed to learn about the #WeAreNot Waiting movement and its open-source automated insulin delivery (OS-AID) device for people with diabetes. This global movement of thousands of techies and allies created itself, and its device, through commoning, outflanking a stodgy, risk-averse medical device industry.

The homegrown OS-AID system consists of a continuous glucose monitoring sensor worn on one's body, an electronically connected insulin pump, and a smartphone app whose sophisticated algorithm automatically monitors glucose levels and delivers just the right amount of insulin needed, in near-real time.

Several things have made this remarkable achievement possible: the #WeAreNotWaiting movement's collaborative practices and open source ethic; the passionate creativity of key tech innovators and participating community members; and a massive database of biophysical data that people living with type 1 diabetes have assembled themselves.

The resulting system has been tremendously effective in helping people living with diabetes to treat their condition. Freed from having to make dozens of health-related decisions constantly to manage their glucose levels, the DIY device makes it far less stressful and dangerous to live with diabetes.

Beyond developing OS-AID, the patient-led peer production of medical technologies represents a new paradigm for how scientific research can be conducted. It's also a new archetype for how medical treatment can be made more humane through commoning. Participants report that they are able to get better, more engaged assistance through mutual aid than through medical device manufacturers, which happen to offer fairly good customer care.

The odyssey of the #WeAreNotWaiting movement is ongoing, however. After ten years of hard work, it now stands at a difficult inflection point. How can it fortify its commoning and expand access to its device, using commercial markets as needed, without ceding control to investors simply out to make a buck? Can the peer production paradigm avoid being co-opted, captured or eclipsed by the medical device industry?

Read more about The Breakthrough Insulin Device Developed by Commoners
Log in or register to post comments

The Anthropocene? No. We’re Actually Entering the Ecocene!

We moderns are so self-important that we’ve even named a geological epoch after ourselves, the Anthropocene. Sure, human civilization has massively transformed and destabilized the planet’s ecosystems. But Anthropocene is ultimately a misleading moniker because it implies that we humans are the driving force on Earth.

How self-regarding! As a parade of wildfires, floods, droughts, and extreme heat are showing, it’s Gaia who is calling the shots. She’s making her own fierce, non-negotiable demands on us. She’s bursting the frames of order that humans have long used to shape civilization, capitalism, the state, and culture. That’s why Mihnea Tănăsescu, a brilliant Romanian-born, Belgium-based academic, urges that we instead recognize this geological era of Earth as the Ecocene.

Mihnea Tănăsescu, author of *Ecocene Politics*

Locked in our anthropocentric bubble, we humans have failed to see that we are deeply entangled with nature and not separate and superior to it. If humanity is to survive, it will have to learn how to get in sync with natural systems, culturally and economically, and actively contribute to the flourishing of earthly and human systems in tandem.

Hence the title of Tănăsescu’s 2022 book, Ecocene Politics. Our epoch is “characterized by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life,” as the book puts it. If you can recognize this reality, it becomes clear that our politics, economy, and culture must actively learn new post-modern ways of being and doing, and adapt appropriately. That is the task ahead. Trying to shore up or restore the collapsing edifice of modernity is a fool’s errand.

Impressed by the precision and passion with which Tănăsescu addressed these issues, I spoke with him in Episode #43 of Frontiers of Commoning about his book. Tănăsescu is Research Professor of the Fund for Scientific Research at the University of Mons, Belgium, where he writes extensively about human relations with nature, drawing deeply on anthropology, sociology, politics, and law.

Read more about The Anthropocene? No. We’re Actually Entering the Ecocene!
Log in or register to post comments

Create a Schumacher Action Lab. Reconstitute the World.

I offered the following remarks at the First Annual Schumacher Lecture, at Plaats de Kleine Aarde, a community land trust in Boxtel, Netherlands, on September 14, 2023. The event was convened to explore the launch of a new organization, Schumacher Lab Netherlands.

I wish to thank the organizers of this event – Natasha Hulst, Shinta Oosterwaal, Reinout Wissenburg – and de Kleine Aaarde, for bringing us all together on this special occasion to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the book Small is Beautiful. And for Susan Witt's steadfast stewardship of the Schumacher legacy at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics over the past 43 years!

The global impact of Small is Beautiful, written in 1973 by E.F. “Fritz” Schumacher, continues to reverberate. Why? Because it had the audacity to critique economics from the perspective of a well-lived life. It offered an honest measure of standard economics and the society it had produced, and declared it sorely deficient and outrageous.

Both the premises of economics and the institutions they engendered were called out for being grotesquely large, rigid and inefficient, ecologically harmful, and anti-democratic. Instead, here was a brave and brilliant renegade calling for an economics that honored “the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.” He even included a chapter on the idea of Buddhist economics! He openly celebrated the actual experience of life over the desiccated theories of the discipline, saying, “An ounce of practice is generally worth more than a ton of theory.”

This sort of wisdom has profoundly inspired people for decades. It gave hope that a more humane, eco-friendly future could be credibly pursued. Then this window of fresh air was abruptly slammed shut. The arrival of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and the power-surge of neoliberal capitalism in the 1980s forced the small-is-beautiful ethic to the margins, as a ruthless market/state system aggressively pursued environmental deregulation, austerity budgets, corporate subsidies, growth-driven energy policies, globally integrated commerce, and capitalist power over democracy. The promise of the 1970s was put on ice. You could say that, politically and culturally, we are only just now emerging from the fantasies that neoliberal capitalism imposed on the world for the past forty years.

And so we convene on the fiftieth anniversary of Small is Beautiful. How best to commemorate this landmark book? I believe the most significant homage we can pay is to this book is to make his vision real in our time. Fortunately, this is exactly why this event has been convened. This gathering is an invitation to help imagine, and build, a new vision for our troubled, some would say doomed, world. This event is about creating a new organization – and catalyzing a larger movement – that could help enact a more place-based economy aligned with living ecosystems and social need.

Netherlands

system change

Commonsverse

Read more about Create a Schumacher Action Lab. Reconstitute the World.
1 comment
Log in or register to post comments

Hannes Gerhardt: From Capital to Commons

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Internet culture was bursting with hopeful experimentation and dreams of political emancipation. John Perry Barlow, the visionary digital activist, published a famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace that featured grandiose lines like:

“Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel. I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind, on behalf of the future. I ask you ask you of the past to leave us alone. You were not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

For newcomers to the Internet, which at the time was most of us, these lines were a stirring glimpse of emancipation via the Internet. Given the giddy pace of disruptive socio-technical innovation at the time, they were also quite credible. If you are under 30, you probably don't remember the excitement surrounding explosion of free and open source software, and especially Linux as a renegade operating system, and the rise of the blogosphere and wikis. Political insurgents everywhere were transfixed by the promise of BitTorrent and peer-to-peer file sharing as it leapfrogged over a stodgy, exploitative music industry. The reinvention of copyright law via Creative Commons licenses allowed ordinary people to legally authorize sharing of content, while countless other tech innovations facilitated novel forms of collaboration and sharing.

Now that capitalism and nation-states have utterly domesticated and colonized the Internet as a commercial marketplace, Barlow’s manifesto comes off as terribly naïve (even though his contemporary peers, the crypto world, serve up similar blue-sky utopianism).

Let’s face it, the capitalist/state alliance has effectively contained and tamed user sovereignty on the Internet. Consider the geo-local surveillance of our online lives, social media’s algorithmic manipulations of our online feeds and of public opinion, campaigns of disinformation and hacking from the alt-right, Russia, and other rogue players, and corporate paywalls and national firewalls that are Balkanizing the once-unitary Web.

It was therefore refreshing to encounter From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism, a new book by Hannes Gerhardt, a professor of geography at the University of West Georgia (US). While Big Tech monopolies, compliant legislatures and intelligence agencies have crushed the soaring ideals that one prevailed in Internet and hacker cultures, Gerhardt bravely argues that there are still ways that commoning and technology could engineer a transition away from capitalism.

Read more about Hannes Gerhardt: From Capital to Commons
1 comment
Log in or register to post comments