A major San Francisco museum that celebrates a “hands-on, learning-by-doing ethos” plans to present an exhibit about the commons by letting people experience a taste of its dynamics. As reported in today’s New York Times, the Exploratorium will open a new $220 million facility along the Embarcadero next spring, where it will likely attract larger crowds. The museum will have three times more exhibition space than its current facility, and it will feature exhibits dealing with the environment, microbiology and social psychology.
As the Times reports:
Prototypes have already been tested on the floor of the current Exploratorium. In one social psychology exhibit, some items of modest value, like a calculator were put out at the beginning of the day. Visitors were told they could take an item, provided they replace it with something else.
“The goal of this is to have a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation,” said Hugh McDonald, one of the curators of a new gallery, which will focus on human behavior. “This table is a commons. It’s up to you to maintain it with the quality of interesting stuff.”
If people do not, he said, participants learn that “it turns to trash.”
After a week at the beach, I'm back at my desk and tracking all things commons. --DB
A recent piece by social anthropologist Mariya Ivancheva of Central European University in Sofia reminds us that the political and culture context of the commons matters a great deal in how we think about it – much more than we might imagine. Her piece appeared at OpenDemocracy and was excerpted by Michel Bauwens at the P2P Foundation blog.
Ivancheva notes how the commons is experiencing a big surge in western Europe, especially in Italy, but she stresses that the history of Bulgaria is quite different from that of western Europe. Western European commoners have fought the privatization of public resources such as water (Italy), cultural works (the ACTA treaty) and housing (Spain and France). While eastern Europeans have also protested various acts of privatization, many of them favor the commons in some respects while viewing private property and (capitalist) economic development more favorably. She writes:
For the majority of people who grew up imbued with neoliberal ideology nurtured by anti-communist and anti-communal narratives – hegemonic public discourse in east-central Europe since 1989 – the idea of “the commons” does not make much sense. Many prefer an opt-in and opt-out strategy: they stand against the privatization of nature and for the privatization of industry and services; against the pollution of water and soil, but for the private property and “management” thereof; against the cutting of funds in the education sector, but for “efficiency” and individual survival by competition within the educational and job sector.
At the same time, the debates in the public forums surrounding the anti-Forestry Act protests [opposing ski-tourism facilities on public land] made clear the elite-driven public they attracted. The discourse is centered on preserving individual liberty and urges people to choose their struggles selectively (even when undergoing urgent political developments). This became even more problematic once you added in the manifest feeling of entitlement that people with upper social and significant geographical mobility demonstrated. As the author of one manifesto that became famous among protesters claimed, “We are against the limitation of the possibilities of development.”
And now, the movie poster for The Olympics – or as John Stewart puts it, deference to the IOC’s bullying over unauthorized uses of the trademark “Olympics,” “The Quadrennial corporate sponsored international ring-based sports event.”
This poster was made by Smuzz, a British illustrator of sci-fi books, among other things who lives in Lancashire. Funny how the Games™ seem more of an excuse for corporate branding and image-polishing than something that belongs to the athletes themselves or to Londoners.
For those of you who (like me) have trouble reading the fine print on the poster, it reads: “£25 billion taken from depleted public funds. Square miles of public land permanently truned over to private contractors. £553M on security. 13,000 armed forces personnel – more than Britain deploys in Afghanistan. New police powers. Wholesale destruction of public parks, sports facilities, allotments, conservation areas, and public spaces. The Olympics – a self-governing multinational – transforming public property into private assets in every city it lands. Policed by G45. Sponsored by Dow Chemicals.”
Noam Chomsky recent gave a meaty talk, “Destroying the Commons: On Shredding the Magna Carta” that shows how fragile the rights of commoners truly are. Achieved after enormous civil strife, the Magna Carta supposedly guaranteed commoners certain civic and procedural rights. A companion document, the Charter of the Forest later incorporated into the Magna Carta, expressly guarantees commoners stipulated rights to access and use forests, land, water, game and other natural resources for their subsistence.
Both documents are now being shredded today with barely a peep of acknowledgment that centuries-old principles of human rights are being swept aside. Much of Chomsky’s talk is dedicated to his familiar critiques of US geopolitics and corporate globalization. But he has a few illuminating passages about the Charter of the Forest and modern-day enclosures, especially in the global South. Chomsky gave the speech at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Citing Linebaugh’s book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, Chomsky writes:
The Charter of the Forest imposed limits to privatization…. By the seventeenth century, however, this Charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice and morality.
With the commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to what could not be privatized, a category that continues to shrink to virtual invisibility. In Bolivia, the attempt to privatize water was, in the end, beaten back by an uprising that brought the indigenous majority to power for the first time in history. The World Bank has just ruled that the mining multinational Pacific Rim can proceed with a case against El Salvador for trying to preserve lands and communities from highly destructive gold mining. Environmental constraints threaten to deprive the company of future profits, a crime that can be punished under the rules of the investor-rights regime mislabeled as “free trade.” And this is only a tiny sample of struggles underway over much of the world….
The tech world frequently talks about open source software as a collaborative endeavor, but it is less apt to use the word “commons,” let alone engage in rigorous empirical analysis for understanding how software commons actually work. The arrival of Internet Success: A Study of Open-Source Software Commons (MIT Press) is therefore a welcome event. This book is the first large-scale empirical study to look at the social, technical and institutional aspects of free, libre and open source software (often known as “FLOSS”). It uses extensive firsthand survey research, statistical analysis and commons frameworks for studying this under-theorized realm.
While most people may associate open source software with Linux, there are in fact tens of thousands of open source projects in existence. Many consist of no more than two or three participants, and may have only an irregular existence. However, many thousands of others attract a small but spirited team, and still others are huge, robust social ecosystems in their own right.
The authors of Internet Success, UMass Professor Charles M. Schweik and consultant Robert C. English, looked at the large universe of FLOSS projects hosted on SourceForge.net, a website that functions as a kind of clearinghouse for over 260,000 FLOSS projects (as of February 2011) and 2.7 registered software developers. The site provides most of the tools that developers need to find colleagues and build a new FLOSS program – a Web repository of code, bug-tracking utilities, online forums, email mailing lists, a wiki, file downloading services, etc.
While SourceForge is not the only such site for FLOSS projects, it is the largest and arguably representative of the universe of such projects. With support from the National Science Foundation, Schweik and English set out to study the pool of software development projects on SourceForge to try to determine why some succeed, why others fail and why others simply languish. They explain in excruciating technical, social science detail how they assembled and analyzed their datasets, which originate in a vast collection of SourceForge data on more than 130,000 projects as well as their own survey questionnaire of programmers.
In development that feels strangely like kismet, an encampment of dispossessed young people who wish to opt out of the corporate system and reclaim a basic freedom of working the land, have made their way to Runnymede, a hallowed site in the history of the commons.
Runnymede is where King John signed the Magna Carta in 1215, settling the long civil war with barons and commoners, and leading to the Charter of the Forest that granted explicit commoning rights to commoners. Runnymede is therefore an appropriate place for contemporary Occupy-style encampments. It's where the king formally recognized that he was not above the law, and that the commoners have rights that must be respected. But history and king-like proxies have papered over such truths. (Peter Linebaugh's Magna Carta Manifesto is THE book to read on this subject.)
A group that calls itself Diggers 2012 is now trying to engineer a rendezvous between that past and a commons-directed future. After being forced out of their encampments in London, the Diggers are now establishing their own Runnymede Eco Village. (Thanks for the alert on this news, James Quilligan!) The Diggers want to secure their own right to the land and to develop their own autonomous system for self-governance and subsistence. Some want to create a banner, "We don't want workfare, we want landshare!"
After being shooed from one place to another, and suffering the destruction of their plantings, the Diggers decided to set up camp at Brunel University’s Runnymede campus, which has gone unused for six years and is poised to become a construction site for apartments. In The Guardian, columnist George Monbiot has a wonderful column about the encampment at Runnymede, which he described as “a weed-choked complex of grand old buildings and modern halls of residence, whose mildewed curtains flap in the wind behind open windows, all mysteriously abandoned as if struck by a plague or a neutron bomb.
The Diggers are off on an out-of-theway, unused piece of land. Not exactly a prime location on which to attract attention. But they are nothing if not determined to make a point and build another world. As one camper explained: “Like our forbearers, ‘The Diggers’ of the mid 17th Century, we too will face the same forms of oppression as we attempt to make use of the disused land. And like the Diggers, we are committed to continuing our mission to make use of the disused land in the face of brute force. So if the bailiffs come, we may go, but we may too come back and keep coming back. For you can tear down our structures and rip out our crops, but you cannot kill the spirit of our vision. We are not here to fight anyone. We know in our hearts that our activities are just and reasonable. So we will carry on.”
It is time to pause and celebrate the improbable, wonderful life and career of Woody Guthrie, born a century ago today. Could such a voice of ordinary people ever make it as a songwriter/performer today? It’s remarkable how the “Oklahoma cowboy” drew together the strands of American folk music, hillbilly lyrics, cowboy songs and countless other regional influences to create songs that sound as if they had existed from time immemorial. In a way, they had. He was often renovating folk tunes that had already endured for generations and giving them more timely, politically inflected lyrics: derivation as original creativity. He sang about dignity and social justice; he sang about hard personal truths and political struggle.
Guthrie himself said, “A folk song is what’s wrong and how to fix it or it could be who’s hungry and where their mouth is or who’s out of work and where the job is or who’s broke and where the money is or who’s carrying a gun and where the peace is.” In today’s media-saturated world, in which posturing and PR optics drive talent to become facsimiles of the authentic (but never the real thing, lest it be caught by surprise in an unflattering light being all-too-human), Guthrie was the unvarnished, plain-spoken real thing.
Out of that stubborn authenticity came a raw eloquence that could not be suppressed. When Irving Berlin wrote the sanctimonious “God Bless America,” which went on to become a hit, especially as sung by pious conservatives like Kate Smith, Guthrie set out to write a song that would not be so darn complacent about America.
Raj Patel has been tracking the pathologies of the global food system for many years. An activist and academic who teaches at the UC Berkeley Center for African Studies, Patel has just published a second, updated edition of his 2008 book, Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System.
The problem with the food system is not that we don't produce enough calories to eradicate hunger, Patel notes. It's that the food system has its own priorities of institutional consolidation and profit, which means that more than 1 billion people in the world are malnourished and 2 billion are overweight – which is worse than when the first edition of Patel's book came out.
Patel has also been a serious student of the commons. His 2010 book, The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape the Market Society and Redefine Democracy, is a lucid overview of the fallaciious premises of market economics and its dismal performance. He also goes on at length about the ability of the commons paradigm to help ameliorate food sovereignty, environmental sustainability and social justice.
Recommended reading is a recent interview with Patel at Stir, the vigorous, commons-oriented British political journal founded by Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh. (Incidentally, Stir is in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to pay for a print run of a book collecting some of its best articles.)
Here are a few excerpts from Stir’s interview with Patel:
On genetically modified crops & climate change: “We have an increasing amount of evidence to suggest that agro-ecological farming systems will be able to feed the world in the future. The GM advocates are saying, “What about drought-resistance and climate-change-ready crops?” That seems to be nonsense! To have a crop that is climate-change-ready is ludicrous because change is precisely change — it is so many different things. It could be new pests, rains coming at the wrong time; it could be too much rain, or too much heat. It is impossible to have a single crop that is ready for those possible changes. We’ve already seen the limits of that because Monsanto has a product called ‘Drought Guard’ — a genetically-modified crop that performs no better than any conventional crop in resisting anything but a mild drought. The problem with this is that climate change isn’t about mild anything but extreme weather events.”
The International Olympics Committee is one of the biggest, most aggressive marketers of the Olympic Brand. It should come as no surprise that athletes want a piece of the action for themselves. American runner Nick Symmonds has shown his appreciation for the true Olympic spirit by auctioning off a corporate sponsorship on his left shoulder.
Hanson Dodge Creative, an advertising and design agency in Milwaukee, won the right to pay Symmonds $11,000 to tattoo its Twitter hashtag on his left shoulder. As a piece by Stewart Elliot in the New York Times assures us, it’s only a temporary tattoo – but it will be there for the duration of the Olympic Games and 2012.
The Olympics once prided itself on honoring amateurism in athletics – a standard that was often controversial on the margins because it was hard to enforce. Everyone needs to earn a livelihood somehow, and the eastern bloc countries for years had a form of state-sponsored professionalism of athletes. That said, is it an emancipation for athletes to be selling their bodies as a vehicle for corporate tattoos? Talk about “branding”!
Hanson Dodge bought the "tattoo rights" before Nick Symmonds won a berth on the US Olympic team. After he made Team USA, it meant that Hanson Dodge would now get far more public exposure for its $11,000 than originally anticipated. Symmonds proudly noted, “You’re never going to find a better cpm.”
Yes, athletes have become experts on advertising. A “cpm” is a trade term for “cost per thousand,” or the cost that advertisers pay TV, radio or newspaper outlets to reach a thousand consumers. One might say that Symmonds is a perfect representative for Team USA: sell, sell sell!
There is something very sad about the Olympics becoming little more than a strike-it-rich business opportunity. Symmonds is unapologetic. When he finished first in a race in June, he stuck out his tongue in defiance, and said: “My brand identity is to treat every day like it's your last, live life to the fullest.” Living life to the fullest apparently means acting like a boor and leveraging the cash value of Brand Symmonds.
A thousand-year-old tradition of farming commons in southern England may be jeopardized as housing prices drive out farmers and render the commoning rights moot. Yes, there are still self-identified commoners in England. BBC radio recently interviewed a handful of the remaining commoners who rely upon the New Forest in Hampshire to feed their cattle, sheep and chickens. The 23-minute radio report focused on how the farming commons is a way of life that has preserved the distinctive ecological landscape – and how this future is now in doubt.
New Forest is said to be the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed pasture land, healthland and forest in the southeast portion of England. The land became a royal forest in 1079 when King William I shut down 20 hamlets and isolated farmsteads, provoking an uproar. He then consolidated the land into a single tract, the New Forest, which he used for royal hunts.
The traditions of commoning in the New Forest are quite involved and detailed, as Wikipedia notes:
Commons rights are attached to particular plots of land (or in the case of turbary, to particular heaths), and different land has different rights – and some of this land is some distance from the Forest itself. Rights to graze ponies and cattle are not for a fixed number of animals, as is often the case on other commons. Instead a marking fee is paid for each animal each year by the owner. The marked animal's tail is trimmed by the local agister (Verderers’ official), with each of the four or five Forest agisters using a different trimming pattern. Ponies are branded with the owner's brand mark; cattle may be branded, or nowadays may have the brand mark on an ear tag.
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