David Bollier

As more and more computing moves off our PCs and into “the Cloud,” Internet users are gaining access to a wealth of new software-based services that can exploit vast computing capacity and memory storage.  That’s wonderful.  But what about our freedom to create and share things as we wish, free from corporate or government surveillance or over-reaching copyright enforcement?  The real danger of the Cloud is its potential to limit how we may create and share what we want, on our terms.

There are already signs that large corporations like Google, Facebook, Twitter and all the rest will quietly warp the design architecture of the Internet to serve their business interests first.  A terrific overview of the troubling issues raised by the Cloud can be found in the essay, “The Cloud:  Boundless Digital Potential or Enclosure 3.0,” by David Lametti, a law professor at McGill University, and published by the Virginia Journal of Law & Technology.  An earlier version is available at the SSRN website.   

Lametti states his thesis simply:  “I argue that the Cloud, unless monitored and possibly directed, has the potential to go beyond undermining copyright and the public domain – Enclosure 2.0 – and to go beyond weakening privacy. This round, which I call “Enclosure 3.0”, has the potential to disempower Internet users and conversely empower a very small group of gatekeepers. Put bluntly, it has the potential to relegate Internet users to the status of digital sheep.”

What would “degrowth” look like and why is it needed?  At the Degrowth conference in Montreal in May, Josh Farley, an ecological economist at the Gund Institute in Vermont, gave a brisk overview of the problems with our current debt-driven growth economy -- and the feasible alternatives -- in a seventeen-minute video.  Farley and eight other co-authors give a more detailed critique in a paper that they presented, “Monetary and Fiscal Policies for a Finite Planet."

Normally, I prefer to read a paper than to watch a video summary.  But in this case, Farley is so compelling that I found it a pleasure to watch him deconstruct the conceptual errors of mainstream economic thinking and GDP.  One fact that he cited really jumped out at me -- in 1969 U.S. per capita consumption as measured by GDP was only half of current levels -- and yet Americans were just as happy if not happier than they are now.  Indeed, since 1969, there have been many declining metrics of health and happiness, such as greater obesity, infant mortality, etc. 

For those dead-enders who insist that economic growth is a prerequisite to solving any of our social problems, it’s worth pausing on this fact -- that Americans were in fact once healthier and happier despite consuming at half of contemporary rates.  This proves that it is not utopian to think that we could lower our consumption and still be happy.  It’s an historical fact!

Farley would like to conduct a more systematic study of how we might return to such a society.  He calls his proposed research project “QOL 350,” which stands for the quality of life (QOL) that could be sustained at energy consumption levels not exceeding atmospheric concentrations of 350 ppm of carbon – the level that scientists say is needed to prevent climate change.  A vital element of any QOL 350 vision, Farley says in his video, is to ensure greater fairness in economic distribution and to create institutions that encourage cooperative action.

On Tuesday evening, I gave a talk at the American Academy in Berlin, where I have been a residential fellow for the past five weeks.  I focused on the commons as “a new/old paradigm of governance,” making a survey of the topic in ways familiar to readers of this blog.  (Here is a video of the talk along with the text.)  It was fun to mix it up with a very diverse crowd that included academics, journalists, students, a Google Germany executive, a Wikipedia leader, a German patent law official, among many others.

Among the many interesting comments made by the audience, Katrin Faensen of The Virus,  coined a word that I am going to start using a lot:  “commonable.”  Faensen asked how she personally could become “more commonable” in the sense of connected to and participating in a commons.  I replied that she should start with whatever she is passionate about, and find a suitable commons project there.

I like “commonable” as a term because I think there will be a growing use for it in the future.  Tommaso Fattori of Italy has proposed new sorts of “commons/public” partnerships, for example, which could lead one to ask the question, “Is that public service or asset ‘commonable’?”  Many of us would like to see the earth’s atmosphere treated as a commons, which could lead to the statement, "We need to make the atmosphere commonable.”  My pleasure in the word was reinforced when another fellow here at the Academy, a renowned literary translator, agreed that the word has a promising future.

A word about the American Academy in Berlin.  This small, independent center in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee is dedicated to “advanced study in the humanities, public policy, social sciences and arts.”  Its central aim is to foster German/American cultural exchange via its Berlin Prize Fellowships.  I am pleased to say that I was selected for the Bosch Berlin Prize in Policy for fall 2012.  This has given me the gift of six weeks to read, study, think, meet with people, give talks and enjoy great food and stimulating company.  As a non-academic with no hope for a sabbatical, this has been a rare treat and a real joy. 

Below, my prepared remarks at the Paratactic Commons conference, the Amber ’12 Art and Technology Fest, hosted by Istanbul Technical University and Winchester School of Arts, in Istanbul on November 10, 2012.  Title:  "The Commons Rising:  How Digital Innovation is Transforming Politics and Culture."

It’s too bad that the commons is so neglected today – often dismissed as a “tragedy” or failed system of management – because the truth is that the commons holds great promise for transforming our political culture in many positive ways.  So I am pleased that see Istanbul Technical University and Winchester School of Arts tackle this important subject. 

Surely one of the most robust and expanding type of commons these days is the digital commons – that is, communities of social practice that come together on open platforms such as the Internet to manage shared bodies of information and creativity.  The most familiar examples are open source software, Wikipedia, open access publishing and certain types of social networking, but there are many other exciting species of digital commons.

At this point, digital commons constitute a vast new sector of culture and economic production.  What makes them so distinctly different from the familiar forms of market production in the 20th Century are their self-directed, self-organized, distributed dynamics.  Digital commons give users new sorts of direct freedoms that are not available in markets where corporations strive to control everything that happens.  On open networks, that’s simply not possible.