David Bollier

Always on the prowl for new assets to exploit, investors are trying to push some of the crown jewels of American government – land, highways, civic infrastructure – onto the auction block.  From the perspective of the owners of these assets, we the American people, it’s a terrible time to strike a deal.  Why sell off prime equity assets in a down market for a fraction of their actual value?  Ah, but that’s the point, from the point of view of investors:  Let’s snatch these assets for a song while governments are so desperate for cash! 

The latest example is a 387-acre tract of land in West Los Angeles that has long been prized as a precious bit of open space in an over-built city.  The land is owned by the Veterans Administration, and is estimated to be worth $5 billion in today’s market.

As the Wall Street Journal (July 16) reports, “For 25 years, wealthy locals and veterans groups—backed by California's congressional delegation—have successfully resisted efforts to sell or develop the land, delighting in the open space and fearing the consequences of development.”  But now the GOP – with scant resistance from Democrats – is pushing to sell off the land in order to raise money.

One of the most penetrating essays on the commons that I have encountered in the last few years was published this year by Italian comparative law professor Ugo Mattei, who teaches at the International University College of Turin (Italy) and the University of California, Hastings College of Law.  Professor Mattei deals with a topic that gets very little attention – how the commons relates to the State and Market – and does so in the broadest philosophical scope imaginable and with great sophistication.

So far as I can tell, Mattei’s essay, “The State, the Market, and Some Preliminary Question about the Commons,” (in English and French) written this year, has not been published in any scholarly journal.  This is not entirely surprising:  the short essay is too cutting-edge for in its theorizing, and the commons itself elicits limited interest in mainstream academic disciplines beyond the ritualistic flogging of Hardin’s “tragedy” essay.

Professor Mattei starts by pointing out how the categories of “public” and “private” impoverish the possibilities of modern political life.  The former is seen as the realm of the State and citizens, and the latter is the realm of the market and private property.  All of politics is framed by this axis, casting us as “for” or “against” the Market or the State, respectively.  But the very idea of “public vs. private” is, as Mattei puts it, “a distinction without a difference,” one that furthermore shuts down other ways of being, knowing and seeking change. 

I am always trying to figure out how to explain the idea of the commons to newcomers who find it hard to grasp.  In preparation for a talk that I gave at the Caux Forum for Human Security, near Montreux, Switzerland, I came up with a fairly short overview, which I have copied below.  I think it gets to the nub of things. 

The commons is….

• A social system for the long-term stewardship of resources that preserves shared values and community identity. 

• A self-organized system by which communities manage resources (both depletable and and replenishable) with minimal or no reliance on the Market or State.

Most Facebook users have become so accustomed to working on the “corporate plantation” as "digital sharecroppers" that they lose any interest in controlling their own digital lives and content.  It is a welcome development, therefore, to see enterprising souls like Owen Mundy develop a free app that lets people reclaim their data from their Facebook accounts.

Give Me My Data,  which is officially in “public-beta” release, is an attempt to give social network users control over their own stuff.  You might want to delete your account but retain your accumulated postings, for example.  Or you might want to get around the Facebook interface, archive your content or perhaps make artwork from it.  The content can be exported into a variety of common formats.

Give Me My Data is not only a useful free software tool (licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license), it’s a way of sending a signal to the corporate goliath Facebook that users have some choices and just might decide to go elsewhere.   Mundy sees his app as a vehicle for public education:  “While clearly utilitarian,” he writes, “this project intervenes into online user experiences, provoking users to take a critical look at their interactions within social networking websites. It suggests data is tangible and challenges users to think about ways in which their information is used for purposes outside of their control by government or corporate entities."