David Bollier

Smart Phones as Our Modern DataVeils

I’ve always felt that artists will play a leading role in helping us understand the deeper subjective and identity dimensions of commoning.  In Istanbul this past weekend, I encountered a number of artists who confirmed this fact for me.  I was at the “Paratactic Commons” conference, hosted by Istanbul Technical University and Winchester School of Art.  The event brought together a number of artistic interpretations of the commons as well as activist-oriented initiatives on the commons in Turkey. 

I was quite taken by several performance and video works by the Dutch artists Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat.  (I’ll talk about other projects featured at the conference in my next post.)  One of their most provocative works is called Tele_Trust, a performance project that explores how we come to trust each other online.  It explores how our bodies – especially our eyes and sense of touch – are critical to developing trust.  So what does this fact mean as more of our personal and social lives migrate to online platforms?  How do we develop trust there? 

Speaking at the conference, Hermen Maat described how he and his partner wanted to explore the subjective experiences of trust and privacy in a world of ubiquitous personal communications.  We face a paradox in our world of ubiquitous telecommunications:  “While in our changing social eco-system we increasingly demand transparency, we cover our bodies with personal communication technology.”  Our mobile phones function as a kind of “personal armor,” said Maat, covering our bodies and rendering us inaccessible to the public.  And yet we still need to cultivate trust, if only to consummate business deals. 

If our electronic devices function as “digital data veils,” Maat reasoned, why not explore that idea by connecting it to its nearest analogue – the wearing of a burqa? 

Maat and Lancel developed an interactive wearable “DataVeil” to cover one’s entire body.  Gender-neutral and one-size-fits all, it is “inspired by eastern and western traditions, like a monks’ habit, a burqa, Darth Vader, and a 'trustworthy' chalk stripe business suit,” they explain.  “When wearing the DataVeil it functions as a second skin.  Flexible, invisible touch sensors woven into the smart fabric of the veil, transform your body into an intuitive, tangible interface. It is a a membrane for scanning an intimate, networking body experience.”

Belgian Greens Explore a Commons Agenda

The Greens in Belgium have been taking a serious look at the potential of the commons to transform their political agenda.  Last week, a thoughtful 60-page report on a one-day symposium on the commons, "The Commons:  (Co)Managing Commonly Owned Resources" (pdf file), was released.  It describes the highlights of a March 9, 2012, event organized by the Green European Foundation in cooperation with the Belgian Green foundations Oikos and Etopia.  An overview of the symposium is available here.  The full report is here. My previous blog post on this event is here.

The report brings together a number of papers presented at the symposium (including mine).  Here is the contents page:

Introduction

Conceptual Clarification

The Commons:  DNA of a Revival of Policy Culture (David Bollier)

Science:  The Commons and Knowledge (Valerie Peugeot)

Nature for All, and By All:  The Common Resources of Environmental Infrastructure (Pablo Servigne)

Constructing a New System:  Collectively Produced Common Resources (Maarten Roels)

Reclaiming Finance and the Economy:  Economic Commons (Arnaud Zacharie)

Sharing without Owning:  Genetic Heritage as a Common Resource (Tom Dedeurwaerdere)

Conclusion:  The Commons and Reinventing Prosperity (Tom Dedeurwaerdere and Isabelle Cassiers)

A Lucid New Primer on the Collaborative Economy

For anyone scratching their head about how to understand the deeper social and economic dynamics of online networks, a terrific new report has been released by Michel Bauwens called Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy.  Michel, who directs the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives and works with me at the Commons Strategies Group, is a leading thinker and curator of developments in the emerging P2P economy. 

The report was prepared for Orange Labs, a division of the French telecom company, as a comprehensive survey and analysis of new forms of collaborative production on the Internet.  The report is a massive 346 pages (downloadable as a pdf file under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license) and contains 543 footnotes.  But it is entirely clear and accessible to non-techies.  Unlike so many popular books on this subject that are either larded with colorful hyperbole and overly long anecdotes, or arcane technical detail, the Bauwens report cuts to the chase, giving tightly focuses analyses of the key principles of online cooperation.  The report is meaty, informative, comprehensive and well-documented.

Two paragraphs from the Introduction give a nice overview:

Two main agents of transformation guide this work. One is the emergence of community dynamics as an essential ingredient of doing business. It is no longer a matter of autonomous and separated corporations marketing to essentially isolated consumers, it is now a matter of deeply inter-networked economic actors involved in vocal and productive communities. The second is that the combined effect of digital reproduction and the increasingly 'socialized' production of value, makes the individual and corporate privatization of 'intellectual' property if not untenable, then certainly more difficult , and in all likelihood, ultimately unproductive. Hence the combined development of community-oriented and 'open' business models, which rely on more 'social' forms of intellectual property.

In this work, we therefore look at community dynamics that are mobilized by traditional actors (open innovation, crowdsourcing), and new models where the community's value creation is at its core (the free software, shared design and open hardware models). We then look at monetization in the absence of private IP. Linked to these developments are the emergence of distributed physical infrastructures, where the evolution of the networked computer is mirrored in the development of networked production and even financing. Indeed the mutualization of knowledge goes hand in hand with the mutualization of physical infrastructures, such as collaborative consumption and peer to peer marketplaces, used to mobilize idle resources and assets more effectively.

End Climate Silence

It is amazing amidst all the media coverage of Hurricane Sandy that there is barely a peep about the likely role of global warming.  Neither President Obama nor Mitt Romney could be bothered to mention the issue during their three recent campaign debates. Nor have many public figures drawn the linkages between extreme weather events in the US this summer (drought, heat wave, wildfires) and global warming.  Of course, there are also the many ecological changes occurring around the world that scientists link to a hotter atmosphere.

Jeff Masters, a leading hurricane tracker and weatherman, has said that water temperature in the mid-Atlantic this year is 5°F warmer than average, according to the 350.org website.  This allows hurricanes to travel farther north and contributing to “an unusually large amount of water vapor available to make heavy rain.”

Since the governing classes are determined to look the other way, the burden of changing public opinion and mobilizing effective responses has fallen to ordinary commoners.  Yesterday, a few dozen activists with 350.org unfurled this succinct demand in New York City's Times Square as Hurricane Sandy chugged toward the estimated 66 million people in its projected path.

Update:  Bloomberg Business Week comes out with a "controversial" cover story days after the storm:

The Little-Known Origins of Monopoly, the Board Game

One of the games of childhood in the US, and in many other places around the world, is the board game known as Monopoly.  This classic board game pits players in a race to assemble monopolies of real estate so that they can charge higher prices and win the game by bankrupting their opponents.  Forming a monopoly is celebrated, along with the deceptions, predation and ruthlessness that any good competitor must show.  But hey, it's just a game! 

What is less well-known is the very different board game that preceded Monopoly and formed the basis for it.  The Landlord’s Game, as it was called, was originally conceived by actress Lizzie Magie in 1906.  She set forth a game in which people fought monopolies and cooperated to share the wealth.  The story of the true origins of Monopoly is masterfully told in the latest issue of Harper’s magazine by Christopher Ketcham.  “Monopoly is Theft” is the title of his article, which describes “the antimonopolist history of the world’s most popular game.”

Lizzie Magie was greatly influenced by Henry George, the author of the 1879 book, Progress and Poverty, who famously proposed a single tax on land as a way to fight unjustified monopolies of land.  She saw The Landlord’s Game as a way to popularize George’s teachings, especially the idea that no one could claim to own land.  As Ketcham writes, Henry George believed that private land ownership was an “erroneous and destructive principle” and that land should be held in common, with members of society acting collectively as “the general landlord.” 

The way that monopolies in land could be prevented – and the social value of land socialized for the benefit of all – was via a tax on land value. There was no need to overthrow capitalism; one need merely impose a single tax on land that would prevent monopolists from enjoying unearned, unfair "rents."  Ketcham provides a wonderful short history of Georgist thought and the great influence that it had in the late nineteenth century.  Henry George was celebrated by Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain and John Dewey as one of the great reformers of his time.  He was also reviled by the Catholic Church, landlords and businessmen as more dangerous than Karl Marx.

The International Elevate Award Goes to Women’s Network for Sustainable Development in Africa

Every year the Elevate Festival in Graz, Austria, awards its International Elevate Award to an exemplary project of commoners, a recognition that comes with a 2,500 euro prize.  Elevate is a rare event that brings together cutting-edge music with leading thinkers about the commons and politics.  What a combo!  I had the privilege to attend four years ago, which led to some collaborations on the commons that continue to this day.

The Elevate Awards don't just recognize past achievements, but also future promise.  As the name "elevate" implies, the awards seek to recognize under-recognized but strong, innovative projects that take account of "the environmental and cultural commons of our planet." 

The 2012 winner of the Elevate Award has just been announced:  the Women’s Network for Sustainable Development in Africa, or REFDAF. The Senegal-based organization is a network of hundreds of grassroots women’s associations in the southern regions of West Africa.  It’s dedicated to the empowerment of women to establish their own livelihoods through sustainable regional production. A live-stream of the awards show on October 28 will be shown here.

The State of Minnesota Goes After Free Online Education

Shortly after I posted this, the State of Minnesota changed its mind, as reported here.  Nice to know that officialdom can change its mind in the face of the blazingly obvious.

In a sign of just how deeply rooted cultural prejudices against free culture truly are, the State of Minnesota has banned Coursera, the free online course website, from offering its courses to Minnesota citizens.  As reported in Slate magazine (itself drawn from the Chronicle of Higher Education), “Free Online Education Illegal in Minnesota.”  Coursera is a website that partners with Stanford, Columbia, the University of Michigan and other top universities around the world to offer some of their courses online for free. 

Why is this so objectionable to the state of Minnesota?  Technically, the state wants to enforce its right to approve anyone that offers educational instruction within its borders. It is especially concerned with preventing fly-by-night schools from bilking people with worthless degrees.

But if the courses offered are for free, and if no degrees are being offered, what’s the problem?  The state official in charge of enforcing the law told the Slate reporter that Minnesota residents could be wasting their time by taking the courses.  So it's come to this:  state regulators are worried about our frittering away our time on free courses like “Principles of Macroeconomics” and “Modern and Contemporary American Poetry.”

Occupy Endures

Whatever happened to Occupy?  At the one-year anniversary, we saw a smattering of retrospectives, most of them focused on its superficial aspects.  One of the more thoughtful accounts of the enduring significance of Occupy is Rebecca Solnit’s recent piece in Guernica magazine, “Occupy Your Victories.” 

Solnit is an activist and the author of (among other books) A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, a lyrical, brilliant account of the deep empathy of human beings that manifests itself when absolute crises occur. 

Solnit’s piece is refreshing because she considers the impact of Occupy in a larger time-frame and with an emphasis on how it has irreversibly changed our political culture.  The encampments may be gone, but the cultural understandings made public by the movement endure.  Inequality of wealth and opportunity, the corruption of democracy, the dysfunctions of our economic system, the state's reliance on surveillance and violent repression of free speech -- these are now widely accepted ideas. 

What also endures are the highly diverse networks of activists that the movement forged, and scores of discrete victories, big and small, in countless comunities around the world.  These victories should not be forgotten.

The Great Value Shift -- And What It Means for "Memory Institutions"

On October 11, I gave a talk at the "Economies of the Commons 3 Conference:  Sustainable Futures for Digital Archives."  My remarks were entitled, "The Great Value Shift:  From Stocks to Flows, from Property Rights to Commons."  The text is below.  A video of my talk (29:36 minutes) can be watched here.

This panel is supposed to focus on new forms of value creation in the “audiovisual commons.”  I am not an archivist and I’m not even a techie.  But I have studied the commons quite a bit.  Today I’d like to suggest how the idea of the commons can help us think more clearly how to manage sustainable digital archives in the future.  The commons helps us in a number of ways.  It gives us fresh philosophical premises, ethical principles, valuable legal models, and a worldview that can help us understand value in some new ways. 

A big part of our challenge is simply shedding the comfortable prejudices with which we have been brought up.  Let’s face it, we are creatures of the 20th century and its overweening faith in free markets, private property, technology as the path to “progress.”  It’s not easy to escape this mentality.  Or as John Maynard Keynes put it when trying to introduce his own new ideas to economics:  “The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious.  The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify…into every corner of our minds.”

The ideas behind the commons are actually quite simple and obvious.  It’s about access, sharing, fairness, collaboration and long-term sustainability.  It’s about protecting and expanding a resource.  But living in a culture that celebrates markets, large institutions and copyright has instilled some deep prejudices in us about how the world can and must work.  The language of the commons can help us re-think these assumptions by giving us a new vocabulary and perspective.  And if we’re ingenious enough, it may help us reinvent many contemporary systems of production and distribution as commons.

The Chakrabarty Case and the Ownership of Lifeforms

The brave new world of “owning life” began 32 years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court first approved the patenting of a genetically engineered bacteria that can help decompose oil.  By a 5-4 decision, it was the first instance of U.S. law recognizing ownership in a "manufactured" lifeform.  On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to participate on a panel with the microbiologist who brought that 1980 case, Ananda Chakrabarty, who was then an employee of General Electric. 

The panel was part of a series of live radio programs hosted by Action Speaks! in Providence, Rhode Island, an usually intelligent, spirited show hosted by the genial polymath Marc Levitt.  The theme for this fall’s series is “Private Rights and Public Fights,” which is devoted to looking at “moments when the rights of the individual have clashed with the needs or beliefs of the public—and where the line between private and public has been defined or blurred.”

Anyone who noses around the legal literature soon realizes that the case of Diamond v. Chakrabarty is a real landmark case because it opened the door for the  patenting of lifeforms.  Over the past thirty years, more than 3,000 gene patents have been granted.  Nearly 20 percent of the human genome is now privately owned.  The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued nearly 50,000 patents involving human genetic material.  Patents have been granted for microorganisms, genetically modified plants and animals, stem cells, tissue and many other living things.

Chakrabarty, now is a 74-year-old professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago, had few reflections to offer on the seismic impact of the case.  He was proud of his role in legal and scientific history, but he focused mostly on the scientific aspect of his work and of patent law in general.  Too bad, because I think the extra-legal, extra-scientific ramifications of the Chakrabarty case have been significant.