David Bollier

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.”

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 text below is the second half of the Introduction to the recently published anthology of essays, The Wealth of the Commons:  A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press).  The first half was posted yesterday.  More about the book can be found at www.wealthofthecommons.org.

As the corruption of the market/state duopoly has deepened, our very language for identifying problems and imagining solutions has been compromised. The snares and deceptions embedded in our prevailing political language go very deep. Such dualisms as “public” and “private,” and “state” and “market,” and “nature and culture,” for example, are taken as self-evident. As heirs of Descartes, we are accustomed to differentiating “subjective” from “objective,” and “individual” from “collective” as polar opposites. But such polarities are lexical inheritances that are increasingly inapt as the two poles in reality blur into each other. And yet they continue to profoundly structure how we think about contemporary problems and what spectrum of solutions we regard as plausible.

Words have performative force. They make the world. In the very moment that we stop talking about business models, efficiency and profitability as top priorities, we stop seeing ourselves as homo economicus and as objects to be manipulated by computer spreadsheets. We start seeing ourselves as commoners in relationship to others, with a shared history and shared future. We start creating a culture of stewardship and co-responsibility for our commons resources while at the same time defending our livelihoods. This new language situates us as interactive agents of larger collectivities. Our participation in these larger wholes (local communities, online affinity groups, inter-generational traditions) does not eradicate our individuality, but it certainly shapes our preferences, outlooks, values and behaviors: who we are. A key revelation of the commons way of thinking is that we humans are not in fact isolated, atomistic individuals. We are not amoebas with no human agency except hedonistic “utilitarian preferences” that are expressed in the marketplace.

No: We are commoners – creative, distinctive individuals inscribed within larger wholes. We may have many unattractive human traits fueled by individual fears and ego, but we are also creatures entirely capable of self-organization, cooperation, a concern for fairness and social justice, and sacrifice for the larger good and future generations.

I’m pleased to report that the English edition of a new anthology of essays, The Wealth of the Commons:  A World Beyond Market and State, is now available!  I’ve been working on editing the book with my German colleague Silke Helfrich for nearly a year and a half, so it’s wonderfully satisfying to see the book in its final, printed form. 

Let me immodestly state:  Never before have so many different international voices about the commons been brought together in one volume.  The Wealth of the Commons consists of 73 essays by a diverse roster of international activists, academics and project leaders. It consists of descriptions of specific commons innovations, essays on the theory and economics of commons, accounts of different types of enclosures around the world, and much else.

There are accounts of fishing commons off the coast of Chile; fruit sharing from abandoned orchards in Germany; and an overview of subsistence forestry in Nepal.  There are many accounts of market enclosures, from dam-building in India to mining in South America to the international land grab now underway in Africa and Asia.  The book also features a series of essays on knowledge commons and more than a dozen essays focused on commons-friendly policy innovations.

The soft-bound, 442-page book is published by Levellers Press, a small, innovative publisher here in Massachusetts that is also a worker coop and itself ardently committed to the commons.  I love the fact that a book on the commons is being published by a publisher that truly honors the Levellers, one of the great movements of commoners in the seventeenth century.  The book can be bought from the Levellers website for US$22.50 plus shipping and handling.  More about the book can be found on its website, www.wealthofthecommons.org.