digital technology

In the 1990s and early 2000s, Internet culture was bursting with hopeful experimentation and dreams of political emancipation. John Perry Barlow, the visionary digital activist, published a famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace that featured grandiose lines like: 

“Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel. I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind, on behalf of the future. I ask you ask you of the past to leave us alone. You were not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”

For newcomers to the Internet, which at the time was most of us, these lines were a stirring glimpse of emancipation via the Internet. Given the giddy pace of disruptive socio-technical innovation at the time, they were also quite credible. If you are under 30, you probably don't remember the excitement surrounding explosion of free and open source software, and especially Linux as a renegade operating system, and the rise of the blogosphere and wikis. Political insurgents everywhere were transfixed by the promise of BitTorrent and peer-to-peer file sharing as it leapfrogged over a stodgy, exploitative music industry. The reinvention of copyright law via Creative Commons licenses allowed ordinary people to legally authorize sharing of content, while countless other tech innovations facilitated novel forms of collaboration and sharing. 

Now that capitalism and nation-states have utterly domesticated and colonized the Internet as a commercial marketplace, Barlow’s manifesto comes off as terribly naïve (even though his contemporary peers, the crypto world, serve up similar blue-sky utopianism).

Let’s face it, the capitalist/state alliance has effectively contained and tamed user sovereignty on the Internet. Consider the geo-local surveillance of our online lives, social media’s algorithmic manipulations of our online feeds and of public opinion, campaigns of disinformation and hacking from the alt-right, Russia, and other rogue players, and corporate paywalls and national firewalls that are Balkanizing the once-unitary Web.

It was therefore refreshing to encounter From Capital to Commons: Exploring the Promise of a World Beyond Capitalism, a new book by Hannes Gerhardt, a professor of geography at the University of West Georgia (US). While Big Tech monopolies, compliant legislatures and intelligence agencies have crushed the soaring ideals that one prevailed in Internet and hacker cultures, Gerhardt bravely argues that there are still ways that commoning and technology could engineer a transition away from capitalism.

Here's a fanciful but almost-real scenario: the bees, squirrels, geese, bugs, trees, and other species of your local park have decided that they've had enough of human aggression and abuse. They're not going to take it anymore, and rise up and demand equal rights with humans. Through a series of interspecies assemblies, a treaty is negotiated to ensure that every living being in the local ecosystem can flourish.

This scenario is a "live action role-playing" (LARP) game devised by Furtherfield, a London-based arts collective as part of its stewardship of part of the Victorian-era Finsbury Park. Over the next three years, Furtherfield is inviting humans to don masks and play the roles of each of seven species in negotiating "The Treaty of Finsbury Park 2025" -- the name of the project.

By casting humans as beetles and squirrels attending Interspecies Assemblies as delegates of their species, the LARP aims to help people develop "empathic pathways to nonhuman lifeforms through play." There is even a Sentience Dial to help different species communicate with each other. Who knows, this process may actually make Finsbury Park a more lush and lively place?

This adventure in animism is just one project that Furtherfield has hosted over the past 25 years, most of which blend art, digital technologies, and social action in some creative fashion. In my latest Frontier of Commoning podcast (Episode #24), I speak with Ruth Catlow about Furtherfield's distinctive approach to participatory art as a way of thinking anew about the world.

Catlow, an artist, curator, and co-leader of Furtherfield, has been a guiding visionary for its many artistic projects since its inception in 1996. She helps orchestrate collaborations with various local, national and international partners -- but especially with ordinary people. The point of its many artworks and technology projects is to try to get us to see the world differently, and to honor the role of art in envisioning new futures for ourselves.

Improbable as it seems, there is actually a vibrant citizens’ research and development lab for innovation in civic life and culture.  It has its own building, funding from the city of Madrid,  and robust participation from activists, academics, techies, artists, policy experts and ordinary citizens.

Welcome to Medialab Prado in Madrid, Spain. It’s a very special institution that explores new forms of commoning on various tech platforms and systems. Billing itself as a “collective intelligence laboratory for democratic participation,” the lab pursues a wide-ranging agenda of R&D with great brio. In this moment of great danger to democracy, I find it inspiring that a serious, progressive-minded institution is boldly prowling the frontiers of experimental practice.

To showcase some of the amazing work that Medialab Prado does, I interviewed Marcos García, the lab’s artistic director, for Episode #7 of my podcast Frontiers of Commoning. Marcos is a wonderfully gracious fellow who exudes a reassuring calm despite a formidable responsibility in overseeing many ambitious, speculative projects. Let me offer a brief, incomplete tour.

An open data project is exploring new ways to use shareable databases in creative, public-spirited ways. The “Follow the Food” workshop, for example, investigated how to tell data-driven stories through journalism. It developed data visualizations about the food system so that people can better understand where their food comes from, and how and why that systems works the way it does.    

The “Eating Against Collapse” project is trying to imagine scenarios that can get us beyond the current, unsustainable agro-industrial food model. Organizers solicited proposals for new models of agricultural production and distribution, and then ran a prototyping workshop for two weeks, along with an international seminar on the work, a public presentation of the prototypes, and an exhibition of them.

I’m pleased to announce the launch of a new podcast series, Frontiers of Commoning, which is a project of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics. Every month I plan to host a lively conversation with creative pioneers who are demonstrating new ways of commoning.

In my travels over the years, I’ve encountered dozens of fascinating people who are developing commons in unlikely and challenging contexts. There are commoners who are making theater into commons and creating regional currencies to retain locally generated value. There are folks who are trying to create new types of commons for bodies of water like the Great Lakes in North America, and people stewarding forest commons and creating platform cooperatives to challenge Silicon Valley.

The podcast format appealed to me because it enables a lively back-and-forth conversation in their own voice. I plan to ask people: So how does your commons work and what special problems have you had to overcome? I'd like to get a sense of the personality of the commoners interviewed and the emotional complexities of their work.

In episodes of thirty to sixty minutes, Frontiers of Commoning will get up close and personal with the emerging practices of lots of path-breaking commoners. The first episode features the two artistic directors of Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts -- Carlos Uriona and Matthew Glassman. They explain how commoning informs the performances and stewardship of their artist-owned ensemble theater company. Every summer, the original productions and creative outdoor staging of Double Edge Theatre performances attract sell-out crowds to its farm in the green hills of western Massachusetts.

The organization is also a leading force in a national network of theater companies, performers, and arts and culture projects that is exploring how commoning lies at the heart of artistic work and social engagement. And this only begins to scratch the surface. Here is a link to the first podcast episode.

For too long, discussions about how blockchain software could change the world have been dominated by libertarian-minded techies and market-driven startups. No wonder they are dazzled by Bitcoin, the currency for capitalist speculation, and by turbo-charged networked markets. 

This approach has left a huge void in our thinking about alternative futures -- ones that could be progressive, cooperative, and collectively emancipatory, and not just the next, more stifling iteration of capitalism. We need to ask: What sorts of systems might be possible if we were to design new tech platforms and protocols to facilitate commoning? 

How refreshing that we now have some answers. The basic idea is to create variations on a new institutional form, the “Distributed Cooperative Organization,” or DisCO. Check out 80 riveting pages on this topic, an extended essay entitled, “If I Only Had a Heart: The DisCO Manifesto,” published by the Guerrilla Media Collective in collaboration with the Transnational Institute.

The authors of this essay are my friends and colleagues Stacco Troncoso (lead author) and Ann Marie Utratel (coauthor and lead editor). Both have long worked with the P2P Foundation, Commons Transition, Guerrilla Translation and Guerrilla Media Collective groups. (Full disclosure: I gave the authors some comments on early drafts.) 

In an amazingly prescient essay, “The Exit From Capitalism Has Already Begun,” journalist and social philosopher André Gorz in 2007 explained how computerization and networks are causing a profound crisis in capitalism by making knowledge more shareable. He argues that shareable knowledge and culture undercuts capitalist control over the global market system as the exclusive apparatus for production and consumption (and thus our "necessary" roles as wage-earners and consumers). 

The essay, translated by Chris Turner, originally appeared in the journal EcoRev in Autumn 2007 and was reprinted in Gorz’s 2008 book Ecologica. It’s worth revisiting this essay because it so succinctly develops a theme that is now playing out, one that Jeremy Rifkin reprises and elaborates upon in his 2014 book The Zero Marginal Cost Society. 

Let’s start with the conundrum that capital faces as computerization makes it possible to produce more with less labor.  Gorz writes:

The cost of labor per unit of output is constantly diminishing and the price of products is also tending to fall. The more the quantity of labor for a given output decreases, the more the value produced per worker – productivity – has to increase if the amount of achievable profit is not to fall. We have, then, this apparent paradox: the more productivity rises, the more it has to go on rising, in order to prevent the volume of profit from diminishing. Hence the pursuit of productivity gains moves ever faster, manpower levels tend to reduce, while pressure on workers intensifies and wage levels fall, as does the overall payroll. The system is approaching an internal limit at which production and investment in production cease to be sufficiently profitable.

Over time, Gorz explains, this leads investors to turn away from the “real economy” of production, where productivity gains and profits are harder to achieve, and instead seek profit through financial speculation in "fictitious" forms of value such as debt and new types of financial instruments. The value is ficititious in the sense that loans, return on investment,  future economic growth, trust and goodwill are social intangibles that are quite unlike physical capital. They depend upon collective belief and social trust, and can evaporate overnight.

Still, it is generally easier and more profitable to invest in these (fictitious, speculative) forms of financial value than in actually producing goods and services at a time when productivity gains and profit are declining.  No wonder speculative bubbles are so attractive:  There is just too much capital is sloshing around looking for profitable investment which the real economy is less capable of delivering.  No wonder companies have so much cash on hand (from profits) that they are declining to invest. No wonder the amount of available finance capital dwarfs the real economy. Gorz noted that financial assets in 2007 stood at $160 trillion, which was three to four times global GDP – a ratio that has surely gotten more extreme in the past eight years.

This and other questions are addressed in “The Weightless Marketplace:  Coming to Terms with Innovative Payment Systems, Digital Currencies and Online Labor Markets,” a just-released report that I wrote for the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program. The report distills the more salient points raised at a three-day conference last August that brought together leading players in banking, financial services and online labor platforms.   

Most of the conference participants are in the business of inventing or adapting to new types of digital payment systems or data-based services. They include major players like JP Morgan Chase, Intuit and VISA as well as upstarts such as Bitcoin, ID3 and the identity-management service Personal.

The basic story in digital markets is the ongoing elimination of “friction” in making transactions – reducing the barriers of geography, time and transaction costs. Hence the title “the weightless marketplace.”  “Reducing economic friction” has been the story of the World Wide Web from its beginnings, of course, but the trend is now reaching new levels of intensity and disruption.  My role, as rapporteur, was to represent the diverse points of view while providing my own interpretive synthesis. 

Perhaps the most fascinating points of discussion revolved around Bitcoin.  Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding it, Bitcoin’s basic functionality and soaring popularity have some serious implications for banks, credit card companies, PayPal and other payment systems. Peter Vessenes of the Bitcoin Foundation noted that digital technology can move value to anywhere in the world, at any time, using just 100 bytes of data.  And it can do it at very little cost – much less than the per-transaction charges levied by credit cards, for example.

Critics charge that Bitcoin facilitates illicit transactions, money laundering and terrorist activity, not to mention tax evasion.  Vessenes replied that Bitcoin is “way less anonymous than cash” – because the permanent global ledger of transactions for each Bitcoin is accessible and can be used to help identify buyers and sellers.  Another reason that Bitcoin is controversial is that it represents a potential threat to the sovereignty of nation-states, because it could undermine their monetary and fiscal policies.  That’s why regulation of Bitcoin is inevitable, many agreed.

But apart from Bitcoin’s fate, the larger question may be how existing banks and financial companies will respond to the coming “democratization of money.”  Several factors are fueling this trend, according to Gartner, the consulting firm:  individual access to massive, high-speed flows of information, the proliferation of mobile computing (smartphones, tablets, etc.), the rise of the cloud, and the social commons of highly specialized communities of interest.

Five years ago I wrote about the concept of “sousveillance,” which was then a budding counterpoint to surveillance. Surveillance, of course, is the practice of the powerful monitoring people under their dominion, especially people who are suspects or prisoners – or today, simply citizens.  Sousveillance -- “to watch from below” – has now taken off, fueled by an explosion of miniaturized digital technologies and the far-reaching abuses of the surveillance market/state. 

Following my earlier post on corporate espionage of activists, I figured it was an appropriate moment to revisit this topic.  As it happens, the fellow who coined the term “sousveillance,” in 1998 -- Steve Mann, a pioneer in “wearable computing” who teaches at the University of Toronto – has recently written two terrific essays on the subject.  Both were released at the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers] International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS) in June 2013. 

Mann argues that sousveillance is an inevitable trend in technological societies and that, on balance, it “has positive survival characteristics.”  Sousveillance occurs when citizens record their encounters with police, for example. This practice exposed the outrageous police brutality against Occupy protesters (blasts of pepper spray in their faces at point-blank range) and helped transform small citizen protests against Wall Street into a global movement.

In the first of his paired essays, Mann writes:

We now live in a society in which we have both “the few watching the many” (surveillance), AND “the many watching the few” (sousveillance).  Widespread sousveillance will cause a transition from our one-sided surveillance society back to a situation akin to olden times when the sheriff could see what everyone was doing AND everyone could see what the sheriff was doing.  We name this neutral form of watching “veillance” – from the French word “veiller,” which means“to watch.”  Veillance is a broad concept that includes both surveillance (oversight) and sousveillance (undersight), as well as databeillance, uberveillance, etc.

It follows that: (1) sousveillance (undersight) is necessary to a healthy, fair and balanced society whenever surveillance (oversight) is already being used; and (2) sousveillance has numerous moral, ethical, socioeconomic, humanistic/humanitarian and practical justifications that will guarantee its widespread adoption, despite opposing sociopolitical forces.

(This passage is from “Veillance and Reciprocal Transparency:  Surveillance versus Sousveillance, AR Glass, Lifeglogging and Wearable Computing,” available as a pdf download here. A companion essay, “The Inevitability of the Transition from a Surveillance-Society to a Veillance-Society:  Moral and Economic Grounding for Sousveillance,” can be found here.)