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.”
Does capitalism produce prosperity and development while indigenous culture leads to a life of poverty and stagnation? This question is usually addressed by one side or the other, and rarely gets a straight-up, interactive debate. So it is treat to encounter precisely such a debate about the virtues of private property and markets vs. the collective governance of Native American tribes.
Forbes, whose promotional tagline for years was “Capitalist Tool,” has its own ideological axe to grind, of course. It amounts to this formula: more property rights = greater market development = greater prosperity and happiness for everyone. Apart from flogging this familiar bit of capitalist propaganda, one has to wonder if Forbes’ real interest in is opening up investor access to minerals and oil on Native American lands. What better way to do that than argue that capitalism will alleviate poverty on the res. Make the humanitarian, populist case that private property rights will help impoverished Indians (the very same arguments that Members of Congress made a century ago for stealing Indian lands and forcing tribes to assimilate into mainstream white society).
Koppisch wrote: “To explain the poverty of the reservations, people usually point to alcoholism, corruption or school-dropout rates, not to mention the long distances to jobs and the dusty undeveloped land that doesn’t seem good for growing much. But those are just symptoms. Prosperity is built on property rights, and reservations often have neither. They’re a demonstration of what happens when property rights are weak or non-existent.”
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. Joshua Farley
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.
At one time in American life, a day at the beach was open to anyone. Over the past fifty years, however, that expectation has been slowly eroded and parceled into expensive, privately owned beachfront lots. As Marquette professor Andrew W. Kahrl writes in The New York Times “…up and down the Eastern Seaboard, beachfront property owners, wealthy municipalities and private homeowners’ associations threw up a variety of physical and legal barriers designed to ensure the exclusivity — and marketability — of the beach. These measures were not only antisocial but also environmentally destructive.”
The historic bulwark against the enclosure of coastal lands has been the public trust doctrine, a legal principle with deep roots in Roman law that was eventually incorporated into British and then American law. However, U.S. state courts have generally given the public trust doctrine very different interpretations, and state legislatures have enacted different standards of public access to and ecological protection of coastal lands.
As a result, states like California and Texas have remarkably open access to all beaches while eastern seaboard states like Connecticut and New Jersey have fairly restrictive rules. Such states apply the public trust doctrine only to fishing and navigation, for example. It is not widely appreciated that this is not just unfair to people who can't afford to buy or rent their own beach house, it’s an environmental danger.
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.
Josh Wallaert, writing at the Places Journal (at the Design Observer Group) – “the online journal of architecture, landscape and urbanism,” has a wonderful post about nominally public spaces on the Internet. The post, called “State of the Commons,” notes:
….Flickr has become a ghost town in recent years, conservatively managed by its corporate parent Yahoo, which has ceded ground to photo-sharing alternatives like Facebook (and its subsidiary Instagram), Google Plus (and Picasa and Panoramio), and Twitter services (TwitPic and Yfrog). An increasing share of the Internet’s visual resources are now locked away in private cabinets, untagged and unsearchable, shared with a public no wider than the photographer’s personal sphere. Google’s Picasa and Panoramio support creative commons licenses, but finding the settings is not easy. And Facebook, the most social place to share photos, is the least public. Hundreds of millions of people who have photographed culturally significant events, people, buildings and landscapes, and who would happily give their work to the commons if they were prompted, are locked into sites that don’t even provide the option. The Internet (and the mobile appverse) is becoming a chain of walled gardens that trap even the most civic-minded person behind the hedges, with no view of the outside world…..Canton Public Library, 1903, Canton, Ohio; entry in the Wiki Loves Monuments USA contest. [Photo by Bgottsab], from Designobserver.com.
For better and worse, public-making in the early 21st-century has been consigned to private actors: to activists, urban interventionists, community organizations and — here’s the really strange thing — online corporations. The body politic has retreated to nominally public spaces controlled by Google, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, which now constitute a vital but imperfect substitute for the town square. Jonathan Massey and Brett Snyder draw an analogy between these online spaces and the privately-owned public space of Zuccotti Park, the nerve center for Occupy Wall Street, and indeed online tools have been used effectively to support direct actions and participatory democracies around the world. Still, the closest most Americans get to the messy social activity of cooperative farm planning is the exchange of digital carrots in Farmville.
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.
As neoliberal policies put the squeeze on cities, what role can the commons play? Some commoners in Greece decided to explore this issue by mapping the commons of Athens – and then this year, Istanbul. The results are an inspiration and prototype for commoners in cities around the world. The online maps and videos make visible the subjective, experiential commons that sustain people’s daily lives, giving a new twist to the official maps of a city.
The “Mapping the Commons” project got its start when the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens commissioned the Spanish collective Hackitectura to convene an interdisciplinary group of artists, sociologists, scientists and researchers from universities in Athens. Hackitectura is a group of architects and programmers that theorizes, and develops projects, that explore how space, electronic flows and social networks converge.
The Athens project describes itself as “an open collaborative cartography of the contemporary metropolis based on the importance of the commons in times in of disaster capitalism.” The project explicitly wanted to imagine a new Athens by seeing it through the lens of the commons. As the organizers put it:
We propose the hypothesis that a new [view of the] city will come out of the process, one where the many and multiple, often struggling against the state and capital, are continuously, and exuberantly, supporting and producing the commonwealth of its social life.
The workshop will develop collaborative mapping strategies, using free software participatory wiki-mapping tools.
Organizers noted, “Due to our tradition of the private and the public, of property and individualism, the commons are still hard to see for our late 20th century eyes. We propose, therefore, a search for the commons; a search that will take the form of a mapping process. We understand mapping, of course, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and as artists and social activists have been using it during the last decade, as a performance that can become a reflection, a work of art, a social action.”
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.”
ould 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.![Canton Public Library, 1903, Canton, Ohio; entry in the Wiki Loves Monuments USA contest. [Photo by Bgottsab], from DesignObserver.com](/sites/default/files/u6/Screen%20shot%202012-11-27%20at%208.57.03%20PM.png "Canton Public Library, 1903, Canton, Ohio; entry in the Wiki Loves Monuments USA contest. [Photo by Bgottsab], from Designobserver.com.")
es, and develops projects, that explore how space, electronic flows and social networks converge. 
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