David Bollier
From apc.au wiki
For Growing the Global Information Commons (commissioned paper) and Nailing The Commons (micro-doc).
day02 – Clip 016 - 19
APC: What is your understanding of the commons?
David Bollier: Well, the commons is a different form of social governance than the market. There is no money involved. There are no contracts, there are no lawyers, there is no advertising. But the commons can nonetheless be a terrific source for creating value.
There's no single definition of the commons in that it varies from one locality, from one community to another. The commons is essentially a social form of managing a resource and it's doing it in a way that is not like the market. Common examples include free software, online communities and Wikipedia. But there are lots of different commons in the real world – offline – for example, villages that collectively manage a water resource or fishery. Now this isn't communism, but it is socially negotiated and managed ways of controlling a resource.
The virtue of a commons is that it tends to be more sustainable and socially fair than most markets, because the collective needs need to be taken care of. Also, long-term ecological needs are more likely to be taken care of -- which is something the market is notoriously unable, or often ineffective, at doing.
So the commons is essentially a different paradigm for managing and creating wealth.
APC: You spoke of the great potential of the commons in terms of imposing good governance / democracy. Why has this not worked so far and why do you think the digital commons could make the change?
David Bollier: Well, digital commons are especially effective because they are about unleashing abundance -- whereas in the offline world, like natural resources, a commons is about managing scarcity – something that's finite -- and that's a more difficult proposition.
Commons in the online world can arise almost spontaneously, and with minimal standards, protocols and social norms for governing something. The can be seen in the tremendous "prosperity" that Wikipedia, free software and Facebook have helped unleash. A commons can arise online if you have the right software architecture and platform and the right shared understandings of how the community is going to work -- a shared ethic, shared ideals. And so the online world is especially susceptible to the commons paradigm, because it does not necessarily involve a lot of effort and you're not dealing with physical resources that deplete. There's a big difference between online and offline commons.
APC: Where do you see the future potential of the commons? In the developing world for instance?
David Bollier: Well, let me say first of all that I think that there's an emerging "commons sector" in the online world especially. As online communities mature, there's a vast differentiation occurring. You not only have free software and Wikipedia, you have Creative Commons licensed content, you have social networking communities, you have the blogosphere, you have collaborative archives. You have a whole ecosystem of commons, which are themselves a distinct way of creating valuable things. I think that as this sector matures, it's increasingly going to compete with government and business as a more effective way, and as a more socially responsive way, of creating valuable things and providing valuable services.
Whether the online commons ethic will migrate to the natural resource world... well, that's a difficult question to answer. In developing countries, the commons is already a very powerful, recognized category for governing resources. People in developing countries have "lived" with the commons' for centuries. It's the market-saturated world of the United States and Europe that is, in a sense, rediscovering the commons that has been part of human history for many, many millennia.
APC: Is the digital commons taking us from national to planetary governance thinking?
David Bollier: Well, to the extent that the Internet is breaking down all sorts of national boundaries and developing new transnational tribes, so to speak, the commons does propose a challenge to traditional nation states. Particularly because centralised governments don't have as good information as many online commons. Because so many commons are dispersed and decentralised, they can get more accurate, on-the-ground knowledge, assemble it, and make sense of it, faster than governments can. The U.S. State Department can't react as rapidly to global networks, be they Al-Qaeda, ethnic Diaspora groups or any other online community that has genuine grassroots participants. That's why the commons poses a profound challenge to nation-states and how they're organised -- and to global business, I might add. If global business can't have the kind of social trust and connection that is occurring in online communities, then it is not going to be able to compete as well in the future. In some cases, the commons is out-competing businesses in providing valuable services. So the next few years should be interesting!
The singular achievement of the free software movement has been the General Public Licence, which is a license for keeping the value created by coders within the commons. That is the overall challenge: how to protect value created within the commons from market appropriation. That's what the Creative Commons licenses do in their own way. That's what certain types of commons do through social means – social sanctions; commoners shun or punish those who try to appropriate the value created by a community. The challenge, looking toward the future, is to develop new means for protecting the value that the commons creates -- protect the commons from market enclosure. This is an important challenge because one of the most serious pathologies of our time is the market enclosure of our commonly shared resources.
One of the real values of talking about the commons is that it provides an alternative, a push-back to neo-liberal policy. It identifies the systemic limitations of neo-liberal economic analysis. Traditionally the market *takes* from the commons without truly paying for the value it extracts....and then it dumps its waste into the commons and says, “Governments, you take care of it!” Conventional economics is very constricted in this sense. It does not take accurate account of the full costs of the market system. It depends on using the commons as a hidden, unacknowledged subsidy and waste dump.
The other valuable thing about the commons paradigm is that it allows you to assert the existence of shared resources that ought to be collectively managed. But it does it in a way that doesn't require you to be anti-corporate or anti-market, in the manner that traditional leftists have been. The commons allows you embrace positive mechanisms of the market such as open business as a healthy alternative. Open businesses try to acknowledge the holistic dimension of resource use, and to share the positive externalities that they generate -- as opposed to appropriating them exclusively for themselves.
The commons enables us to put forward an affirmative vision of value that is not necessarily based on the market or its assumptions. And so it becomes easier to identify and defend the value of intact communities, family life, ecosystems and so forth. Instead of merely resisting conventional trade policies, for example, developing nations might be able to assert a more coherent, positive vision of "development" and "value," one that is not solely based on boosting market activity and capital.
APC: Such as an affirmative vision that ensures right to land?
David Bollier: Think about how Mexican farmers were challenging NAFTA. If they could've said that the integrity of the environment, the integrity of our local communities and the productivity of our corn crops, are all part of a commons management system and it has these positive attributes, that would be a more effective response than just saying, "No, we oppose NAFTA.” Putting the commons on the table starts a different conversation. That's why I see a certain strategic value in talking about the commons.
