In our third and last installment concerning David Bollier’s new book on the Commons movement (Viral Spiral), we asked him for an update, i.e. to reflect on some action recommendations for the present and near future.
Below, we add a video presentation where David explains his ideas to an audience in Graz, Austria, during the Elevate the Commons festival. Together with the other panel contributions, it is well worth seeing as it unites the major advocates of the Commons.
1. Some Speculations About the Future of Digital Citizenship, by David Bollier
“So how might the digital citizen, working through self-organized commons, transform society over the long term? Michel Bauwens asked me to prepare a sort of coda to the last chapter of my book, Viral Spiral. Below, I speculate on some of the sweeping changes that the empowered “netizen” may catalyze.
At this early, embryonic stage of digital citizenship, it is risky to make specific predictions about how online social collectives will reconfigure power relationships and institutional behavior. But it is clear that they will. They already are. Which is why we must remain alert to the shifting dynamics of power so that the commoners can take advantage of the fluid circumstances, and introduce new institutional innovations.
The future of serious journalism is a growing concern, for example. In the United States, the newspaper industry is experiencing unprecedented declines in advertising revenue and subscribers. News aggregators and blogs have begun to turn news into a commodity and even a “free” resource. The Web is also providing fresh competition for local daily newspapers, most of which have been enjoyed local monopolies and impressive profits. But now Craigslist is undercutting the inherent inefficiencies of newspapers by offering free classified ads. Bbloggers and various websites are offering a more satisfying and specialized “news experience” than printed newspapers.
As the traditional business models for newspapers begin to crumble, the search is on for more promising alternatives. Walter Isaacson suggested in his recent Time magazine cover story that micro-payments may be the way to go. But such desperate ideas avoid the deeper truth. Internet users have not just become accustomed to “free” news; they want a different, more participatory and transparent relationship with their news providers. They do not want to “consume” the news, even through micro-payments. They want to engage in a dialogue with news organs and fellow citizens, and even contribute their own expertise and reportage. But unpaid bloggers and enthusiasts will never be able to supplant the kinds of well-reported enterprise journalism that newspapers have historically paid for.
Which is why new revenue models need to be developed. I like the idea of endowed trusts as an alternative, non-market host for serious news. The St. Petersburg (Florida) Times functions as an endowed trust, an arrangement that has allowed it to generate much higher-quality and independent journalism than its corporate peers.
The citizen-journalism movement is experimenting with new models that may yield results. One example is NewAssignment.net, which is mixing professional journalists with amateur contributions. Another example is Spot.us, which invites people to make pledges to help finance the reporting of specific stories in the San Francisco area. Whatever new archetypes emerge, they are not likely to replicate the producer/consumer model that has defined commercial journalism to date. They will be more open and collaborative.
The empowered digital citizen is also transforming corporate organization and strategy. We have already seen how Internet companies like Google, Amazon and eBay save enormous costs by leveraging the collective intelligence of their customers. By using the social recommendations of customers about products (Amazon), ratings of sellers (eBay) and statistics about favorite websites (Google search), companies are both enhancing their performance and saving money.
Eric von Hippel of MIT has studied businesses that look to active online communities as sources of research and development. In Democratizing Innovation, he shows how for-profit enterprises can enter into friendly collaborations with a commons, and build a business model around it. In a pattern played out in many “extreme sports” (skiing, bicycling, hang-gliding, etc.), a company develops new product innovations in collaboration with communities of athletes. The communities, in turn, enjoy easier access to well-designed, specialized equipment. This may be a paradigm for new sorts of collaboration between companies and commoners.
It may be too early to theorize about the best “open business models,” but the future is likely to belong to companies that are able to perform well on open platforms. By relying less on proprietary code and copyrighted content, they will attract engaged and stable user bases. (Whether such companies will be more lucrative than current businesses may be another question entirely.) Newcomer companies that develop symbiotic relationships with their customers are more likely to out-compete conventional companies over the long term. This is because the newcomers can leverage social trust and loyalty – and thus sales revenues – more efficiently than larger, less responsive companies. Large, centralized corporate empires are typically burdened with expensive overhead costs that require government subsidies and regulatory privileges to maintain.
The commons itself is increasingly becoming a source of competition, as Yochai Benkler and others have described. Social collectives are providing for themselves, without the use of cash or contracts, and in more efficient, socially satisfying ways than the market. Academics are bypassing commercial journals by developing their own open-access journals. Scores of wikis now enable communities with special interests to come together without commercial hosts. Craigslist provides a mostly free venue for effecting private barters or sales. And so on. These trends are likely to intensify in the years ahead because they are more economically attractive and socially congenial.
A big, unresolved question that will become more salient in coming years: How shall markets and commons negotiate mutually respectful terms of competition and cooperation? Can traditional market players learn to respect the social and ethical norms of the people formerly known as “customers”?
If the past is any guide, many market players will continue to try to enclose the commons. But the commoners are no longer defenseless. Many are now empowered with their own free software platforms and legal licenses, not to mention a robust community ethic. People have choices. Consider how MySpace users howled when the site prohibited the use of outside software widgets, or how Facebook users resisted new features that they considered privacy violations.
Digital citizenship is likely to bring huge changes to politics. While there were many singular aspects to Barack Obama presidential race, the use of social networking technologies and other tools of self-organization will persist and expand. If only because of its proven fundraising potential, the “netroots” will become a more powerful player in political campaigns. It will raise more money and confer greater social credibility and legitimacy on campaigns than old-style campaigning.
Like companies and their customers, politicians and their supporters will enter into more of a “conversation.” It won’t center on just a one-off transaction, voting on election day. (It is dismaying to see the Democratic National Committee short-sighted commitment to treat the people on Obama’s massive email list as Pavlovian automatons rather than as a social community with its own capacity for deliberation and political agency.)
Governance, too, is going to become more of a fluid conversation with the general public, rather than a privileged backroom negotiation among anointed insiders. The Internet is opening up governance by making it more transparent, accessible and instantaneous. Citizens can now review draft legislation in its raw forms before it is enacted, and agitate publicly for changes. Special-interest earmarks are being identified and publicized, with predictable shaming effects on their sponsors. Although some critics like law professor Cass Sunstein worry that the immediacy of Internet culture will short-circuit thoughtful deliberation, the quality of deliberation that occurs now is not especially impressive. I think the transparency of Internet culture will greatly enhance democratic accountability in the future. (The screaming you hear are the special interests whose politically rigged deals can no longer be carried out under the cover of darkness.)
Government itself will experience new pressures as decentralized commons challenge the competence of centralized bureaucracies. It is a secular trend across modern societies: large, centralized institutions tend to be inept, inflexible and unable to craft situational solutions. Smaller, decentralized and networked organizations tend to be closer to reliable, on-the-ground information, and have the capacity to respond more nimbly and effectively. A big question for the future is how the regularities and predictability of government institutions can be integrated with online commons, which tend to be more socially responsive and flexible.
A final speculation that almost seems self-evident: politics and culture are likely to become more trans-national than they already are. This is a kind of counterpoint to the economic globalization that is well underway. A new kind of global communion among digital citizens is being facilitated by a proliferating array of cheap and versatile platforms — Skype, social networking, blogs, Twitter, and more. Online communities with niche political or cultural interests are arising and traversing national boundaries, despite the repressions of authoritarian governments. Some of the most robust trans-national communities include free software, free culture, indie music and ethnic diaspora communities. As such virtual communities grow in influence, many governments and multinational corporations will likely push back against them. But it would be foolish to try to ban or restrict such passionate, diversified insurgencies. They represent the seeds of a future polity struggling to be born.“.
2. Video: Reclaiming the Commons
Details on this video:
Reclaiming the Commons (discussion): Numerous organizations and movements worldwide oppose the neoliberal paradigm of privatization and have dedicated themselves to the preservation and the sustainable and innovative use of the commons. A selection of protagonists from different commons-friendly initiatives will discuss the following questions: Which decisive struggles for the commons are being fought today? Who are the driving forces of privatization, who are the ones opposing it? How can the power relations between both sides be assessed? What do the conflicts about the access to the genetic information of plants have in common with those about copyrighted music? How are seed breeding and the production of free software connected? What unites the struggle for the preservation of biological diversity with the activism for the availability of public knowledge? Which visions do all these different struggles share and by which means and strategies do they operate? How can they join forces?
panel discussion with Percy Schmeiser (CA), Petra Buhr (DE), Ronaldo Lemos (BR), Massimo De Angelis (UK), Stefan Meretz (DE).