Game of Thrones was arguably about climate change, but the HBO series turned this narrative around by presenting a last-minute technological solution as magically saving the day, the planet, and existence. 

!!! SPOILERS AHEAD !!!

Game of Thrones was arguably about climate change. George RR Martin himself confirmed that it is indeed “a great parallel”. Perhaps that is still the case in the books (we’ll have to wait until, or if, he completes his story), because the HBO series certainly shattered this narrative.

Presumably the message here is: no need to stop our petty squabbling in the face of a cataclysmic threat looming, a last-minute solution will magically turn up. While that might be an unfair bit of criticism to place on a show that indeed specialises in human squabbling, it is yet another example of pop culture reinforcing a dangerous idea. That whatever existential peril we may face as a species, we can solve through our real-world magic: technology!

This belief that eventually technological breakthroughs solve our problems is as powerful today as ever. How could it not? In the face of a problem like planetary collapse, which would require us to completely alter the way we exist as a society, it is easier to just passively hope for that inevitable bit of tech that will save economic growth!

One might imagine that this development in the show was forced due to the creators’ desire to move onto other projects. Because up to the point where the massive problem is instantly resolved, the show seemed to be building a narrative that relied on the humans getting their act together and making radical changes to their behaviour in order to survive. Thus, the opportunity to make a point to millions of people watching was sadly lost.

From Arya Stark’s dagger to personal computers and smartphones, technological artefacts reach users who often ignore the production history of those artefacts. Who produced them? At what social and environmental cost? How was nature transformed in the place where the materials of a certain technological artefact were found? The technologically-enabled abundance that a few people experience is linked to the scarcity experienced by many.

Ecomodernism argues that the issues of scarcity and environmental degradation can be addressed by using more efficient technologies. It has been a matter of debate in political ecology and in this blog. Ecomodernism overlooks the consequences of efficiency improvements. The Jevons Paradox is a finding attributed to the 19th century economist Stanley Jevons. It illustrates how efficiency improvements can lead to an absolute increase of resource use.

For example, the invention of more efficient train engines allowed for cheaper transportation that catalyzed the industrial revolution. However, this did not reduce the rate of fossil fuel use; rather, it increased it. More efficient technologies use less energy, and thus they cost less, which often encourages us to use them more—resulting in a net increase in energy use. Although since the 1970s technological advances have been significant, both global energy use and global material use have increased threefold.

In a famous quote, prolific writer Ursula K. Leguin says

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art…”.

Art, and especially science fiction and fantasy, has the power to challenge ingrained beliefs and explore radical imaginaries, which may inspire action. Sadly, however, the Game of Thrones series failed to deliver.

Vasilis Kostakis is a Professor at TalTech and a Faculty Associate at Harvard. He is coordinating the Cosmolocalism.eu project. Chris Giotitsas is a Research Fellow at TalTech and a core member of the P2P Lab.

Header image: CC Chapman/Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The post Why ‘Game of Thrones’ was about ecomodernism appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This piece by Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis was originally published on The Next System.org.

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Why is this emerging mode of production so important in discussions about post-capitalist futures? And how can participants in commons-based peer production— the “commoners”—make sustainable livings, thereby creating a thriving global commons economy within and beyond capitalism?

Here’s why and how.

Introduction: Two big questions

When we investigate realistic social change, it is not enough to ask (normatively) how things should be or (idealistically) how things could be. We must also look at the seeds of potential change. Just as capitalism developed over centuries by combining such patterns as double-book accounting and knowledge diffusion through printing, any post-capitalist system will be grounded in patterns emerging within capitalism or from attempts to solve its systemic problems.

These post-capitalist patterns include commons-based peer production. John Restakis (2017), David Bollier (2016), and others have addressed the re-emergence of the commons, defined as a shared resource, maintained or co-created by a community, and governed through that same community’s rules and norms. Here we go one step farther, describing an emerging mode of production that makes the commons the central feature of its value creation and distribution.

This new modality of value creation has fresh but widespread roots. It emerged in the digital realm to organize the production of open knowledge, free software, and shared designs. Now, it is also a strong candidate to take over the organization of physical production and create a political economy in which the distribution of value is both more socially just and ecologically regenerative. As we will show, forces already afoot could produce and distribute value in socially fair and environmentally balanced ways.

Commons-based peer production as a new pattern of value creation for digital production

In commons-based peer production (CBPP), originally identified as a new pathway of value creation and distribution, Internet-enabled infrastructures allow individuals to communicate, self-organize, and co-create digital commons of knowledge, software, and design (Benkler, 2006; Bauwens, 2005; Kostakis & Bauwens, 2014). Think of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia, the myriad free and open-source projects (e.g., Linux, Apache HTTP Server, Mozilla Firefox, WordPress, Enspiral), or such open design communities as Wikihouse, RepRap, Sensorica, and Farm Hack. This remarkable new modality combines global coordination mechanisms with the small-group dynamics characteristic of human tribal forms, allowing these dynamics to go global.

Post-capitalist characteristics

CBPP differs fundamentally from value creation under industrial capitalism. In the incumbent models, the owners of the means of production hire workers, direct the work process, and sell products for profit maximization. Production is organized by allocating resources through price signals, or through hierarchical command harking to these price signals.

In contrast, CBPP is in principle open to anyone with skills to contribute to a joint project, pooling the knowledge of every participant. Some participants may be paid by companies or clients, but this system of production is also open to self-motivated contributors and distributors. In these open systems, there are many reasons to contribute beyond or besides receiving monetary payment.

CBPP allows contributions based on all kinds of motivations, but most important is the desire to create something meaningful or mutually useful to those contributing. For the productive communities as well as other users, most of their work is oriented to use-value creation, not exchange-value. In CBPP’s open and transparent systems, everyone can see the signals of others’ work and can that way adapt to the needs of the system as a whole.

Stigmergic collaboration

In CBPP, some commoners may be paid or employed as wage labor or work for the market as freelancers. Whether paid or not, all of them produce commons. The work is not directed by corporate hierarchies, but through the mutual coordination mechanisms of the productive community. Indeed, corporate hierarchies must defer to the community values if they want to participate in this type of production. In CBPP’s open and transparent systems, everyone can see the signals of others’ work and can that way adapt to the needs of the system as a whole.

CBPP is often based on ‘stigmergic’ collaboration. Basically, stigmergy is the phenomenon of indirect communication among agents and actions (Marsh & Onof, 2007, p. 1). Think here about how ants or termites exchange information by laying down pheromones (chemical traces). This indirect form of communication enables social insects to build such complex structures as trails and nests. An action leaves a trace that stimulates the next action by the same or a different agent (ant, termite, or, in the case of CBPP, commoner).

In the context of CBPP, stigmergic collaboration is the “collective, distributed action in which social negotiation is …mediated by Internet-based technologies” (Elliott, 2006). For example, free and open-source software code lines and Wikipedia entries are all produced in a distributed and ad hoc manner as large numbers of people contribute.

Of course, unlike termites and ants, people are given to ego problems, mixed agendas, and other human frailties, so what about quality control? CBPP projects do have quality-control systems based on a hierarchy (or heterarchy). These safeguards are imperfect but improving. Without coercing work, “maintainers” in free and open source software collaboration or Wikipedia “editors,” for instance, protect the integrity of the system as a whole and can refuse contributions that endanger that integrity.

Far from the norm in traditional business, this kind of collaboration does appeal to profit-seekers, too. Since CBPP is based on more freely engaged and passionate labor and obviates some costs to capital, it can appeal to for-profit forces. Hence, we see the massive growth of CBPP in software production for industry.

A new institutional ecosystem

Through CBPP, we see a new institutional ecosystem of value creation emerging. This ecosystem consists of three institutions: the productive community, commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalition(s), and the for-benefit association. Our description cannot be all-inclusive or definitive because each ecosystem is unique and this new mode of production is rapidly evolving. The aim instead is to offer a birds-eye-view of the expanding universe of CBPP.1

^{Five of the oldest and best-known commons-based peer production ecosystems.}

Along with Wikipedia and the well-documented ecosystems of the free and open-source software projects, Enspiral, Sensorica, Wikihouse, and Farm Hack offer new perspectives on the rich tapestry of proliferating CBPP ecosystems. All can be described as building new post-capitalist ecosystems of value creation, and all illustrate the shift from the purely digital production of software and knowledge to its use by entities that produce physical products and sophisticated services. Enspiral has a complex service offering, including the participatory decision-making platform Loomio, Sensorica designs and deploys sensors, Wikihouse produces designs for sustainable housing, and Farm Hack engages in the participatory design of agricultural machinery. All four replay the tripartite institutional structure emblematic of digital production. A recent study of the urban commons in Ghent (Bauwens & Onzia, 2017) shows that commons-based urban provisioning systems also exemplify this new structure.

^{Three emerging commons-based peer production ecosystems.}

The first linchpin of the new model is the productive community. It consists of all the contributors to a project of CBPP. As noted, its members may be paid or may volunteer their contributions out of sheer interest. Either way, all produce the shared resource. Most important when compared to systems based on wage labor, the system must remain open to contributions.

The second institution is the commons-oriented entrepreneurial coalition. It aims to create either profits or livelihoods by creating added value for the market, based on the shared resources. The participating enterprises can pay contributors.

The digital commons themselves are typically outside the market because they are not scarce so are not subject to the laws of supply and demand.

Crucially important in the relation among the entrepreneurs, the community, and the common-pool resource on which they depend is whether their relationship is generative or extractive. That said, every entity is expected to present a mixture.

Two distinctions are relevant here. First, entrepreneurship should not be identified exclusively with capitalism: not all entrepreneurs are motivated by profit maximization. For some, entrepreneurship expresses the desire for autonomy. In the emerging class of autonomous and precariously employed workers, many are involved in the “auto-entrepreneurship” crucial to CBPP ecosystems. Entrepreneurship should not be identified exclusively with capitalism.

Second, markets should not be identified with capitalism. Non-capitalist market systems that are not based on wage labor or the separation of the means of production from the workers, and that operate with different “value logics” than profit maximization, have existed throughout history. They still coexist within capitalism and can be further developed as post-capitalist modalities. CBPP’s potential here is to create commons-oriented market forms that both benefit the commons and the commoners.

Crucial to the “commonification” of the entrepreneurial coalitions is the figure of the “autonomous worker.” Today’s dominant conception of the entrepreneur is of someone who is independent and takes all the risk to play the capitalist lottery. In contrast, if you want a salary, then you need to obey corporate rules. So, if you are a worker, you have a contract of subordination. In contrast, autonomous workers are free to make their own decisions and interact with the market and the commons as they wish and without permission.

This form of self-propelled enterprise should not be confused with neoliberal entrepreneurship. From a Gramscian perspective (Gramsci, 1971), CBPP can be viewed as an effort to advance alternatives to dominant ideas of what is considered “normal” and legitimate. Commons-based entrepreneurship places freedom and autonomy associated with entrepreneurship in a contributory perspective.

Consider here the creation of the labor mutual SMart, which advances the concept of “autonomous worker.” Participating workers freely engage with the market to advance their values and life projects, but mutualize their life risk through a co-owned cooperative. Such workers are ideally situated to join more commons-centric models.

Marjorie Kelly (2012) introduces non-capitalist/generative enterprises, pressing the distinction between markets and capitalism. In these enterprises, collectively owned market agents use their surplus to further social and environmental causes, rather than accumulation. To demonstrate the difference between extractive and generative economic activity, think of industrial agriculture versus permaculture. In the former, the soil grows ever poorer and less healthy while in the latter the soil becomes richer and healthier.

Extractive entrepreneurs seek to maximize their profits, and few of this breed reinvest enough in the maintenance of the productive communities. Like Facebook, they do not share any profits with the co-creating communities that provide the company’s value and its realization. Some, like Uber or Airbnb, tax exchanges without creating transport or hospitality infrastructures. So, though such enterprises develop useful services based on previously untapped resources, they do so extractively. They facilitate these services, but they also create competitive mentalities that destroy the collaborative and environmental advantages of mutualizing pooled resources. Moreover, extractive enterprises may free-ride on social or public infrastructures (e.g., roads in Uber’s case) and further undermine welfare provision by evading taxation and failing to provide social benefits. To demonstrate the difference between extractive and generative economic activity, think of industrial agriculture versus permaculture.

In contrast, generative entrepreneurs add value to these communities, which they both seed and depend on. In the best case, the community of entrepreneurs and the productive community are one and the same. Creating livelihoods while producing commons, contributors re-invest the surplus in their well-being and the overall commons system they co-produce.

The third institution is the for-benefit association. This entity can be seen as the infrastructural organization of the commons that manages commons-based cooperation. Indeed, many CBPP ecosystems feature independent governance institutions that support the infrastructure for collaboration, empowering the CBPP. Cooperation thus takes place autonomously, without any command-and-control apparatus. Indeed, commoning is impossible without it. For example, the Wikimedia Foundation is the non-coercive for-benefit association of Wikipedia. Similarly, free and open-source software foundations often manage infrastructure and networks of projects.

Traditional nongovernmental and nonprofit organizations operate in a world of perceived scarcity. They spot problems, search for resources, and direct their resources toward solving the issues they have identified. This approach arguably mirrors the for-profit model of operating.

In contrast, for-benefit associations operate for ‘potential’ abundance. They recognize problems and issues but believe that there are enough contributors eager to help solve or resolve them. Hence, they maintain an infrastructure of cooperation that allows contributive communities and entrepreneurial coalitions to engage in CBPP processes vital for addressing these issues, without directly commanding the contributors. They protect these commons through licenses and may also help manage conflicts between participants and stakeholders, fundraise, and help build the general capacity needed to work in particular fields through, for example, education or certification.

The specific CBPP ecosystems are interrelated through their digital commons. Since the output of one project can be the input of another, CBPP can be seen as a grand ecosystem composed of diverse smaller ecosystems.

Overcoming the commons-capital contradictions towards an integrated economic reality

The nascent ecosystems described here are not sovereign in the current political economy, and all come with challenges and contradictions. For instance, Enspiral owes its business success largely to the distinct talent and skills of its members who are very competitive in their respective fields and who acquired skills and experiences from their education and occupations in such traditional institutions as universities, software companies, and financial firms. Beyond that, its area of expertise fills a niche in a developed market with low capital entry. Enspiral’s business model may be hard to replicate absent these factors.

Similarly, Sensorica and Farm Hack both face significant challenges concerning proper and comprehensive documentation of their processes and outputs, while WikiHouse is still striving to broaden the scope and reliability of its layouts and technologies. All the described projects, especially those entailing localized manufacturing, still rely substantially on cheap, mass-produced raw materials and components. Their business models, not yet fully defined, can sustain livelihoods for only a small number of active and highly dedicated contributors.

These caveats notwithstanding, don’t underestimate the importance of examples like those sketched here in solving urgent and neglected societal challenges. These new initiatives are gradually building considerable capacity to support this emerging commons-based political economy. Each case offers unique techno-social solutions, crystallizing a new socially embedded perception of value, defining new forms of organization and relationships to the means of production, and providing a new and more holistic representation of economic reality.

As these solutions mature and get adopted, replicated, and improved by other projects, this new economic reality could subsume and transcend today’s tumbling political order. Empowered by commoning, in time they will reshape and sublate the current contradictions and processes into a synthesized, concrete, commons-centric totality.

To be sure, the autonomous emergence and development of these seed forms are by themselves not a sufficient condition for social change. But they are a necessary feature of such change and their prefigurative function and power are vital to the success of any social change strategy. No conflict or crisis resolution can occur without reliance on these seeds of change.

From seed form to societal form

Make no mistake: the new models of production described here as an emerging institutional infrastructure at the micro level of concrete projects are also potential formats for a new post-capitalist political economy and civilization:

• The productive community at the heart of contributory value creation is also a model for a new type of civil society and for the central institution of a new post-capitalist economic and civilizational model. In this model of a productive civil society, citizens are also recognized for their contributions to society through CBPP.
• The entrepreneurial coalitions, which are generatively co-creating added value to the human and natural commons, are a model for a generative and ethical market.
• The infrastructural for-benefit associations are a model for enabling and empowering the state, which ensures the contributory equipotential capacity of its citizens and inhabitants.

Commons for the commoners, commodity for the capitalists

In CBPP, contributors create shared value through open contributory systems, govern their work through participatory practices, and create shared resources that can, in turn, be used in new iterations. This cycle of open input, participatory process, and commons-oriented output can be considered a cycle of accumulation of the commons, and this cycle parallels capital accumulation.

At this stage, CBPP prefigures what could become a post-capitalist mode of production. It is a prototype since it cannot yet fully reproduce itself outside of mutual dependence with capitalism. Productive and innovative “within capitalism,” CBPP also has the capacity to solve some of the structural problems generated by capitalism—in effect, transcending it. That said, CBPP won’t be the new “total social reality” until it also engages in physical production. The new models of production described here as an emerging institutional infrastructure at the micro level of concrete projects are also potential formats for a new post-capitalist political economy and civilization.

As for capitalist competition, CBPP can spur innovation. Firms that can access the digital commons possess a competitive advantage over firms that use proprietary knowledge and rely only on their research (Tapscott & Williams, 2005; Benkler 2006; von Hippel, 2017). For example, by mutualizing the software development in an open network, firms save substantially on their infrastructural investments. In this context, CBPP could be seen as a mutualization of productive knowledge by capitalist coalitions.

This capitalist investment is not negative in itself. Instead, it is a condition that has increased society’s investment in a commons-oriented transition. Since CBPP solves some structural issues of the current system, capital and both productive and managerial classes gravitate toward it. Even though prolonging the dominance of the old economic models distorts CBPP, it simultaneously sparks new ways of thinking that undermine in that dominance.

Even so, the new class of commoners cannot rely on capitalist investment and practices. Marinus Ossewaarde’s and Wessel Reijers’s (2018) threefold observation rings true here: “(1)…through technologically mediated practices of digital commoning implicit and explicit pricing mechanisms can be realised, (2)…such mechanisms draw the practices of digital commoning towards the monetary economy, (3) which in turn affects the forms of resistance that are implied in practices of digital communing.”

In the end, commoners must render CBPP more autonomous from the dominant political economy. Eventually, the balance of power could then be reversed: the commons and its social forces would become society’s dominant modality, forcing the state and market modalities to adapt to societal requirements.

Reverse cooptation

Commoners should avoid situations in which capitalists co-opt the commons and head toward situations in which the commons capture capital and use it to build its own capacity. Such reverse cooptation has been called “transvestment” by Dmytri Kleiner and Baruch Gottlieb (Kleiner, 2010, 2016). In the case of CBPPs, value would flow from the capitalist market to the commons, using generative market practices whenever possible. Thus, transvestment would help commoners become financially secure and independent. Such procedures are being developed and implemented in seed form by such open cooperatives as Sensorica or the Enspiral network.

Sensorica is a collaborative network that develops sensors. It was officially launched in 2011 in Montreal, Canada, inspired by free and open-source projects and the forms of collaboration they entailed. Sensorica explicitly separates its production processes, which are commons-based, from its market operations, which are held by independent entities though controlled by the productive network. The network’s contribution-based accounting system logs every contribution by every project participant at every stage, from initiation to marketing. In turn, all revenue from marketable products is distributed back to those who have contributed to their production. By providing livelihood opportunities, Sensorica emancipates its contributors so they can commit more of their creative energy to commons-based productive processes.

As for structure, the Enspiral network consists of the Enspiral ventures, the Enspiral Foundation, and a community of professionals representing various domains and a broad range of competencies. The Enspiral ventures offer their products and services in the market, like any common enterprise, but their focus is on the social economy, and they mobilize in response to societal challenges. Through this process, they create commons (software, infrastructures, knowledge—most famously, Loomio, a web application that helps groups make decisions together), but also revenue and (in some Enspiral ventures) even profits. A portion of these funds is donated to the Foundation. The latter then uses a part of them to cover its operation, and the rest is reinvested to new commons-based projects through democratic procedures. When projects are externally financed, the backing companies typically redeem their shares once an agreed-upon level of return has been reached. This agreement, combined with democratic control, allows the companies to decide to reinvest profits in their social mission and/or new Enspiral projects.

Open Cooperativism

Open cooperativism is a working concept aimed at infusing cooperatives with the basic principles of CBPP (Bauwens & Kostakis, 2014). Pat Conaty and David Bollier (2014) have called for “a new sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and commons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of the co-operative and solidarity economy movements on the other.” To a higher degree than in traditional cooperatives, open cooperatives would statutorily be oriented toward the common good by co-building digital and/or material commons. This orientation basically extends the seventh cooperative principle—concern for the community (ICA, 2018). In contrast to traditional cooperatives, open cooperatives pool their digital resources (knowledge, software, designs), creating a multifaceted digital commons for other open cooperatives. So, open cooperatives would internalize negative externalities, adopt multi-stakeholder governance models, help create immaterial and material commons, and be socially and politically organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally.

One way to understand open cooperativism is to look at how the medieval guild system functioned. A guild was an association of producers who oversaw the practice of their craft or trade in a particular geographical area. It had elements of a professional association, a trade union, a cartel, and a secret society. Externally, guilds sold their goods or services in the marketplace, but internally they were fraternities and solidarity systems. In a commons-centric economy, such efficiency and solidarity could be achieved through open participatory systems that would connect producers and consumer/user communities, as community-supported agriculture does now. By this token, the models proposed below would intertwine contributors with various roles into one solidarity ecosystem.

Beyond the classical corporate paradigm

Here, six interrelated strategies for post-capitalist entrepreneurial coalitions are outlined. All aim to go beyond the classical corporate paradigm and its extractive profit-maximizing practices to establish open cooperatives that cultivate a commons-oriented economy.

First, it is essential to recognize that closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. Although knowledge in digital form can be shared quickly and at low marginal cost, traditional firms may use artificial scarcity to extract rents from its creation. Through legal repression or technological sabotage, naturally shareable goods are sometimes made artificially scarce to generate extra profits (Kostakis et al., 2018). This is particularly galling when life-saving medicines or planet-regenerating technological knowledge are overpriced or unnecessarily scarce. Open cooperatives, in comparison, would refuse to generate revenue by making such abundant resources as knowledge artificially scarce.

Second, a typical CBPP project involves various distributed tasks, to which individuals can freely contribute. For instance, in the free and open-source software projects, participants contribute code, create designs, maintain websites, translate text, co-develop the marketing strategy, and offer user support. In this setup, salaries based on a fixed job description may not be the most appropriate way to reward contributors. An alternative is open value accounting or contributory accounting: any income from contributions flows to contributors according to the points accrued from their meaningful participation in collective production. This model could be an antidote to the tendency in many firms for a handful of well-placed contributors to capture the value co-created by a much larger community.

Third, open cooperatives could secure fair distribution and benefit-sharing of commonly created value through “copyfair” licenses (Bauwens & Kostakis, 2014). Today’s “copyleft” licenses—such as Creative Commons and the GNU Public License—allow anyone to reuse the necessary knowledge commons provided that changes and improvements are subsequently shared in that same commons. The hitch is that this framework fails to encourage reciprocity for commercial use of the commons or to foster a level playing field for commons-oriented enterprises. These shortcomings can be overcome through copyfair licenses that allow for sharing while also ingraining reciprocity. More particularly, these licenses preserve the right of sharing knowledge but predicate commercialization of any such knowledge commons on contributing to that commons. For example, the copyfair approach to licensing endorses the free and open-source software freedoms enshrined in the GNU Public License, but regulates profit-making potential. The Peer Production License is the first case of copyfair that restricts the usage of a digital commons to worker cooperatives (Kleiner, 2010). Further, the FairShares Association uses a Creative Commons non-commercial license for the general public but allows its members to use the content commercially.

Fourth, open cooperatives would use open designs to produce sustainable goods and services. For-profit enterprises often build planned obsolescence into products to maintain tension between supply and demand and maximize profits. Such obsolescence is a feature, not a bug. In contrast, open design communities do not have the same incentives to plan obsolescence (Kostakis et al., 2018).

Fifth, open cooperatives could reduce waste. The lack of transparency and penchant for antagonism among closed enterprises makes it hard for them to create a circular economy in which the output of one production process becomes an input for another. However, open cooperatives could develop ecosystems of collaboration through open supply chains. These chains may enhance the transparency of production processes so participants could adapt their behavior based on the knowledge available in the network. There is no need for overproduction once the realities of the network become common knowledge. Open cooperatives could then move beyond exclusive reliance on imperfect market price signals and toward mutual coordination of production, thanks to the combination of open supply chains and open value accounting.

Sixth, open cooperatives could mutualize both digital and physical infrastructures. Despite the justified critique it receives, the misnamed “sharing economy” of Airbnb and Uber does illustrate the potential for matching idle resources. Co-working, skill sharing, and ride sharing also exemplify the many ways in which we can reuse and share resources. With co-ownership and co-governance, a genuine sharing economy could use resources far more efficiently, aided by shared data facilities and manufacturing tools.

Cooperative ownership of platforms can also begin to reorient the platform economy around a commons-oriented model. The six practices highlighted here are already emerging in various forms but need to be more universally integrated. In our estimate, the primary aim for fostering a more commons-centric economy is to recapture surplus value that is now feeding speculative capitalism and reinvest it in the development of commons-oriented productive communities. Otherwise, CBPP’s potential will remain underdeveloped and subservient to the dominant system.

The challenge of physical production and the creation of sustainable production

Typically, the need for capital is dramatically higher for physical production, which requires natural resources, buildings, machines, and people. Clearly, assembling networked individuals requires substantially less capital. Nevertheless, as noted, CBPP cannot be considered a full mode of production unless it integrates both digital and physical production.

Building on the confluence of the digital commons of knowledge, software, and design with local manufacturing technologies, new models of physical production are emerging. They can be codified as “design global, manufacture local” (DGML). What is light (knowledge, design), this logic goes, becomes global, while what is heavy (machinery) is local and ideally shared. DGML demonstrates how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development, celebrating new forms of cooperation (Kostakis et al., 2018; Kostakis et al., 2015; Kostakis et al., 2016). Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, the DGML model emphasizes small-scale, decentralized, resilient, and locally controlled applications. DGML could recognize the scarcities posed by finite resources and organize material activities to conserve them. After all, since manufacturing is largely local, shipping costs are lower, and maintenance is easier. Manufacturers design products to last as long as possible under the DGML mantle, and knowledge and design are freely shared since there are no patent costs.

Already, we see a rich tapestry of DGML initiatives unfolding in the global economy that do not need a unified physical basis because their members are located all over the world. For example, consider the L’Atelier Paysan (France) and Farm Hack (U.S.), communities that collaboratively build open-source agricultural machines for small-scale farming or the OpenBionics project that produces open-sourced, low-cost designs for robotic and bionic devices or the RepRap community that creates open-source designs for 3D printers.

Cities around the world are partially embracing this shift, as evidenced in a study on the urban commons (Bauwens & Onzia, 2017). In Ghent, Belgium, nearly 500 urban commons were identified, a tenfold increase in 10 years, covering all the basic provisioning systems. Most of these commons-based forms, however, redistribute but don’t produce goods. For instance, car and bike-sharing schemes mutualize access to transport but do not manufacture the vehicles. Similarly, housing coops, co-housing, and community land trusts offer access to housing but do not “make” the housing.

A further limitation: Many generative projects remain fragmented and locally limited. As welcome as these initiatives’ rapid growth is, it’s not enough to turn the tide. Public-commons cooperation must be combined locally with community wealth building policies inspired by the models in Cleveland and Preston, UK. What’s more, transnational investment coalitions are needed to create global open depositories for setting up provisioning systems and mutual learning endeavors that are locally adapted but globally coordinated. Public-commons cooperation must be combined locally with community wealth-building policies inspired by the models in Cleveland and Preston, UK.

One fast-growing sector amid a more fundamental transformation is ahead of the game. It can create healthy food for urbanites, livelihoods for producers, multi-stakeholder governance systems involving both producers and consumers, and meaningful work in an integrated ecosystem. Indeed, 80 of the 500 projects identified in Ghent were food projects—organic farmers supplying food through various commons-based schemes. Such local agricultural production exemplifies CBPP’s next stage: the cosmo-local production of goods. This stage combines open global communities mutualizing production knowledge, distributed local production, and cooperative, generative organization of the productive ecosystem. The challenge—extending this model to the economy’s more capital-intensive sectors—is likely to require the commitment of both the public sector and the world of cooperative investment and financing.

The greatest challenge, however, remains creating sustainable modes of production. Kate Raworth (2017) has very usefully summarized what needs doing: fulfill humanity’s social needs without exceeding the carrying capacity of the planet and damaging the vital cycles and needed balanced ecosystems that sustain human life. Commoning is both green and efficient.

The commons will be a vital part of this strategy for human survival. Commoning requires pooling and mutualizing resources and infrastructures to replace the wasteful corporate competition that reflects the systematic externalization of social and environmental costs to keep expenses and prices as low as possible. In contrast, CBPP’s “collaborative advantage” is that it produces products and services for human need, at lower thermodynamic costs than capitalist production models (Piques & Rizos, 2017). For example, the associate car-sharing project in Ghent, Degage, uses 130 cars for 1,300 members, guaranteeing them full mobility while greatly lowering environmental costs. Studies of similar projects have shown that every shared vehicle can replace up to 13 private cars (Shaheen, 2017).

Commoning is both green and efficient. Commons-based organic food ecosystems do not pollute the groundwater, do not use toxic additives, and can use carbon-free transportation systems. As shown in the meta-historical comparisons of civilizational overshoots (Motesharrei et al., 2014), more equal access to the resources of life significantly reduces resource catastrophes and makes crisis periods less severe. Production models that use a “subsidiarity of material production” approach will dramatically cut transportation costs and needs while maintaining global cultural and technical cooperation.

The good news is that pioneering communities all over the world are developing many of the tools needed to make this shift. For example:

• open and contributive accounting systems, able to recognize and reward all contributions, not just market value, as pioneered by Sensorica and others,
• shared ecosystemic circular supply chains, as experimented by Provenance, the Oxchain research project, eventually using the eco-systemic shared accounting systems like the R-E-A system, integrated impact and/or biophysical accounting systems, allowing direct access to thermo-dynamic flows and expenditures, using “global thresholds and allocations,”
• non-ecologically destructive distributed ledger systems, such as the Holochain,
• token-based value systems, which allow programmable production based on various value logics.

Instead of conclusions: A drinking horn for the commons

In medieval times, drinking horns were often used by guilds communally to symbolize and promote conviviality, friendship, and solidarity among the members. These values proved of great importance to the prosperity of the guild (Rosser, 2015).

Needed now is a drinking horn for the commons to help make CBPP a dominant production modality. The guild system can inspire commoners looking for sustainable livelihoods. Our transitional vision includes commons-based networks of “neo-guilds” comprised of cooperatives and autonomous producers. These networks would produce value—a global commons for the commoners and the general public and a product to be sold to enterprises outside the commons.

The small-scale initiatives can now be influential on a larger scale, as nodes in a commons-based global network of local networks. Through digital commoning, grassroots initiatives can have both a local and global orientation: “the small and the local, when they are open and connected, can therefore become a design guideline for creating resilient systems and sustainable qualities, and a positive feedback loop between these systems” (Manzini, 2013). Hence, instead of “scaling-up,” CBPP initiatives are “scaling-wide.”

With a crisis of capital accumulation upon us, might a stream of value seek and find a place in the commons economy? Yes. Instead of the cooptation of the commons economy by capital through capitalist platforms that capture value from common enterprise (e.g., Facebook, Google, IBM), commoners can coopt capital inside the commons, and subject it to its rules. With a crisis of capital accumulation upon us, might a stream of value seek and find a place in the commons economy?

Much depends on whether we can pull off more sophisticated types of reverse cooptation. Commoners must create interconnected transvestment vehicles that admit capital disciplined by the new commons and market forms developed through CBPP. For example, “double-licensing” schemes require those who wish to capitalize to pay a license fee or join the commons-based neo-guild. This approach creates a flow of value from the system of capital to the system of the commons economy.

The ultimate vision for a new society is one of a civil society productive in its own right, not just an adjunct to the market and state. Under this new dispensation, the state enables free social production in a galaxy of interconnected, collaborative initiatives. True, CBPP does not solve many of today’s inequalities and systemic social unfairness, especially involving race and gender. Nor does it directly address the hidden environmental and social costs of digital technologies, which are energy-intensive throughout their life-cycle, from cradle to the grave. Also, low-wage laborers (often including children) work under inhumane circumstances so that ever more people in the advanced economies have access to cheap digital technologies. But these shortcomings and injustices can be addressed, and CBPP traces a unique grand institution dealing with value creation that is far removed from the catastrophic characteristics of modern capitalism. This connection to sustainability is likely to open up new spaces for a free, fair, and long-lived society.

Acknowledgments

Parts of this essay are based on the authors’ forthcoming open-access book (co-authored with Alex Pazaitis), titled Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto, to be published by University of Westminster Press. It also builds on Bauwens M. & Kostakis V. (2016). “Why Platform Co-ops should be Open Co-ops.” In Scholz

T. & Schneider N. (eds) Ours to Hack and Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet. New York, NY: OR Books, 163-166. Vasilis Kostakis acknowledges funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No. 802512).

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All web links were active on July 6, 2018.

• 1. These ecosystems have been thoroughly discussed by several studies. See indicatively Dafermos, 2012; Harhoff & Lakhani, 2016; Mateos-Garcia & Steinmueller, 2008; Weber, 2005; Benkler, 2006; von Hippel, 2017.

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A new VICE Special Report: The Future of Work premieres April 19 on HBO.

This video has been reposted from the HBO youtube channel.

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Abstract

This paper discusses how emerging issues in housing construction could revolutionise the building industry. It focuses on commons-based networks of organisations, technologies and users that form a niche practice on the margins of the dominant paradigm. This practice can be understood as “Design Global, Manufacture Local” and is exemplified by the Hexayurt, the Open Source Ecology Microhouse and the WikiHouse. Using these descriptive case studies, light is shed on the challenges and opportunities of open construction systems with regard to technological, institutional and social perspectives. Notwithstanding the positive dynamics, certain issues need to be addressed, so that a sustainable built environment could flourish.

Excerpts

The DGML Approach

As a form of CBPP, the DGML approach introduces a shift from mass-produced solutions to customised ones. It describes the convergence of global digital commons with local manufacturing technologies (including 3D printers, CNC machines, laser cutters, etc.), as well as simple tools (like saws, drills, etc.). It emerged as a promising model of distributed production within the dominant capitalist system (Giotitsas & Ramos, 2017). Further, extensive discussions have triggered about the impact of DGML on culture through the idea of cosmo-localism (Ramos, 2017).

Echoing Kostakis, Latoufis Liarokapis, & Bauwens (2016a), three genuine components of the DGML paradigm include: the removal of planned obsolescence that describes the deliberate production of goods with a limited lifetime towards profit maximisation (BBC, 2017; Guiltinan, 2009); on-demand production, considering that the manufacturing process takes place in local makerspaces, hence transportation and environmental impacts are expected to be lower (Kohtala & Hyysalo, 2015; Kostakis, Fountouklis, & Drechsler, 2013); sharing practices and mutualisation of both digital (such as software and designs) and material infrastructures (such as makerspaces and shared machinery).

Considering recent concerns for sustainability (Taranic, Behrens, & Topi, 2016; Whicher, Harris, Beverley, & Swiatek, 2018), the DGML model could pave the way for sustainable practices in the built environment. This model entails the concept of modular design through the use of recyclable elements that could be deconstructed without damage and reused. Hence, repairability, recyclability, disassemblability, and upgradability of the manufactured components can be achieved (Bonvoisin, 2016).

The DGML approach is also characterised by flexibility in the design of objects via the use of parametric design tools. Digital 3D designs stimulate an ongoing interaction between the participants in the design process since they represent information easily grasped even from amateurs (Yap, Ngwenyama, & Osei-Bryson, 2003). More dimensions, such as financial data, material properties or energy characteristics, can be added to the building geometry through the concept of Building Information Modelling (BIM). The latter allows for advanced simulations— including structural tests, energy analyses, etc.—which enable a life-cycle management of buildings by increasing predictability levels.”

Technological, institutional and social aspects of Open Construction Systems

The prefigurative examples of change presented through the three case studies have significant implications for the future of the construction sector and societal development. The focus is placed on the identification of opportunities and problems faced by these communities to expand the use of open construction systems. Relevant issues are analysed with regard to three interrelated aspects: technological, institutional and social.

Technological aspect

Parametric design tools can support the propagation of open construction systems, given that one-size-fits-all solutions of housing supply cannot work (WikiHouse, 2018a). The complexity of buildings together with a variety of regional contexts (with regard to climate, soil, regulations, etc.) renders the existence of parameters indispensable. Investment in information management through the use of BIM technology can support long-term decision-making processes, while robust planning could address quality and risk-related issues identified by self-build communities (Open Source Ecology, 2018).

Furthermore, communication protocols are necessary so that different stakeholders can address responsibility issues and cooperate harmoniously during the construction process. To facilitate transnational cooperation through BIM, national classification systems should be combined in international scale through the commitment on open standards (such as the Industry Foundation Classes). This would enable the participation of engineering firms in the research and development of open construction systems by offering technical support to communities across the building supply chain.

As far as the design part is concerned, a crucial element for the creation of an international, collaborative puzzle of structures via the use of open construction systems is standardisation. This term refers to the existence of a global dimensional framework to ensure common design guidelines (Open Structures, 2018). In this way, dimensions of the parts that compose a structure could be chosen according to a common global grid. These parts could then be assembled into components, which, in turn, could be combined into flexible structures and superstructures. The construction of a building could, thus, be analogised to the formation of an organism (Open Structures, 2018).

Another integral part of the process is the existence of detailed open-source documentation, as well as its ongoing update. Architectural data (e.g. digital drawings and calculations), construction data (e.g. model tests and building methods), technical, chemical and biophysical details (e.g. weather conditions and subsoil), costs (e.g. materials and equipment) and environmental requirements (e.g. recycling, water and depletion) should be extensively documented, facilitating the widespread replicability of open hardware solutions through easy-to-follow manuals (Bonvoisin, 2016).

Experimentations with new materials could improve open construction systems. Instead of monolithic materials (such as plywood, cardboard, etc.) mainly used during the introduction of these buildings, advanced materials, such as nanotechnology, bioplastics, and composites, could also be tested. However, given the difficulty of distinction between organic and industrial materials included in biocomposites, special care should be taken to ensure the recyclability of the new materials. The goal is to attain energy savings, structural capacity, as well as higher resistance to heat and moisture in extreme weather conditions through the use of environmentally friendly materials towards future circularity.

Institutional aspect

Open construction systems are promising, but the regional variation of building regulations and zoning codes is challenging. Although the International Building Codes reflect the best practices based on construction experience and technology, local regulations vary from country to country and from context to context. For example, in parts of Missouri, USA, there are no building regulations (Open Building Institute, 2018), whereas in the UK building permissions can be evaded as specified by a set of laws (Knight & Williams, 2012).

The creation of simplified databases with regulation-related documents per country is believed to give prominence to the benefits of building open construction systems at local levels (Open Building Institute, 2018). Also, by taking advantage of the non-existence or ambiguity of regulations, loopholes in building codes allow communities to operate in a more restriction-free manner (Knight & Williams, 2012).

The embedded modularity of open construction systems allows for the mitigation of spatial barriers, which come from differences between strict building regulations. In that sense, modularity enables flexibility, which, in turn, facilitates compliance with the building codes: by replacing specific modules with others; by substituting materials; by adding or removing modules to meet geometric constraints. Moreover, modular design facilitates the disassembly of a structure into building modules, which can be modified, substituted and upgraded independently, as well as undergo physical tests in response to varying circumstances.

Despite their inability to address issues of inflated land prices and unequal access to resources, open construction systems seem to attract political support, like the case of the ongoing WikiHouse project in Almere. The reason for this could be the increasing demand for sustainable housing in the developing world and the mounting number of low-income groups in the developed countries.

Within oppressive austerity policies, it is possible that local authorities will start financing open construction systems as low-cost technological solutions. Otherwise, communities should keep struggling to raise funds, which come from donations or other sources (e.g., selling manuals and offering service-based support).

Finally, the institutionalisation of such dispersed informal teams or individuals is vital for the expansion of these initiatives. These groups strive to advance their initial ideas and engage professional groups in the actualisation of their projects. As more professionals and organisations get involved over time, institutional constraints will be eliminated (Molitor, 1977).

Social aspect

Enabled by information technologies, open construction systems attempt to provision housing in a creative, socialising and convivial way. People enjoy greater potential when working within collectives, leading to the renaissance of pre-industrial architecture through community-based building. In this context, citizen-driven initiatives try to provide affordable and sustainable housing.

Digital fabrication technologies may be helpful tools towards this goal, given that they translate digital data into physical objects. Consequently, the thresholds of skills, cost and time needed for the construction are lowered together with the relevant transportation and socio-environmental costs(Kostakis, Fountouklis, & Drechsler, 2013).

Moving beyond market economy systems, low-cost, adaptable and sustainable solutions can be produced in localised settings. The soil nourishing the shared infrastructure of the global digital commons can continuously be expanded by contributors around the world. Beyond that, the availability of various building types under open-source licences fosters experimentation and the ability to develop combinations of the best or most appropriate elements for each situation.

The implementation of the DGML model in the construction sector introduces a radically different approach from that of the dominant model. In cases like the building process, where stakeholders with various interests are involved, conflicts are unavoidable. For instance, open construction systems may seem as a long-term sustainable solution to global issues for the opensource communities. On the other hand, the sharing of infrastructures may threaten the short-term profit-oriented goals of the construction companies.

A redefinition of roles and responsibilities of all parties involved in the construction process—including governments, self-build communities, engineers, and asset-owners—is required. Thus, we need to witness behavioural change towards resource efficiency and sustainability. For example, supporting services and consultancy could be purchased instead of tangible objects and systems could be developed and monitored in collaborative environments instead of competitive ones.

Considering the newly-published information around open construction, the scalability of such emerging initiatives and their future ability to outcompete the dominant construction model in terms of quality or safety may be questionable. However, the success of open-source initiatives in the past has given prominence to the importance of human participation. The latter may be increased by promoting global awareness of the sustainability features of the open-source movement, as well as of the circular economy features embedded in the use of open construction systems. By empowering proactive and knowledgeable citizens globally, more individuals, collectives, and firms would be contributing to the improvement of open construction systems and the related policy making. In this way, the development of flexible modular structures via a common dimensional framework could prompt the completion of the universal building puzzle. Yet no one could question the role of education to prepare the participants for new building practices and build resilience at a global scale.

Despite the efforts of these open-source communities to solve pressing future challenges, form new business strategies and become institutionalised, these projects remain marginal. However, their momentum to provide affordable and sustainable housing affects many. Their mounting social impacts increase the chances for these innovative initiatives to evolve into an important issue.

Especially by intensifying the testing of solutions with the aid of a global network of contributors, these communities could be integrated into the mainstream and challenge the status quo.

Given the current global credit crisis and sustainability concerns, the DGML model creates new ecosystems with the potential to grow more widely. The key systemic factors that enable this proliferation include: the broad diffusion of low-cost ICT and internet connectivity, the development of the relevant culture around openness and sharing intensified by the widespread means of information sharing, and the ecological crisis that creates higher demand for more sustainable and circular economy-based models.

Finally, the DGML model has the flexibility to adjust to different needs and contexts, as well as provide solutions to various issues, which may correlate to market failures in the global North or the inexistence of relevant infrastructure in the global South. Thus, it may fill the gaps of marketbased solutions for sustainable housing through the development of alternative systems of housing provision, while providing affordable housing to the people in need.”

Conclusion

“This article contributes to the understanding of how individuals, companies, and governments could come together to promote a sustainable built environment. It represents an attempt to shed light on the dynamics of the emerging open construction systems implemented through DGML approaches. The entire debate regarding open construction systems has gained momentum in light of the growing concern about global pressing issues.

In this context, three case studies were used to elucidate the ways and means by which the DGML model can further sustainability in the construction sector by sharing physical and digital infrastructures. These case studies see the construction process as a community-driven procedure that unfolds outside the market economy. The relevant challenges and opportunities were elaborated upon.

It is concluded that the implementation of the DGML approach in constructions calls for drastic changes in current practices, in the role of various stakeholders and the scale of the processes.

Especially new business strategies surface with the involvement of advisers, developers, business and organisational experts in citizen-driven projects, providing expertise on all stages of the building supply chain. The necessity for institutionalisation of the communities involved, as well as the existence of a standard design grid to enable large-scale constructions, could boost the potential of open construction systems, maximising their social impact.

A limitation of this paper is that the problems and opportunities that accompany the implementation of the DGML model in the construction sector were identified but not directly addressed. Technical evaluations of open construction systems could estimate the degree of sustainability of these structures. Hopefully, this article will prompt discussions among industry practitioners and trigger explorations worldwide.”

More information

Contact author via

• Christina Priavolou. Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance, Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia street 3, 12618, Tallinn, Estonia.
• P2P Lab, Kougkiou 3A, 45221, Ioannina, Greece.

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Mike Hales: When I first read Gary Werskey’s 2007 ‘three movements’ article – four years ago – I was sceptical. He discussed two British movements of radicals around science, in the 30s-40s and the 70s-80s, and speculated on the possibility of a third (which might possibly have an environmental impetus).

I was particularly unconvinced about the possibility of a Marxist movement, like the other two. But now, in 2018, I do have the sense that, yes, the peer-to-peer commons movement may be the thing that is in fact standing in that place. It would be worthwhile, at least, to proceed on the basis that it is – with substantial (if, for activists, secondary) implications for the field of science and technology studies (STS). I’m in no doubt that P2P-commons is the biggest thing I’ve seen in my activist lifetime . . and that it mobilises the stuff I’ve been cultivating these past 50 years, as a libertarian socialist with an orientation to the politics of knowledges and technologies.

It would be worth proceeding on the basis that P2P-commons is ‘the third radical science movement’

‘Radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science?

The movement for P2P-commons may be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified

The P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in the 70s, ‘in-and-against the PMC’

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was

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David Bollier and Silke Helfrich: If there is one recurring theme described in this book, it is the importance of exploring the inner dimensions of commoning as a social form, moving beyond economistic notions of the commons as a mere resource to be managed. Commoning is an attitude, an ethic, an impulse, a need and a satisfaction – a way of being that is deeply inscribed within the human species. But it is up to us to make it thrive. We must choose to practice commoning and reflect on its impact on our lives and the Earth, the more consciously, the better.

The great appeal of commoning is simultaneously a reason for its invisibility: it calls on us to see the world from a fundamentally different perspective, acknowledging that the self emerges from relationships with others and can exist only through these relationships and as a result of them. Failing to perceive the diverse types of “we’s” that exist and their complex dynamics and logics is tantamount to trying to live on Earth without an atmosphere. Our lives are enframed and defined by “we’s.” These collectives are not merely the sum of individuals, but distinct systems of organization that emerge from our encounters with each other and committed joint action.

More: a commons is dynamic and evolving, and therefore proposes a more realistic idea of human life. It does not propose a static economic perspective that assumes what we supposedly are; it recognizes that we are always becoming. Commoning draws upon our distinct, situated identities, cultures and roots as essential elements of governance, production, law and culture. This perspective helps us grasp that we not only create the world; the world in turn shapes and creates us. So we must attend to the larger, holistic consequences of our own world-creating capacities, to make sure that the selves that we each cultivate through our relationships and world-making are the selves that we truly wish to be and worlds we wish to live in. Or as Lau Tzu put it with such wisdom, “Be a pattern for the world.”

The commons quivers with aliveness precisely because it is a reflexive, open system that resists attempts to make it schematic, regularized and tightly controlled. The commons is alive because it offers space for people to apply their own imaginations and energy to solve problems – and human ingenuity and cooperation tend to produce many surprising results. In their self-created zones of freedom, commoners have the latitude to build their own worlds without the tyranny of the Market/State, bureaucratic procedures or confining social roles (consumer, seller, employee, expert).

Needless to say, an economy and society that truly respects commons requires a re-imagination of politics itself. They require social processes that invite collective participation and express collective sentiments, not “leaders” who may be only crudely accountable to people and captive to capital and its imperatives. Commons require a primary focus on meeting everyone’s needs, not on catering to the ever-proliferating wants of the few. Expanding the scope and scale of commons so that they can become a powerful alternative to capital driven markets, and spur mutual coordination and federation, introduces a whole new set of challenges, of course. It requires that we work for new configurations of state authority and clear limits on market power. Yet there are many promising scenarios of policy, law, governance and politics that seek to advance this vision: the focus of our next anthology.

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“What is, then, a philosophy of relation?

Something impossible, as long as it is not conceived of as poetics.”

 – Edouard Glissant

The World as Consciousness

Near Sant’Andrea, Italy, the sea laps onto the slabs of rock that form the edge of the island of Elba. The waves, smooth as fish bellies, slate gray, white, and aquamarine, shatter into liquid fragments on the rock. In the distance lies Corsica, barely visible in the haze, under a fan of fingers of light. The water that strokes the stones, the boulder rounded and worn away, the wind tousling one’s hair, the birds blown by and lost again, come together in a dance. We are commoners of a commons of perception from which our own experiences, our own identities and those of the world emerge.

Our identities arise through that which we are not: through impressions and touch, through sensory exchanges with that which is stone and water, molecule and light quantum, all of which somehow transform themselves into the energy of the body. All life, from the very beginning, derives from solar energy that is given to all. Our existence in an ecosphere suffused with life is part of a vast commons even before individuality can be perceived. Each individual belongs to the world and is at the same time its owner, owner of the rough stone speckled by the waves, ruffled by the wind, stroked by rays. All perception is commons, which is to say, the result of a dance of interdependency with the world. The world belongs to us completely, and at the same time, we are fully entrusted to it. It is only through this exchange that we become conscious of it and of ourselves.

Beyond Humanism

A new self-understanding that aspires to supplant modernity is currently developing. It is still in a state of flux, unformed in many ways. But often, it can be discerned as a struggle by humanism to overcome the limits of Enlightenment rationality. It questions the separation of the world into a sphere of humans and a sphere of things that consists of natural resources, animals, objects and ideas. Humans are no longer to be at the center – but the idea of nature as an independent order is also rejected.

Proponents of this type of thinking have given it various names – “Anthropocene,” “Posthumanism” and “Metahumanism,” among others. What they all share is an attempt to reconceive the relationship between humanity and nature, thus articulating the human in a different way. The proponents of this project – for example, the Italian philosopher and writer Francesca Ferrando – see “an urgency for the integral redefinition of the notion of the human” (Ferrando 2013:26).

This quest will shift completely our understanding of ourselves and of the world we are part of. As a consequence it will also imply a reordering of the realms of politics and economics. If we do not see the world any longer under a duality of “human actors” and “natural resources,” then the boundaries between that which is being distributed and those who are using it become blurred. In such a world, socioeconomics can no longer pursue only the goals of just and fair distribution because “producers” and “consumers” are often the same people. We can already witness this in the many commons now arising, and in those that have always been there and are now being rediscovered.

In other words, in the epoch of the Anthropocene and the posthumanist thinking it entails, a new metaphysics of “householding” is emerging, revealing how exchanges of matter and metabolites – and human meaning – are deeply intertwined. This is an astonishing opportunity to escape the dilemmas of modernity and to reimagine our ontological condition. It might be compared to the great transformation occurring at the beginning of the Enlightenment period.

Seeking a new concept of what is human, numerous thinkers are doing away with the separations between humans and “nature,” “nature” and “culture,” and body and mind, which have dominated our self-understanding since the Enlightenment. New propositions are challenging these dualisms and, in turn, undermining the worldview that has given rise to the neoliberal “free market” economy and the biological ideology that all organisms strive to be “efficient.” The old conceptual barriers that thwarted a more benevolent relationship between humanity and the rest of the living world can now be overcome, or at least the terms of the relationships can be shifted.

Today, we are not only in a time of economic or social upheaval, but also in a crisis of self-awareness; the very metaphors we use to describe our role in the world are inadequate. This crisis of normative perception and thought offers the rare opportunity to achieve a more balanced relationship between humans and the earth than was possible with thinking that presumes a human/nature separation. But our crisis today could also result in the opposite, namely, a more commanding, coercive vision of human dominance. Will a new form of anthropocentrism, a new toxic utopia, emerge from the current competition between perspectives? Will this worldview ultimately dominate natural history by comprehending the biological solely as an object of technical creativity? Will it treat the human as a derivative version of the cyborg – a perspective that some representatives of Anthropocene thought seem to believe? Or can we instead develop a comprehensive ontology of creative aliveness?

It is imperative to go beyond Enlightenment categories of thought to recover those currents of humanism that earlier, rationalizing streams of the Western world banished. It is equally important to evaluate some important new perspectives that contemporary thought are able to add, drawing upon co-creative perspectives in biology, anthropology and poetics. To date, theories of the Anthropocene and Posthumanism do not sufficiently include the perspective of creative aliveness; this is the diagnosis of this essay. These theories still follow mainly the notion that the world can be accurately understood as a body of inert physical matter, or, that it needs human stewardship as a controlling agent or a “gardener” (Marris 2013) to fully reach its creative potential.

This essay challenges this belief by recovering the dimension that has been forgotten since the Enlightenment and has not yet been rediscovered in the Anthropocene – the radical philosophical practice and perspective of the commons, without which the relationship of humans to reality cannot be understood. I argue that reality, from which we are descended and through which we experience and engender ourselves, is itself a commons that must be understood and connected to as such.

The commons of reality is a matrix of relationships through which aliveness is unfolding in ecosystems and history. It conveys the aliveness of biological and human communities from a perspective of metabolic dependency, exchanges of gifts, and the entanglement of actors within their vectors of activity. Living participants bring each other into being by establishing relationships (metabolism, predator/prey relationships, social ties), thus producing not only their environments but their very identities (Weber 2014).

Thus, the commons describes an ontology of relations that is at the same time existential, economic and ecological. It emphasizes a process of transformation and identity formation that arises out of a mutuality that is not only material, but also experienced. For humans, then, this ontology produces meaning and emotional reality. This process also encompasses what has recently been described as “conviviality” – “an art of living together (con-vivere) that allows humans to take care of each other and of Nature, without denying the legitimacy of conflict, yet by using it as a dynamizing and creativity-sparking force” (Alphandéry et al 2014).

In the following pages, I will attempt to describe a perspective of reality based on connecting all humans and all other creatures. I seek to shatter the familiar categories of “culture” and “nature,” which are invariably seen by moderns as separate and distinct. The two realms are in fact one, if we can recognize that reality is founded upon aliveness as the critical, connecting element. Aliveness is not limited to “nature” or “culture.” It is intrinsic to all social and biological systems. It has an objective, empirical substance and a subjective, tangible dimension, and it is always interweaving dimensions of matter with perception and experience (Weber 2013).

It is therefore essential that we elucidate a self-understanding of the Anthropocene from this perspective – an ontology of the commons. After all, without this perspective to complete the picture, the Anthropocene – the new epoch characterized by the dominance of human beings – would disregard a core attribute of reality. To distinguish the necessary new perspective from the technical rationality of the Enlightenment, I refer to this emerging perspective as Enlivenment – a theme that I explored in a previous essay (Weber 2013). Enlivenment is an ontology of aliveness, of coming to life, that is at once physical and intangible, and scientific and spiritual. It calls people to live in an unfolding natural history of freedom and self-realization.

The Anthropocene Hypothesis as a Commodification of the Creative

How, exactly, do the many, burgeoning posthumanist interpretations of our time fail to grasp the cosmos as a creative reality? Let us begin with the Anthropocene. Today, climate researchers assume that humans have become the defining biogeochemical force on Earth since the year 1800, more or less, and that the Holocene era, the phase that started with the last Ice Age, has ended (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000:17-18). Today, we are living in the “epoch of mankind,” the Anthropocene. This hypothesis, of course, is not only a scientific finding about the history of the climate: it is simultaneously a cosmological statement about the status of human beings, one that eliminates the familiar division of reality into a sphere of human activity and a sphere of nature.

It is this variant of the Anthropocene hypothesis that is increasingly affecting our deliberations on how to achieve sustainability. Its focus is frankly solipsistic – how should we humans deal with other animals and plants, and what changes should we make to our economic system? But this view lacks a critical element – an account of the more-than-human world as a living reality. The Anthropocene hypothesis may help us overcome thinking that pits humans against nature, but it fails precisely in that endeavor as long as it celebrates humans as the masters of nature. Anthropocene thinkers often enthusiastically annex the planet into the sphere of culture in what appears like a philosophical equivalent of globalization; reality is re-cast to ratify the triumph of human beings over the natural world.

To be sure, our earlier concepts of “nature” are obsolete, but not in the sense that they would have to find their place in the human world. Rather, the Anthropocene is misguided because it projects human methods for solving problems onto a cosmos that is still not understood. It speaks from within the mindset of human power. Sustainability pioneer Wolfgang Sachs observes, “At first, the term ‘Anthropocene’ expressed the diagnosis of anxiety. Ten years on, it meant power of authority” – a methodology of domination (personal communication, July 21, 2014).

If we consider “nature” to be formed predominantly by culture and technology, the Anthropocene consummates the colonialization of elemental nonhuman creative forces that Western culture has dreamed of for centuries. In other words, Anthropocene thinking is proving to be a new, more extensive iteration of enclosure. To advance narrow human purposes, it not only seizes control of self-organizing creative forces in nature (e.g., genetic engineering, nanotechnologies); it also seizes the self-organizing wild creativity within us.

Admittedly, it is hard to determine who is to blame for this habit of thinking, which is so deeply anchored in the self-understanding of the West as to be utterly invisible. We are not talking about a particular discourse, but the very foundation of our concept of reality. Forms of thinking and feeling that deviate from this sense of reality are hardly possible. Or they are considered “unscientific” and thus unserious. This subtle cognitive form of enclosure occurs with the best of intentions. Since the early modern period, the “Bacon project” has sought to achieve the separation of humans and resources. This is the quest for total self-empowerment of mankind that began with the British Renaissance scholar Francis Bacon’s “novum organon” (Schäfer 1993). This project was intended to improve human life and keep death in check. The logic and appeal of this worldview remain very much in force today. In the realm of ecology, for example, humans often regard “nature” as an inert physical Other – or they may consider themselves stewards of natural systems and their functions, which are essential for our survival.

Yet this arrangement paradoxically deepens the gulf between what is human and the rest of the world. In the end, such a stance tempts people to conceive of everything nonhuman as a soulless physical resource. From here, it is only a small step to its actual transformation into a commodity, a saleable good that can be used however we wish. Once we adopt this orientation toward the world, all further enclosures seem as necessary and desirable steps. Every physical enclosure of wild and emotionally unbridled reality can be traced back to this separation of living entities from the living context of which they are a part – a separation that neutralizes the generative power of life itself.

This dynamic can be seen in the enclosures of commons in sixteenth century England, the patenting of the human genome and in the sterile, proprietary seeds produced by gene patenting. Such outcomes are the inevitable physical expressions of a conceptual dualism, as it were, that elevates a narrow human instrumentality over the essential wildness of reality.

Dualism as an Invisible Colonialization of the Soul

This dualism is not a mere abstraction; it has been the driving force separating humans from the experience of creative vitality. It also lies at the heart of the historical Enlightenment idea that the world can become a habitable place only by means of reason, which itself is the basis for the logic of the market that also differentiates between actors and things. All of these phenomena have the same roots and are the consequence of an enclosure that is initially imaginary. The liberal market system, which makes a distinction between resources (which are traded) and subjects (who trade or who want to be supplied with things), is the product of this dualism. Dualism has appeal because it is a method for asserting control by dividing the world in two: an inanimate sphere (“nature”) that is to be dominated and a sphere of human subjects ordained to assert control.

From this perspective, there is no difference between enclosure, commodification, and colonialization. All three not only attack living systems that have no single owner, they at the same time trample on the psychological and emotional identities connected to these resources. They are all attacks on “aliveness” itself – a capacity of life that is unavailable and incomprehensible to the dualistic mind. Therefore, they are also attacks on reality. In this vein, political scientist David Johns (2014:42) observes, “Colonialism is nowhere more apparent and thriving than in the relationship between humanity and the rest of the earth.”

Actual action thus is always preceded by a tacit enclosure sanctioned by the deep assumptions of the mind. Enclosure usurps the categories of existence and disparages the concept of aliveness as well as the dimensions of experience linked to it. The practices of conceptual enclosure preemptively deny the existence of an unavailable Other, making it impossible to conceptualize and honor real, subjective experience. This Other is not only “nature” or a person from a foreign culture; it is the experience of a dimension of reality that can only be lived and not captured by rational conceptualization. This Other is the domain of physically experienced reality that precedes all conceptualization and colonialization: it is the bliss when we watch the sun rise or see a beloved partner or a young dog, or the dimension of meaning in a piece of work that benefits everyone and not just ourselves. It is the domain of what Manfred Max-Neef catalogues as “human needs” – the existential dimensions of healthy relationships to self and others (Smith & Max-Neef 2010).

Enclosure occurs through a type of thinking that ignores creative processes and the meanings of emotions, both of which originate in the body. Enclosure instead subordinates these feelings to “rationality,” “stewardship,” empiricism, discursivity and control. Such thinking culminates in the idea that “nature” and the body themselves do not exist, but are solely artifacts of culture. In modern culture, it is considered naïve to believe that “nature” can be experienced as a domain of creative unfolding, or that there is a perceptible kinship of being alive that is shared by all living things and which can be experienced. This reality is denied by our cognitive frameworks and language, resulting in what amounts to mental and spiritual enclosure. This colonialization of our innermost essence inescapably results in an “empty self,” as biophilosopher David Kidner (2014:10) predicts. This de facto “empty self” is indeed diagnosed by many as a current psychopathological “civilizational narcissism” that marks our times.

In humanity’s resurgent obsession with treating Earth as a raw, inert resource (e.g., geoengineering to forestall climate change, synthetic biology to “improve upon” nature, etc. ), the Enlightenment is pushing one last time for sovereignty over the cosmos. Here the Anthropocene is completely identical with Anthropocentrism. The old notions of human superiority, control and technical mastery are concealed by equating humans and “nature,” putting them on an equal footing. Even a sophisticated theorist such as Bruno Latour falls for this category error when he reassures his readers, “The sin is not to wish to have dominion over nature but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment” (quoted in Shellenberger & Nordhaus 2011). Since people are in fact connected in relationships (with the Earth, with each other), the fallacy lies in attempting to dominate what embraces them in ways they do not understand; they are blind to reality and prone to act destructively.

Italian philosopher Ugo Mattei believes that even the act of dividing the world into subject and object results in commodifying both (quoted in Bollier 2014). The commodification of the spirit inevitably finds a warped expression at the real and political level. “Nature” is banished to the periphery of the human world even though it still nourishes and sustains us, produces everything we eat, and remains the wellspring of creative energy. Every separation into subject and object divides the world into two realms, resources and profiteers. This boundary is not necessarily between things and people (or between matter and creatures), but between that which is used up, and those who benefit from that consumption.

Thus, we are suffering not only because of the commodification of the natural and social world. We are suffering because our conceptualization of the world itself allows commodification as the sole way to relate to it. It is no longer possible to speak about the world in the categories of subjective aliveness. We are suffering because of the enclosure of the spiritual through myriad cultural fictions of separation and domination that falsely parse the world into an outside (resource) and inside (actor). Concepts such as strict cause-and-effect relationships, causal mechanisms, the separation of body and soul – all of them fundamental premises of Enlightenment thinking – result in our taking reality hostage. We colonize it by believing in the concept of a treatable, repairable, controllable world. Any experience that contradicts this enclosure of reality must be discounted or denied.

Yet hardly anyone is aware of the profoundly misleading taxonomic screens of our language and worldview. We can barely imagine the extent to which our view of reality is distorted by spiritual enclosure. We do not realize that the self-organizing nature of our everyday lives has disappeared from view – a dispossession far more radical than the one experienced by commoners locked out of their forests a few hundred years ago. We do not appreciate how conceiving of our own selves as biomachines has impoverished us as humans, and how treating our emotional feelings chiefly as “chemical imbalances” (to be corrected through pharmaceuticals) denies an elemental dimension of our humanity.

Cutting living subjects off from participating in the commons of reality and its mixture of practices and emotions, objects and aspects of meaning, is destructive in another serious respect: It blinds us to the nature of enclosure itself. As psychologists Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmit (2007:101f) observe, the overarching ideology of enclosure is an ideology of control and dominance, and a denial of enduring relationships. This systemic worldview is not simply unjust and dangerous, it brazenly defies reality. It is cruel because it violates the web of relational exchange which reality is.

Every metaphysics that separates humans from the world furtively transforms itself into an inhumane ideology. The ideology of enclosure is inhumane because it generates a hierarchy in reality, ostensibly for human benefit, by installing humanity as custodian of the rational, the protector of the ordered, the knight battling chaos. Yet reality is not chaotic. On the contrary, it simply embodies an order that we are not always able to discern. Reality is structured as a creative expression of living agents, both human and more-than-human. Its structure, however, is sometimes invisible because its systems cannot be universalized, regimented or monetized without destroying life itself.

Posthumanism as an Extension of Our Machine Dreams

A flurry of new critiques are ostensibly seeking to break away from the dualisms of the Enlightenment by using “post” in their names – for example, postenvironmentalism or posthumanism. Regrettably, they do not really come to terms with creative reality. Instead they put forward hybrid versions of human nature that exist between “object” and “subject.” But ultimately they are not rooted in the processes of the creative wild, but in technological artifacts made by humans.

Posthumanism is in fact fixated on machines. It is mostly about cyborgs and hybrid humans, and has little interest in grasshoppers, geckos or the integration of the natural and the social as we see, say, in indigenous communities’ systems of thought. With the notable exception of the influential Donna Haraway, a feminist scholar who writes extensively about human-machine and human-animal relations, posthumanism wants little to do with other species. Posthumanism is oriented toward machines because they are our species-specific creations. They are artifacts that bear witness to this special feature of ours, namely being not only biological creatures of the cosmos, but also sovereign creators, controllers and engineers. Technical hybrids – i.e., humans whose cognitive abilities are enhanced by means of electronic tools or combinations of humans and machines – represent a type of the wild that fascinates many posthumanist thinkers. But a genuine posthumanism would recognize that we must imagine the deconstruction of the machines as functional essence of what is human. The “function” of our hands, after all, is not just to pick up things, but to be able to sensitively caress a stone, a loved one’s neck, or a black poodle’s fur in the warm sun.

Posthumanism as now conceived still erects walls around a colony of abstraction. It strictly guards an enclave of rationality and shies away from the practice of living connectedness. And so except for sporadic lapses when the metaphysical fabric accidentally rips, posthumanism continues to overlook the enclosure of the living body as a place of experience, feeling and self. It fails to see itself as a vehicle for any sort of exchange with the Other. Every self-styled philosophy of emancipation is on shaky ground if it is not clear about the self-concealed enclosures of the wild that it commits against our selves, our thinking and our identities.

Recognizing the Commons of Existence: The Key to the Anthropocene

The hypothesis of the Anthropocene, namely that “man and nature are one today,” can be considered in a meaningful way only if it acknowledges a theory of reality as a commons. A concept of the Anthropocene can be fruitful only if we do not grasp it as yet another “epoch of humankind,” but as an epoch in which the living co-creative reality of ecosystems becomes the foundation for how humans perceive and experience reality.

To this end, we must recognize reality itself as a commons that is pressing forward to unfold in a natural history of freedom. This history must embrace the role of the bodies and subjective experiences of all living subjects. The point is that commons are not only entities designed by humans. They are an existential, self-created necessity of all living exchange – i.e., of life itself. As theologian Martin Buber (1937) puts it, “all actual life is encounter.” All reality, every act of perception which accesses and produces the world, is a negotiation, a creative transformation between two poles, each of which is at the same time object and actor.

Even in our absence, reality is a commons. We can approach it by shaping it according to a pattern of mutual giving and giving in return, and then witness the transformational ripples following from each act of giving. Human culture has the opportunity to shape the world as a commons as it participates in the web of interdependent living things, thus making the world more real. In the Anthropocene, this new perspective on natural history as the unfolding of freedom and depth of experience and expression should be put at center stage. This idea, not a narrow vision of human instrumentality, should explicitly guide our self-understanding and our economic and political agenda. Without such an orientation, we will continue to act destructively toward other living things and our planet.

As a philosophy and practice, commoning considers the coexistence of living things on this planet as a joint, creative process, one that increases the aliveness of the biosphere and the cultural sphere. Thinking in the categories of the commons actualizes an ontology that, while not fundamentally new in Western thinking, has been underestimated and suppressed for a long time. This ontology alone makes it possible for us to grasp the conditions of evolutionary reality in which we exist and then to play a constructive part in shaping the unfolding reality. The existential realities of the world have brought us forth as participants in the natural history of the cosmos and its social, metabolical, and existential dimensions; we in turn are continually extending and recreating this natural history.

A commons is a way of entering into relationships with the world, both materially and conceptually. It does so without the usual dualistic concepts of the Enlightenment (culture/nature, animate/inanimate, etc.) and it fuses theory and practice as one. Principles of acting are embedded in concrete, situational processes of conflict, negotiation and cooperation, which in turn alter reality and generate new situations.

All principles that animate this process are intrinsic to it and cannot come from “outside” of it. The principles do not fall into our laps, and no god, state or moral-philosophical process of any kind can posit them. At the same time, however, the process of commoning – and this is true of the commons of reality, too – is anything but devoid of rules. It follows the principles for how creative relationships arise among various counterparties and thereby create their identities, shape their bodies and determine their interests. Commoning is an ecological and evolutionary reality based on concrete interactions, which always have to mediate between the flourishing of individuals and the prosperity of the encompassing whole. In this sense, existential success always is a negotiation between autonomy and fusion. Its shape can never be codified because it is a living, dynamic process; existential success can only be lived.

In this reading, all commons are “posthuman.” Our undeniable human agency is inscribed within a living system of other animate forces, each of which is both sovereign and interdependent at the same time. In commons, humankind does not hold arbitrary sway as a ruler, but as an attentive subject in a network of relationships. The effects of (inter)actions reflect back on those acting and all other nodes, animated or metaphorical – human subjects, bats, fungi, bacteria, aesthetic obsessions, infections, or guiding concepts – are active as well. Every commons is a rhizome – a material and informal network of living connections which constantly changes as it mutates and evolves.

The innermost core of aliveness cannot be classified and negotiated rationally. It is only possible to be involved in experiences and creative expression. That is why the idea of the commons, which is fundamentally about real subjects seeking nourishment and meaning through physical, pragmatic, material and symbolical means, is the best way to describe a “posthuman” connection to the rest of the biosphere. For a commons is always an embodied, material, perceptible, existential and symbolic negotiation of individual existence through the Other and the whole. It is an attempt to echo the forms of order implied in the self-creating wild through acts of creative transformation, in response to the existential imperatives of the wild.

Each of these acts involves both self-awareness and material interactions. Each is real and metabolic in that the participants of the ecosystem are linked together through the exchange of eating and being devoured, of taking and giving, and of subtly influencing the order of the whole and being influenced by it. This process is imaginative because it is triggered by the experiences of joy, fear and other feelings – which in turn are the basis for consequential actions and material changes.

The concept of the commons helps bridge – and transcend – the dualities that otherwise structure our self-awareness. It bridges the connection between the “natural” – the world of beings and species – and the “social” or “cultural” – the sphere of human-made symbolic systems, discourses and practices – by generating an interdependent, organic whole. For this reason, conceiving of “nature” as a commons of living entities is also a way of understanding ourselves anew. It helps us see and name our biological and our social aliveness as an indivisible whole conjoined to the rest of the world.

An ontology that describes reality through the lens of the commons, in other words, makes it possible to focus on aliveness as both a conceptual idea and experience. Therein slumbers the opportunity to arrive at a new, relational understanding of ourselves and the world. Going beyond “objective” structures, algorithms, and cause-and-effect scenarios that look at observable external behaviors, we can also take account of the internal feelings of the actors (which are motive-forces in their own right), and thereby escape the sterile dualism that has crippled the Western mind for so long.

The Anthropocene can reconcile and integrate humans and “nature” only if we comprehend that we exist as agents who are continuously transformed in a process that is both material and filled with meaning – a process that experiences itself emotionally and reproduces itself creatively, and in so doing generates and expresses ever more complex degrees of freedom (in a larger context of dependency on other living systems).

In this sense, “nature” and “human” are aligned and quite literally identical. Both rely on “imagination” to produce a world and self-reproduce themselves. Our identities are rooted in the uncontrollable wild and in creative self-organization, neither of which can be entirely subject to control or “stewardship.” Such control (even when asserted through enclosure) cannot prevail ultimately because the instruments of control that we devise are themselves built on “uncontrollable forms” – wildness – which remain beyond strict control and understanding. So while humans may “dominate” “nature” in ways that posthumanism celebrates, conversely, we humans are grounded by forces of wildness that ultimately cannot be subdued and mastered through cultural control because culture relies on them as the basic principles of creation, self-organization and co-creative relations.

In regarding reality as commons, we do not resolve the contradictions of existence by reducing them to one aspect – only mind, only matter, only discourse, only market. Nor do we seek anything such as a higher synthesis – the classic, devastating response to the paradoxes of existence ever since Hegel and then his student Marx, who promised a contradiction-free, higher state of being that drove utopians mad in violent anticipation.

The mundane reality is that true being is “higher” and “lower” at the same moment. And for a simple reason: What is alive resists any and all synthesis. Inner, immaterial and experiential identity, coiled within a material body, is itself the greatest paradox. This identity, which becomes real only through a body, has no separate physical mass and occupies no space. And yet still it profoundly alters the physical world and space through a continual and self-referential process.

This dimension of living reality should follow a “dialogic” rather than a binary logic, as French philosopher Edgar Morin claims. Morin’s dialogic does not try to eliminate contradictions but explicitly seizes them to illuminate the point. Living reality is a logic of dialogue and polyphony, of encounters, conversations, mutual transformations and interpretations, in the logic of negotiation and striking compromises (Morin 2001:272). It is this stance of negotiating, adapting and enduring that has determined the way in which humans have dealt with the commons since time immemorial. It is what is called commoning.

Poetic Materialism

The Anthropocene lacks the understanding that any exchange – of things (in the economy), of meanings (in communication), of identities (in the bond between subjects) – always has two sides: an external, material side and also an internal, existential side in which meaning is expressed and experienced. Reality is creative and expressive precisely because it never lets itself be reduced to one of these sides. Since all processes are founded upon relationships that convey meanings (which all subjects experience as emotions), the most appropriate way to formulate such a reality is through the idea of poetics.

The poetic dimension is the world of our feelings, our social bonds, and everything that we experience as significant and meaningful. Poetics is at the same time symbolic and material and therefore it is inextricably linked to social communication, exchange and interactions with others and the environment. Poetics describes the world that we experience in the perspective of the first person – the world in which we are at home in an intimate way and the world that we seek to protect through political arrangements. Economic exchange, which is always a meaningful householding among living beings, also takes place in this world described by a poetic reality.

In our time, the great discourses – empirical rationality, human freedom as a rational actor, instrumental reason in economics – are being exposed as deficient, provoking a mad scramble to salvage them as coherent perspectives. The real issue of our time, then, is to activate a new language. After 300 years of Enlightenment thinking, the challenge is to redefine aliveness and humanity within it by complementing techné with the concept of poiesis. Techné means explainability, analysis and successful replication. Poiesis, by contrast, means creative self-realization – an element that brings forth reality, that cannot be suppressed, and that can never be sufficiently understood to be successfully controlled.

In the end, everything is techné in one sense – but in another, everything is also poiesis. Techné is cause and effect, control, management, understanding, exchange. Poiesis is inner goal-directedness, bringing forth oneself, giving oneself over, self-expression, feeling, and accepting. Techné is planning and sustainability. Poiesis is the “wasteful” promiscuity of creation. Life needs both. Reality is both. Creative transformation grows out of the tension of this contradiction without ever resolving it.

Perhaps one could call such a perspective poetic materialism. Any thinking in relationships can take place only in the form of poetic acts. Living relationships, however, organize themselves only among bodies which constantly transform themselves, which grow and decay. In systems in which change occurs dynamically as participants seek to negotiate and transform each other, experience cannot be expressed as a fixed identity, but only as the transient expression of one through the other – in other words, poetically.

The poetic dimension is simultaneously a modification of the individual and a modification of the whole. It becomes distinct and visible in an individual only through forms of experience and symbolic expression. In this sense, as a poetics of relationships defines the individual reality, and a poetics of relationships can be understood as a commons, reality appears to the individual as a commons. Systematic thinking joined with the lived practice of commons – commoning – are based on a poetics of relations. Their idea of exchange considers both embodied things and the existential (inner) reality of meaning and feeling. All are aspects of a “creative householding” – the ability to express and experience things, which constitute the freedom that is constantly being enacted in natural history.

The idea of understanding reality through the lens of a “poetics of relation” was first formulated by the French-Carribean poet and philosopher Edouard Glissant. Glissant calls his poetics a “creolization of thinking”: a mutual transformation and fertilization of self and other without clear hierarchies. Everyone involved has equal standing. They are actors and objects. They belong to themselves. And they can be means – even food – to everyone else (see Glissant 1997).

A creolization of thinking requires “peership” between empirical reality and feeling. All processes take place inside and outside an organism simultaneously; they are always conceptual and spiritual, but they are also always real in space and time. Taking the step across the abyss between the two cultures means understanding and reevaluating creative aliveness as the center of reality. Creative action is the experience of what is alive, as experienced from the inside, subjectively. One might call it “affective objectivity” – a universal and real phenomenon, but one that is also evanescent and resistant to measurement.

Indian geographer Neera Singh has shown the extent to which this emotive power encourages commoners to act and provides subjective rewards for their action. She demonstrates that villagers in rural India not only make resources more productive through their commoning with forests. They also satisfy emotional needs and “transform their individual and collective subjectivities” (Singh 2013). They are engaging in an active poetics of relating, in which the human affect and the “material world” commune with each other and alter one another.

It bears emphasizing that “collective subjectivity” extends beyond the human community to include the subjectivities of the living environment – the trees, the supportive vegetation, the birds, the flows of water, the “real” ecosystem elements that human subjectivities actually alter. Commoners, one could say, follow a poetic reason that has emotive substance, but also material manifestations in people’s bodies, community life and local ecosystems. The poetic moment of their action manifests itself when the living forest and social community flourish together, in entangled synergy. This is something that can be perceived by the senses and experienced emotionally through the forest’s opulent biodiversity (and yes, also measured, but the measurements will invariably fail to grasp the animating power of the human affect).

It is telling that cultures for whom participation in natural processes amounts to emotional engagement in a poetic reality, do not make the distinctions between “animate” and “inanimate” or “nature” and “culture” – dualities that are taken for granted in Western thinking. The basic affective experience of being in a lively exchange with the world, taking from it and contributing to it, is denied by the West’s worldview and language: a perniciously subliminal type of enclosure.

Singh calls the psychological-emotional engagement arising from caring for a commons “emotional work.” In the absence of this affective dimension, both subject and object lose their paired identities: those working on the land, say, as well as the object of such work, the animate whole. Geographers and philosophers are increasingly beginning to comprehend land and people as a lived reality – a factor of real interactions and an existential, poetic enactment.

If such a commons is colonialized – which today would mean to be reduced to a mere resource by industrial agriculture – the emotional needs of the people involved – belonging, meaning, identity – can no longer be fulfilled. This is precisely what has happened to our purportedly modern minds – a colonization of emotions that are denounced as backward, superstitious, unenlightened or unscientific. The emotional work of caring for a commons, however, is both an ecological necessity and a material reality, as well as it is a psychological need. Therefore the collapse of affect (belonging, meaning, identity) has material consequences. As human relationships to an ecosystem erode, so does respect for the ecosystem, and the ecosystem’s stability. A kind of ecological death occurs, in turn, one that has both spiritual and biodiversity-related dimensions. The two depend on one another and balance one another.

In other words, a healthy culture is a co-creative interpretation of nature in all its irrepressible aliveness. That is why subjectivity, cooperation, negotiation and irreconcilable otherness must not be seen as patterns that only we lay upon the world, as is currently done by most economy and culture approaches. Rather it is the other way round: Subjectivity, meaning-creation, “weak” non-causal interaction, code and interpretation are deep features of living nature. Its most basic principle comes down to the paradoxical self-realization of an individual through the whole, which at the same time is “the other” that needs to be fenced off.

Need, distance and momentary balance in beauty: Aliveness as such is a commoning process. Perception thus becomes a co-creative commons integrating a subject concerned with care for its self and its environment – which both mutually imagine, nourish and bring forth one another. In this perspective our deeper feelings are themselves a distinguishing feature of patterns of creative aliveness. They affect the perceptions of subjects and impel them to participate in a co-creative commons with their environment; subjects and environment actively imagine, nourish and engender each other.

Culture therefore is not structurally different from nature in the sense that it is only human – a feature putting man apart as incommensurate with the remainder of the world. Nature, on the other hand, is not underlying human culture in a reductionist sense. Nor can all cultural structures can be explained (socio-)biologically. The causal-mechanic, efficiency-centered approach as a whole is mistaken. Nature is based on meaning, open to creative change and constantly bringing forth agents with subjective experiences. It is always creative in order to mediate the realization of the individual through the whole. Any exchange-relationship in Nature always involves both metabolism and meaning, and in this way generates feeling. Nature is a process of unfolding freedom, tapping inexhaustible creativity and intensifying experiential and expressive depth (Weber 2015).

In this sense (although not in any superficial, reductionistic pattern), culture has to be like nature. This is an idea somewhat parallel to what philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (2013) is claiming when he argues that any art worthy of its name does not copy nature’s objects but rather follows its deep process of creative unfolding, freedom and “non-identity” – the impossibility of reducing an agent to just one substance, be that a causal mechanism or language-games. Culture is structurally not different from ecological exchange processes, but echoes them in the human species-specific creative forms. It expresses our own poetic interpretation of the ever-recurring theme of coping with the irresolvable paradox of autonomy and wholeness. That is why human culture cannot control and engineer nature as a passive, non-living object. Because we humans are implicated in the creative aliveness of nature, our culture must also honor our own aliveness as the best way to foster our own freedom and long-term survival. We must shape our selfhood according to the needs of a larger whole that is necessary to all life. Autonomy is always inscribed within a larger whole and only possible through it. Paradoxically, autonomy is possible only through relation.

Seen from this perspective, it becomes essential to adopt a first-person viewpoint as a counterpoint to the purportedly scientific perspective of “objective reality,” which is typically expressed in the third person. In the ontological reality that we are describing here, the first-person perspective is both poetic (rich with meaning, feeling and implications for identity) while genuinely objective (material, scientifically measurable). The first-person viewpoint mediates our perception with our material reality, which is only possible from the perspective of a meaning-making self (see Weber & Varela 2002 for more details). Internal, first-person insights that were ruled out by a worldview that accepts only the empirical/objective point of view – because they are not “real” in the material, physical sense – become valid. Once natural ecosystems are seen as creatively alive, it becomes necessary to complement rational thinking and empirical observation with the “empirical subjectivity” of living things, and its complement, the “poetic objectivity” of meaningful experiences. This new standpoint cannot be dismissed as a soft, vague emotion, but must be heeded as a critical genre of evolutionary intelligence.

As living organisms, we must learn to experience and describe the world “from the inside” (emotionally, subjectively, socially) while at the same time treating it as a physical reality outside of us. Poetic objectivity is a solution to the destructive dualities that since the Enlightenment have separated the human species as above and apart from “nature.” Poetic objectivity represents the missing first-person-centered perspective in human culture that must act as a complement to the dominant but partial objectivist approach.

Commoning as Partaking in Reality

This essay has so far focused on the philosophical dimensions of the challenge facing humankind, but of course, the practical test is how to bring this ontological sensibility into the world and make it real. Fortunately, the social practices of creating and maintaining a commons – commoning – offer excellent opportunities for blending the subjective and objective, humanity and “nature,” and for overcoming the many other dualisms that deny our creative aliveness.

The process of commoning challenges the dualisms upon which “the economy” as conventionally understood is based. It does this by enacting different roles than those ordained by neoliberal economics and policy (such as “producer” and “consumer,” and “investor” and “natural resource”) and by building provisioning systems that are oriented toward meeting basic needs in situated contexts, and in ways that generate a sense of life and personal integration. The point of commoning projects and policies is to restore enlivenment to the center of any economy activity, which means it must strive to reflect the shared interests of all, subjective human needs and the integrity of natural ecosystems.

This can be seen in Anne Salmond’s essay in this volume (pp. 309-329), which describes how the culture of the Māori people in New Zealand expresses “the fundamental kinship between people and other life forms….They are linked together in an open-ended, dynamic set of complex networks and exchanges.” The same idea is expressed by the notion of Buen Vivir, the idea of “good living” that people in Ecuador and Bolivia use to speak about living in mindful ways with Pachamama (“Mother Earth”), the community and one’s ancestors. Needless to say, this poses serious challenges to the “modernist cosmo-logic” of the nation-state and capitalist markets. Traditional and contemporary examples add to an endless number of human ways to relate to the Other, social and natural, and defy the artificial borders of animate and inanimate. In so doing, these forms of commoning represent identity systems “beyond nature and culture,” as Collège-de-France anthropologist Philippe Descola (2013) has it.

Such patterns of commoning are not confined to people with premodern cultural roots. Even people raised in that modernist cosmo-logic of globalized industry and commerce are building commons that nourish an ontology of creative aliveness. The permaculture network is deliberately designing and engineering forms of agriculture in alignment with ecological forces. A key principle of permaculture is “integrate rather than separate,” so that farming practices build relationships among those things that work together and support each other.¹ For its part, the Burning Man community celebrates the principles of “radical inclusion” and “communal effort” in conjunction with “radical self-reliance,” “participation” and “immediacy.”² The point is to honor the wildness within every human being while insisting upon a civil social order and sustainable relationship to the land.

The idea of working with the forces of nature and the social dynamics of living communities – rather than trying to deny them, bureaucratize them or forcibly overpower them – is a key principle of commons-based governance. It is why social critics like Ivan Illich embraced the commons as a path for the spiritual reintegration of people in the face of a dehumanizing modernity. The commons helps move in this direction because it honors “affective labor” as a critical force binding people to each other, to natural systems and to earlier and future generations. The commons cultivates identity, meaning, ritual and culture among people as they work with resources to meet their everyday needs. In the process “resources” are retransformed into things that are inflected with personal and community meaning. The artful blending of the social, moral and physical into an integrated commons is what gives the commons paradigm such durability and power. It taps into wellsprings of creative aliveness in people and in so doing engenders deep satisfaction, identity, commitment, flexibility and vitality.

It is admittedly a difficult challenge for the nation-state born of ultra-rational Enlightenment principles to engineer new types of law and public policy to recognize and support commoning. The cosmo-logic of a liberal, modernist polity has trouble understanding the efficacy or desirability of governance based on subjective feelings, locally rooted knowledge and singular historical relationships; the bureaucratic state prefers to govern with universalized abstractions and atomized individuals shorn of their histories and contexts. Paradoxically, this is arguably why the nation-state and bureaucratic organizations are increasingly losing the loyalty, respect and commitment of people – their remote, impersonal modes of governance have become indifferent to the creative aliveness that human beings need and invariably seek.

The idea of citizen/consumers interacting with the market/state duopoly to advance their self-interests corresponds to the individual seeking to act smartly and efficiently to be a sovereign agent using all available resources to build up an identity and resilient self. When personal identity is regarded from this standpoint, it naturally follows that other subjects, human or otherwise, to whom the self becomes attached, are legitimately seen as mere resources for advancing one’s interests. Relationships in this picture become solely a means to a selfish end, a way of functionalizing the Other, rather than open-ended, imperfect processes of transformative exchange.

This may also be why so many commoners working on open networks – e.g., open source software, open design and production, open source agriculture, and much else – are outflanking markets that prize predictable financial gains over all else. Businesses may recognize the abundance that can be produced through common-based peer production, which necessarily draws upon people’s creative aliveness – but they are structurally designed to enclose the commons because of their ontological commitment to the subject/object division which is perfectly executed by money. Money is a means to objectify and separate. Putting a price on something reduces self-contained purpose to mere function. Therefore cash-based relationships generally disdain the value of “affective labor” and long-term commitments. Through its deep alliance with markets, the state generally colludes in denying the ontological reality of living systems despite the existential catastrophes that are now raining down on the entire planet, notably in the form of climate change.

The guardians of the state and “free market” would do well to admit their own structural limitations and legally recognize commons as a salutary form of governance. But as products of modernity and its cosmo-logic, the Market/State is mostly unable to participate as a respectful peer in the natural history of the planet; it is unwilling to acknowledge creative aliveness as an ontological foundation of reality.

It is telling that many proponents of the Anthropocene who interpret it as an epoch of world-gardening and technological stewardship over the biosphere – such as Shellenberger and Nordhaus (2013) and Marris (2013) – celebrate ultra-neoliberal free-market approaches as the best way to organize human interactions with the rest of the biosphere, and to distribute and allocate goods, and make sense of the world. They hail market creativity as the key force for inventing planet-healing technologies. This alone confirms that the postdualism of the Anthropocene is in fact still entirely anthropocentric; we are still enacting Enlightenment principles, but this time it hides behind a different mask.

This is why the tendency of certain sustainablity thinkers to hail “green economy” ecological economics and “green accounting” is questionable. To “factor in” natural services may be a quick, expedient amendment and it may in fact help otherwise-endangered ecosystems. Still, it deeply misunderstands the nature of our relationship with reality. As explained above, it fails to recognize that any exchange process is always and inevitably happening on many entangled, mutually dependent levels that reciprocally co-create one another, from the physiological to the spiritual. In a reality that consists of a dynamic and mutual unfolding of transformative relations, or existential commoning, that inescapably transforms both sides of an exchange, an economics and policy regime based on anthropocentric dualisms, including “posthumanism,” can never truly heal.

Epilogue: The Affirmation of Belonging

Modernity has sought human emancipation from nature by dominating it. The thinkers of the Anthropocene and posthumanism strive to put an end to this stance – but they continue (tacitly) to separate humans from the rest of reality. In contrast, the poetic materialism of Enlivenment outlined here, which expresses itself in successful processes of commoning, sees humans and “nature” as inextricably entangled in an exchange of mutual responsibilities, materially and culturally. The sharing of creative principles is both material and symbolic. It accepts that aliveness is a defining principle of nature just as for all species, one of which is Homo sapiens. The principles of exchange include physical embodiment, co-creativity with other living creatures, birth through death, mutual transformation through commoning, and the paradox that every connection is also a separation – because to connect, a separation is needed in the first place. It is a oneness achieved through the conjunction of two distinct unities. Identity is not wholeness, but “interpenetration,” as the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye would have put it.

The Anthropocene as a reconciliation of humans and nature will function only if we grasp that we are “nature” because we share aliveness with every being, and that creative aliveness is the underlying character according to which reality unfolds. We are transient transformations in a larger process defined by of material/semiotic referentialities. Viewed in this light, reality is revealed as a commons of those perceiving and those perceived, and their ongoing interactions. Its objectivity is not simply an academic discourse. Nor is it invented or constructed by human culture. Instead, reality is both a way of describing the world as it is and as a set of experiential practices. Like Aristotle’s ethical ideal of a mediation between the “wise and the many” (Nussbaum 2001), the ontology of the world is never fixed and unequivocal; it is always process, always birth, always becoming. The goal lies in participating in the enterprise of creative aliveness in order to make the world more real.

*       *       *

After the sun has set in Sant’Andrea off Elba, the thunderstorm, gray and , has moved on toward Corsica. The sea simultaneously mirrors the colors of the atmosphere and shakes them off, while its choppy suit of armor takes on every hue: turquoise, sky blue, gray, orange, violet, ultramarine. The ocean has no colors, it has nothing but energy. The ocean is the “wine-dark sea” that Homer celebrated in song, the power that enables the actualization of living things. It is a power that makes things more real and that lends itself to everyone who carries it further and transforms it.

We can overcome the misunderstanding of the Anthropocene that celebrates itself as the “era of humans.” To do so, however, we need an attitude of inclusivity, of mutual acceptance between attitudes, bodies, identities and sensations. We need the affirmation of belonging and a willingness to engage in an ongoing negotiation within a reality that we recognize as a commons. We can adapt our behaviors to its ongoing transformations and amalgamation. Since this is the inescapable existential reality of life itself, we must acknowledge that the fertile wild ultimately cannot be denied, suppressed or enclosed without a profound constriction on our own freedom.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. 2013. Aesthetic Theory. New York. Bloomsbury.

Alphandéry, Claude et al. 2014. Abridged version of the Convivialist Manifesto, http://lesconvivialistes.fr.

Benasayag, Miguel and Gérard Schmit. 2007. L’epoca delle passioni tristi. Milano: Feltrinelli.

Bilgrami, Akeel et al. 2013. “The Anthropocene Project: An Introduction.” Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Bollier, David. 2014. Think like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, B.C. New Society Publishers.

Buber, Martin. 1937. I and Thou. Eastford, CT: Martino (2010 reprint of the original American edition).

Crutzen, Paul J. and E. Stoermer. 2000. “The ‘Anthropocene’.” Global Change Newsletter 41:S. 17 – 18.

Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago. Chicago University Press.

Ferrando, Francesca. 2013. “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations.” Existenz 8(2):26-32.

Frye, Nortrop. 1991. Double Vision. Identity and Meaning in Religion. Toronto, Ontario. Toronto University Press.

Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Johns, David. 2014. “With Friends Like These, Wilderness and Biodiversity Do Not Need Enemies.” In: George Wuerthner, Eileen Crist and Tom Butler, editors. Keeping the Wild. Against the Domestication of the Earth. Washington, D.C. Island Press.

Kidner, David W. 2014. “The Conceptual Assassination of Wilderness.” In Wuerthner et al. 2014.

Marris, Emma. 2013. The Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. New York. Bloomsbury.

Morin, Edgar. 2001. L’identité humaine. La methode, tome 5, L’humanité de l’humanité. Paris. Seuil.

Nussbaum, Martha. 2001. The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy And Philosophy. Cambridge, Massachusetts. Harvard University Press.

Schäfer, Lothar. 1993. Das Bacon-Projekt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Shellenberger, Michael and Ted Nordhaus, 2011. “Evolve: The Case for Modernization as the Road to Salvation.” In Dies, Love Your Monsters. Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene. Oakland, California. The Breakthrough Institute.

Singh, Neera M. 2013. “The Affective Labor of Growing Forests and the Becoming of Environmental Subjects: Rethinking Environmentality in Odisha, India.” Geoforum 47:189-198.

Smith, Philip B. and Manfred Max-Neef, 2010. Economics Unmasked: From Power and Greed to Compassion and the Common Good. Green Press.

Weber, Andreas. 2012. “The Economy of Wastefulness. The Biology of the Commons.” In David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, editors., The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State. Amherst, MA: Levellers Press.

———. 2013. Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics. Berlin: Heinrich Böll Foundation.

———. 2014. Lebendigkeit. Eine erotische Ökologie. München: Kösel.

———. 2015. Healing Ecology. Finding the Human in Nature. Gabriola Island, B.C.: New Society Publishers.

Weber, Andreas & Varela, Francisco J. 2002. “Life After Kant: Natural Purposes and the Autopoietic Foundations of Biological Individuality.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1:97 – 125.

Andreas Weber (Germany) is a biologist, philosopher and book and magazine writer based in Berlin. His longstanding interest is how human feeling, subjectivity and social identity are related to biological worldmaking and cognition. He recently published Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics (Heinrich Böll Foundation 2013), and Healing Ecology: Finding the Human in Nature (New Society Publishers, 2015).

Special thanks to David Bollier for inspiration, corrections and support, particularly for the section on commoning.

The post Patterns of Commoning: Reality as Commons, A Poetics of Participation for the Anthropocene appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Three problems of Platform Coops

Firstly, Platform Coops do not promote enough the new interesting subjectivities and relationships responsible for the emerging collaborating, sharing, commoning and p2p dynamics that are proving to be transformational. It is precisely because they are built over the already consolidated thin self-interest-driven-relationships that rule our world since the modern era. In short, they are reinforcing those relationships by giving them new ways to exist. Think, instead, about my meeting with Ana Manzanedo. She is a Ouishare Connector in Barcelona that contacted me right after I started blogging about common matters of concern. In our first meeting we shared not only our personal whereabouts but also kind of coached/mentored each other and shared specific knowledge and ideas in order to help each other to create value in the present, and also prepare the field (invitation to a community of practices, etc.) for eventually creating open value together in the near future. It is not that we were not also looking out for our own interest, but we were both ready to give more than what we were taking, now or in the future. She is not, in that sense, the average kind of relationship I have in my business activity, but sure is the one I am looking for. Building a Platform Coops that does not promote connectors, urban entrepreneurs, open makers, technopolitical citizens or technopolitical civil servants or technopolitical representatives, (and so on) will have a much narrow impact than collectives such as Enspiral, Ouishare, Las Indias Electrónicas, etc. which have this generativity of new disrupting subjectivities (Ouishare considers itself above any other thing “an incubator of people; Las Indias offer different ways to experience with them how to live in abundance as communards; etc.) Out of its members, a Platform Coop only promotes a “responsible consumer” subjectivity using more or less the same approach as their non-peer managed rival organizations. I am in favor of such Platforms Coops in the same way I am for any kind of Coop. However, it remains obscure to me in what sense they will be able to compete and outperform non Coop Platforms. Hence the call for the intervention of governments in terms of regulatory frameworks and financial support. Yet, a strong citizenship movement would be needed for that to happen… which hardly will, if new subjectivities demanding it are not promoted. Politicians only challenge existing established interests, if ever, when taking the opportunity of getting more votes. Way more.

Secondly, (and this is connected with the first problem), in this model the capture of value generated in the network is still centralized. We want that those that add value and risk something in the platform are affected by the eventual downsides or upsides. The fact that a Coop Platform does it in a more ethical way, and that it redistributes the value afterwards does not change the fact that it keeps disempowering non-owners of the cooperative. Non-owners may consider that they are, to more or less degree, in the flow of value distribution, but not in its generation nor in its governance. The straightforward approach is to use new technologies based on blockchain (or other even more interesting technologies) in order to make distribution fair, keeping the self-interest motivated actors in the game. But if we design a Platform in which every aspect of the relationship must be translated into an algorithm and coded as a smart contract, then again we are consolidating and making fresh room for the already existing subjectivities. Even more, that will erode the real face-to-face trust thick relationships that may exist. A completely different thing is to use blockchain technologies for doing boring accounting that has to be done in a p2p organization based on thick relationships, or between p2p organizations linked by thick relationships. As in the centralized case, a decentralized architecture based on thin relationships could be, in the best of the cases, a transitory step to something much more interesting, once the limitations of the model are reached and new opportunities are explored.

The third problem is that the Platform Coops, in order to compete in the market with regular platforms, may need to transfer risk or care to some of their stakeholders. The reason why most of the regular platforms thrive is because they avoid granting the usual benefits (care) that workers get in the traditional economy (pension, social security, paid vacations, etc.), and additionally, force workers to carry most of the risks (accidents, illness, etc.). Unless clients are aware and concerned about workers’ conditions — which is an emerging but not yet a game-changing trend — the market will make more competitive those platforms that cut costs that way, not to mention that most of them are fueled with big investor’s money in order to keep litigating with authorities and workers, and operating under financial losses for years. In order to survive and keep their share of the market, Coop Platforms may be tempted to practice the less aggressive practices of risk and care transfer to workers as a way of surviving.

In the second part of this post, I will explore operational responses to these problems.

The post Platform Coops’ Governance (I): Challenges appeared first on P2P Foundation.

It is such a crucial time in human history. It feels as if we are capable of transforming our world, and at the same time we are at the edge of the abyss. In my analysis, governance is at the heart of the great challenges we face – whether or not our societies can protect and create that which we mutually depend on for our survival and wellbeing, our multifaceted commons. We are at a crossroads. Will we live in a world of oligarchs, where antiquated systems, monied interests, elites and corruption undermine our capacity for wise and effective social navigation? Or will the aspirations for distributed, participatory and contributory decision-making create a world of deep democracy and transparency where citizens have real lateral power in forging equitable and sustainable pathways?

Some of my initial ideas on this were put together in this book chapter on the Futures of Governance. Overtime with others I’ve begun to formulate some more general ideas for how governance works across commoning activities, such as through a recent paper co-authored with Michel Bauwens on an Ecology of the Commons.

This is a shared journey and an ongoing exploration for all of us in this movement. Together with Dr. Michelle Maloney, founder of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance and the New Economy Network Australia (NENA), we have developed this one day course called “Transforming Governance for People and Planet” as both an introduction to thinking about the futures of governance and democracy, and as an opportunity to work on synthesis. How do we make sense of the many contexts, threads, innovations in a way that can provide orientation and empowerment in terms of how we see ourselves, individually and collectively, as agents of change?

So in the course we will explore the outline of shifts taking place from a global perspective, current challenges, and the many new innovations, experiments and pathways that are harbingers of change. From the community meeting to the office and work environment, to our local municipal, state and federal systems, and to the global system, we know the context has shifted and the stage has been set for dramatic changes. We will ask the question to participants, at what scale and where do we want to play? The course will provide an overview of the big trends in governance and provide ways in which participants can consider how they want to participate and shape the future. The course intents to bring forth ideas for transforming governance in plain language, with strategies that anyone can use to empower themselves and their communities.

This workshop will present and explore:

• the idea of the “commons” as a framework for rethinking governance;
• how the commons framework provides answers to the critical challenges we face in areas such as: resource management, ecological protection / rights of nature, addressing oligarchy, protecting digital / knowledge commons, humanising and democratising our work and community life, etc;
• an overview of critical historical shifts that bring into relief the great transitions we are experiencing in the early 21st century;
• examples from around the world that demonstrate transformations in governance, and which point to new futures – the many new innovations, experiments and pathways that are emerging around the world in response to our challenges;
• a deep questioning of when our democracies protect and build the commons, and when they undermine them, and what strategies we might take as societies to ensure healthy democracies that protect and build our commons.

Specific topics that will be covered include:

• bioregional governance
• commons governance
• workplace democracy and decentralised decision making
• liquid democracy (and other e-democracy systems)
• rights of nature / Earth jurisprudence
• urban collaborative governance
• peer to peer / digital commons governance
• participatory and contributory democracy
• overcoming the challenges of oligarchy / plutocracy
• global / planetary governance
• anticipatory governance

The workshop will be run as a mix of presentations, audio-visual content, interactive discussions, games and self-guided reflection.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have a general understanding of the big shifts and issues in governance, and the ways in which they can participate in our great transitions and in shaping the future.

For those interested in registering info is HERE

* Several scholarships are available for students and others who wish to attend. Contact us for details.

For more information: Jose Ramos – [email protected]

ABOUT THE WORKSHOP PRESENTERS

• Dr. Jose Ramos, writer, futurist and director of Action Foresight, brings over 15 years’ experience writing about cultural, political and economic change and designing, teaching and facilitating courses on social change, strategic foresight, commons governance and socio-political transformation.
• Dr Michelle Maloney, lawyer and National Convenor of the Australian Earth Laws Alliance (AELA) has been working for 25 years at the intersection of ecological and social justice, and is passionate about building Earth centred law, governance and ethics.

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Is the so-called tragedy of the commons¹ ever averted in the biological world and might this possibility provide solutions for our own species? One plausible scenario is natural selection at the level of groups. A selfish farmer might have an advantage over other farmers in his village, but a village that somehow solved the tragedy of the commons would have a decisive advantage over other villages. Most species are subdivided into local populations at various scales, just as humans are subdivided into villages, cities and nations. If natural selection between groups (favoring cooperation) can successfully oppose natural selection within groups (favoring non-cooperation), then the tragedy of the commons can be averted for humans and non-human species alike.

At the time that Hardin published his article and I was working on my thesis, this possibility had been considered and largely rejected. A book titled Adaptation and Natural Selection, written by evolutionary biologist George C. Williams and published in 1966, was on its way to becoming a modern classic. Williams described between-group selection as theoretically possible but almost invariably weak compared to within-group selection. By his account, attempts to explain evolutionary adaptations as “for the good of the group” reflected sloppy and wishful thinking. Hardin’s article reflected the same pessimism about avoiding the tragedy of the commons other than by top-down regulation. My interest in rethinking the plausibility of group selection placed me in a very small group of heretics (see Okasha 2006, Sober and Wilson 1998, Wilson and Wilson 2007, and Wilson 2015 for more on the controversy over group selection, which in my opinion has now been mostly resolved).

Evolutionary theory’s individualistic turn coincided with individualistic turns in other areas of thought. Economics in the postwar decades was dominated by rational choice theory, which used individual self-interest as a grand explanatory principle. The social sciences were dominated by a position known as methodological individualism, which treated all social phenomena as reducible to individual-level phenomena, as if groups were not legitimate units of analysis in their own right (Campbell 1990). And UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became notorious for saying during a speech in 1987 that “there is no such thing as society; only individuals and families.” It was as if the entire culture had become individualistic and the formal scientific theories were obediently following suit.

Unbeknownst to me, another heretic named Elinor Ostrom was also challenging the received wisdom in her field of political science. Starting with her thesis research on how a group of stakeholders in southern California cobbled together a system for managing their water table, and culminating in her worldwide study of common-pool resource (CPR) groups, the message of her work was that groups are capable of avoiding the tragedy of the commons without requiring top-down regulation, at least if certain conditions are met (Ostrom 1990, 2010). She summarized the conditions in the form of eight core design principles: 1) Clearly defined boundaries; 2) Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs; 3) Collective choice arrangements; 4) Monitoring; 5) Graduated sanctions; 6) Fast and fair conflict resolution; 7) Local autonomy; 8) Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance). This work was so groundbreaking that Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009.

I first met Lin (as she preferred to be called) just a few months before she was awarded the prize, at a workshop held in Florence, Italy, titled “Do Institutions Evolve?” (recounted in Wilson 2011a). Similar events were taking place all over the world in 2009 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species. Multilevel selection theory, which envisions natural selection operating on a multi-tier hierarchy of units, had become more widely accepted by then, especially with respect to human cultural evolution, making me much in demand as a speaker. I had also cofounded a think tank called the Evolution Institute² that formulates public policy from an evolutionary perspective, giving me a strong interest in the workshop topic. I had become somewhat familiar with Lin’s work but having the opportunity to talk with her at length had a transformative impact.

I quickly realized that Lin’s core design principle approach dovetailed with multilevel selection theory, which my fellow-heretics and I had worked so hard to revive. Her approach is especially pertinent to the concept of major evolutionary transitions, whereby members of groups become so cooperative that the group becomes a higher-level organism in its own right. This idea was first proposed by cell biologist Lynn Margulis (1970) to explain how nucleated cells evolved from symbiotic associations of bacteria. It was then generalized during the 1990s to explain other major transitions, such as the rise of the first bacterial cells, multicellular organisms, eusocial insect colonies and human evolution (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995, 1999).

– the defining criterion of a major evolutionary transition (Boehm 1993, 1999, 2011). With disruptive competition within groups held largely in check, succeeding as a group became the main selective force in human evolution. The entire package of traits regarded as distinctively human – including our ability to cooperate in groups of unrelated individuals, our ability to transmit learned information across generations, and our capacity for language and other forms of symbolic thought – can be regarded as forms of physical and mental teamwork made possible by a major evolutionary transition.

Lin’s design principles (DP) had “major evolutionary transition” written all over them. Clearly defined boundaries (DP1) meant that members knew they were part of a group and what the group was about (e.g., fisherman with access to a bay or farmers managing an irrigation system). Proportional equivalence of costs and benefits (DP2) meant that members had to earn their benefits and couldn’t just appropriate them. Collective choice arrangements (DP3) meant that group members had to agree upon decisions so nobody could be bossed around. Monitoring (DP4) and graduated sanctions (DP5) meant that disruptive self-serving behaviors could be detected and punished. Fast and fair conflict resolution (DP6) meant that the group would not be torn apart by internal conflicts of interest. Local autonomy (DP7) meant that the group had the elbow room to manage its own affairs. Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule making authority (DP8) meant that everything regulating the conduct of individuals within a given group also was needed to regulate conduct among groups in a multi group population.

The concordance between Lin’s core design principle approach and multilevel selection theory had three major implications. First, it placed the core design principle approach on a more general theoretical foundation. Lin’s “Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD)” framework emanated from political science and she was an early adopter of economic game theory, but her main case for the design principle approach was the empirical database that she compiled for common-pool resource groups around the world, as described in her most influential book Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990). Multilevel selection theory showed how the core design principle approach follows from the evolutionary dynamics of cooperation in all species and from our own evolutionary history as a highly cooperative species.

Second, because of its theoretical generality, the core design principle approach is likely to apply to a much broader range of human groups than those attempting to manage common-pool resources (CPRs). Almost any group whose members must work together to achieve a common goal is vulnerable to self-serving behaviors and should benefit from the same principles. An analysis of business groups, churches, voluntary associations and urban neighborhoods should yield the same results as Lin’s analysis of CPR groups.

Third, the core design principle approach can provide a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in the real world. It should be possible for almost any kind of group to assess itself with respect to the design principles, address shortcomings, and function better as a result. This prospect was especially appealing to me as president of the Evolution Institute, since I was now actively engaged in formulating and implementing public policy from an evolutionary perspective.

Lin inspired me to begin several projects in parallel with each other. One was to collaborate with her and her postdoctoral associate Michael Cox to write an academic article, “Generalizing the Core Design Principle for the Efficacy of Groups” that established the three major implications listed above for an academic audience (Wilson, Ostrom and Cox 2013). Michael was the lead author of a 2010 article that evaluated the core design principle approach for the literature on CPR groups that had accumulated since Lin’s original analysis (Cox et al. 2010). Our article was published in a special issue of the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization titled “Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy.” Both the article and the special issue should be consulted for more on the theoretical framework that underpins the design principle approach.

In addition, I started to use the design principle approach in projects that involved working with real-world groups in Binghamton, New York. One was a collaboration with the City of Binghamton and United Way of Broome County called “Design Your Own Park,” which used the opportunity to turn a neglected space into a neighborhood park. Neighborhood groups that formed to create a park would be coached in the core design principles and start to manage the affairs of their neighborhood in other respects. This project led to the creation of four neighborhood parks—and their groups—in our city (Wilson 2011b).

The second project was a collaboration with the Binghamton City School District to create a “school within a school” for at-risk youth called the Regents Academy (Wilson, Kaufmann, and Purdy 2011). This was our most ambitious and best documented project because we were able to employ the gold standard of scientific assessment, the randomized control trial, which randomly assigns participants into an experimental group and a control group to identify significant variables that might affect outcomes. To the best of its ability, the Regents Academy implemented the eight core design principles and two auxiliary design principles deemed to be important in a learning context (a relaxed and playful atmosphere and short-term rewards for long-term learning goals). Not only did the Regents Academy students vastly outperform the comparison group, but they even performed on a par with the average high school student on the state-mandated Regents exam (see Wilson, Kauffman and Purdy 2011 for details). This is a strong indication that the design principle approach can be generalized beyond CPR groups and can be used as a practical framework for improving the efficacy of groups in our everyday lives.

The third project was a collaboration with a number of religious congregations in Binghamton to reflect upon the core design principles in relation to their faith and social organization. These conversations did not lead to a formal effort to change practices but they were invaluable for exploring how the success of religious groups can be understood in terms of the design principles approach.

All of these projects were instructive and broadly confirmed the relevance of the core design principle approach for any group whose members must work together to achieve a common purpose. They also showed how the design principles can be sadly lacking in some groups, such as disadvantaged neighborhoods and public schools. It is important to remember that Ostrom was able to derive the core design principles for CPR groups because they varied in how well the design principles were implemented. Some did well without needing to be taught, while others did poorly and might benefit from some coaching. Based on my own projects, I became convinced that all groups are likely to face similar challenges in implementing the core design principles.

At the same time that I was working with Lin, I was working with three leaders in the applied behavioral sciences: Tony Biglan, past president of the US-based Society for Prevention Research; Steven C. Hayes, cofounder of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science; and Dennis Embry, a scientific entrepreneur who markets evidence-based practices for positive behavior change. I was excited to work with them because they had much more experience accomplishing positive behavioral change in real-world settings than I did. They were excited to work with me because they saw that evolutionary theory could provide a more general theoretical framework for their disciplines, in the same way as for the core design principles.

This experience underscored what’s special about evolutionary theory: Now that its generality within the biological sciences has been established, it can expand its domain into the basic and applied human behavioral sciences. One result of our collaboration was a major review article, “Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change” (followed by peer commentaries and a reply), published in the academic journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences (Wilson, Hayes, Biglan and Embry 2014), a piece that expanded the theoretical foundation I was building with Lin and Michael. The first half of the article sketches a basic science of intentional change centered on evolutionary theory. The second half reviews examples of successful positive behavioral and cultural change from the applied disciplines, which illustrate the concept of wisely managing the process of cultural evolution but are little known outside their disciplinary boundaries. As we conclude our article, we are closer to a science of intentional change than one might think.

These collaborations have resulted in an ambitious Evolution Institute project called PROSOCIAL (Wilson 2014), which has three objectives. The first is to create an Internet platform that will enable any group, anywhere in the world, to evaluate itself and increase its efficacy based on a fusion of the core design principle approach and evidence-based methods from the applied behavioral sciences. The second objective is to provide a way for these groups to interact with and learn directly from each other, which is an example of facilitating the process of cultural evolution. The third objective is to use information provided by these groups to create a scientific database, much as Lin had done for common-pool resource groups, which enabled her to identify the core design principles in the first place. This project has been in the development phase for several years and should be operational and accessible through the Evolution Institute website by mid-2015.

Sadly, Lin died of cancer in June 2012. I was with her only a few months before at a workshop, “Rules as Genotypes in Cultural Evolution,” which we organized together and hosted at her Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis, at Indiana University. She was simultaneously trying to care for her aging husband Vincent, satisfy the worldwide demand for speaking appearances, manage her projects and care for herself. I am grateful to be among the many who were touched by her and proud to contribute to her legacy by helping to generalize the core design principle approach and make it available to any group whose members must work together to achieve shared goals.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

References

Boehm, Christopher. 1993. “Egalitarian Society and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy.” Current Anthropology, 34:227 – 254.

———. 1999. Hierarchy in the Forest: Egalitarianism and the Evolution of Human Altruism. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

———. 2011. Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and Shame. New York: Basic Books.

Campbell, Donald T. 1990. “Levels of Organization, Downward Causation, and the Selection-Theory Approach to Evolutionary Epistemology.” In G. Greenberg & E. Tobach, editors, Theories of the Evolution of Knowing, 1 – 17. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Cox, M., G. Arnold & S. Villamayor-Tomas. 2010. “A Review of Design Principles for Community-based Natural Resource Management.” Ecology and Society. 15.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science. 162:1243-1248.

Margulis, Lynn. 1970. Origin of Eukaryotic cells. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Maynard Smith, John, & E. Szathmary. 1995. The Major Transitions of Life. New York: W.H. Freeman.

———. 1999. The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Okasha, Samir. 2006. Evolution and the Levels of Selection. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Ostrom, Elinor. 1990. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2010. “Polycentric Systems for Coping with Collective Action and Global Environmental Change.” Global Environmental Change. 20:550 – 557.

Sober, Elliot, & Wilson, D. S. 1998. Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Williams, George. C. 1966. Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wilson, D.S. 2011a. The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time. New York: Little, Brown.

———. 2011b. “The Design Your Own Park Competition: Empowering Neighborhoods and Restoring Outdoor Play on a Citywide Scale.” American Journal of Play. 3:538 – 551.

———. 2014. “Introducing PROSOCIAL: Using the Science of Cooperation to Improve the Efficacy of Your Group.” This View of Life.

———. 2015. Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wilson, D.S., Kauffman, R. A., & Purdy, M. S. 2011. “A Program for At-risk High School Students Informed by Evolutionary Science.” PLoS ONE, 6(11), e27826. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0027826

Wilson, D.S., & Gowdy, J. M. 2013. “Evolution as a General Theoretical Framework for Economics and Public Policy.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90:S3 – S10. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2012.12.008

Wilson, D.S., Hayes, S. C., Biglan, A., & Embry, D. 2014. “Evolving the Future: Toward a Science of Intentional Change.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 37:395 – 460.

Wilson, D.S., E. Ostrom & M. Cox. 2013. “Generalizing the Design Principles for Improving the Efficacy of Groups.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. 90:supplement, S21 – S32.

Wilson, D.S., & E.O. Wilson. 2007. “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology.” Quarterly Review of Biology. 82:327 – 348.

David Sloan Wilson (USA) is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in Binghamton New York, President of the Evolution Institute, and Editor in Chief of the online magazine This View of Life. His books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (2002),Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives (2007), The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time (2011), and Does Altruism Exist? (2015).

Photo by Szymon Stoma

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