Last Tuesday we launched a National Emergency Library—1.4M digitized books available to users without a waitlist—in response to the rolling wave of school and library closures that remain in place to date. We’ve received dozens of messages of thanks from teachers and school librarians, who can now help their students access books while their schools, school libraries, and public libraries are closed.

We’ve been asked why we suspended waitlists. On March 17, the American Library Association Executive Board took the extraordinary step to recommend that the nation’s libraries close in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. In doing so, for the first time in history, the entirety of the nation’s print collection housed in libraries is now unavailable, locked away indefinitely behind closed doors.  

This is a tremendous and historic outage.  According to IMLS FY17 Public Libraries survey (the last fiscal year for which data is publicly available), in FY17 there were more than 716 million physical books in US public libraries.  Using the same data, which shows a 2-3% decline in collection holdings per year, we can estimate that public libraries have approximately 650 million books on their shelves in 2020.  Right now, today, there are 650 million books that tax-paying citizens have paid to access that are sitting on shelves in closed libraries, inaccessible to them. And that’s just in public libraries.

And so, to meet this unprecedented need at a scale never before seen, we suspended waitlists on our lending collection.  As we anticipated, critics including the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have released statements (here and here) condemning the National Emergency Library and the Internet Archive.  Both statements contain falsehoods that are being spread widely online. To counter the misinformation, we are addressing the most egregious points here and have also updated our FAQs.

One of the statements suggests you’ve acquired your books illegally. Is that true?
No. The books in the National Emergency Library have been acquired through purchase or donation, just like a traditional library.  The Internet Archive preserves and digitizes the books it owns and makes those scans available for users to borrow online, normally one at a time.  That borrowing threshold has been suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency.

Is the Internet Archive a library?
Yes.  The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit public charity and is recognized as a library by the government.

What is the legal basis for Internet Archive’s digital lending during normal times?
The concept and practice of controlled digital lending (CDL) has been around for about a decade. It is a lend-like-print system where the library loans out a digital version of a book it owns to one reader at a time, using the same technical protections that publishers use to prevent further redistribution. The legal doctrine underlying this system is fair use, as explained in the Position Statement on Controlled Digital Lending.

Does CDL violate federal law? What about appellate rulings?
No, and many copyright experts agree. CDL relies on a set of careful controls that are designed to mimic the traditional lending model of libraries. To quote from the White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books:

“Our principal legal argument for controlled digital lending is that fair use— an “equitable rule of reason”—permits libraries to do online what they have always done with physical collections under the first sale doctrine: lend books. The first sale doctrine, codified in Section 109 of the Copyright Act, provides that anyone who legally acquires a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display, or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. This is how libraries loan books.  Additionally, fair use ultimately asks, “whether the copyright law’s goal of promoting the Progress of Science and useful Arts would be better served by allowing the use than by preventing it.” In this case we believe it would be. Controlled digital lending as we conceive it is premised on the idea that libraries can embrace their traditional lending role to the digital environment. The system we propose maintains the market balance long-recognized by the courts and Congress as between rightsholders and libraries, and makes it possible for libraries to fulfill their “vital function in society” by enabling the lending of books to benefit the general learning, research, and intellectual enrichment of readers by allowing them limited and controlled digital access to materials online.”

Some have argued that the ReDigi case that held that commercially reselling iTunes music files is not a fair use “precludes” CDL. This is not true, and others have argued that this case actually makes the fair use case for CDL stronger.

How is the National Emergency Library different from the Internet Archive’s normal digital lending?
Because libraries around the country and globe are closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Internet Archive has suspended our waitlists temporarily. This means that multiple readers can access a digital book simultaneously, yet still by borrowing the book, meaning that it is returned after 2 weeks and cannot be redistributed.  

Is the Internet Archive making these books available without restriction?
No. Readers who borrow a book from the National Emergency Library get it for only two weeks, and their access is disabled unless they check it out again. Internet Archive also uses the same technical protections that publishers use on their ebook offerings in order to prevent additional copies from being made or redistributed.

What about those who say we’re stealing from authors & publishers?
Libraries buy books or get them from donations and lend them out. This has been true and legal for centuries. The idea that this is stealing fundamentally misunderstands the role of libraries in the information ecosystem. As Professor Ariel Katz, in his paper Copyright, Exhaustion, and the Role of Libraries in the Ecosystem of Knowledgeexplains: 

“Historically, libraries predate copyright, and the institutional role of libraries and institutions of higher learning in the “promotion of science” and the “encouragement of learning” was acknowledged before legislators decided to grant authors exclusive rights in their writings. The historical precedence of libraries and the legal recognition of their public function cannot determine every contemporary copyright question, but this historical fact is not devoid of legal consequence… As long as the copyright ecosystem has a public purpose, then some of the functions that libraries perform are not only fundamental but also indispensable for attaining this purpose. Therefore, the legal rules … that allow libraries to perform these functions remain, and will continue to be, as integral to the copyright system as the copyright itself.” 

Do libraries have to ask authors or publishers to digitize their books?
No. Digitizing books to make accessible copies available to the visually impaired is explicitly allowed under 17 USC 121 in the US and around the world under the Marrakesh Treaty. Further, US courts have held that it is fair use for libraries to digitize books for various additional purposes. 

Have authors opted out?
Yes, we’ve had authors opt out.  We anticipated that would happen as well; in fact, we launched with clear instructions on how to opt out because we understand that authors and creators have been impacted by the same global pandemic that has shuttered libraries and left students without access to print books.  Our takedowns are completed quickly and the submitter is notified via email. 

Doesn’t my local library already provide access to all of these books?
No. The Internet Archive has focused our collecting on books published between the 1920s and early 2000s, the vast majority of which don’t have a commercially available ebook.  Our collection priorities have focused on the broad range of library books to support education and scholarship and have not focused on the latest best sellers that would be featured in a bookstore.

Further, there are approximately 650 million books in public libraries that are locked away and inaccessible during closures related to COVID-19.  Many of these are print books that don’t have an ebook equivalent except for the version we’ve scanned. For those books, the only way for a patron to access them while their library is closed is through our scanned copy.

I’ve looked at the books and they’re just images of the pages. I get better ebooks from my public library.
Yes, you do.  The Internet Archive takes a picture of each page of its books, and then makes those page images available in an online book reader and encrypted PDFs.  We also make encrypted EPUBs available, but they are based on uncorrected OCR, which has errors. The experience is inferior to what you’ve become accustomed to with Kindle devices.  We are making an accessible facsimile of the printed book available to users, not a high quality EPUB like you would find with a modern ebook.

What will happen after June 30 or the end of the US national emergency?
Waitlists will be suspended through June 30, 2020, or the end of the US national emergency, whichever is later.  After that, the waitlists will be reimplemented thus limiting the number of borrowable copies to those physical books owned and not being lent. 

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Decentralization is the new disruption—the thing everything worth its salt (and a huge ICO) is supposed to be doing. Meanwhile, Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf, Brewster Kahle, and Tim Berners-Lee are trying to re-decentralize the Web. They respond to the rise of surveillance-based platform monopolies by simply redoubling their efforts to develop new and better decentralizing technologies. They seem not to notice the pattern: decentralized technology alone does not guarantee decentralized outcomes. When centralization arises elsewhere in an apparently decentralized system, it comes as a surprise or simply goes ignored.

Here are some traces of the persistent pattern that I’m talking about:

• The early decentralized technologies of the Internet and Web relied on key points of centralization, such as the Domain Name System (which Berners-Lee called the Internet’s “centralized Achilles’ heel by which it can all be brought down or controlled”) and the World Wide Web Consortium (which Berners-Lee has led for its entire history)
• The apparently free, participatory open-source software communities have frequently depended on the charismatic and arbitrary authority of a “benevolent dictator for life,” from Linus Torvalds of Linux (who is not always so benevolent) to Guido van Rossum of Python
• Network effects and other economies of scale have meant that most Internet traffic flows through a tiny number of enormous platforms — a phenomenon aided and exploited by a venture-capital financing regime that must be fed by a steady supply of unicorns
• The venture capital that fuels the online economy operates in highly concentrated regions of the non-virtual world, through networks that exhibit little gender or ethnic diversity, among both investors and recipients
• While crypto-networks offer some novel disintermediation, they have produced some striking new intermediaries, from the mining cartels that dominate Bitcoin and other networks to Vitalik Buterin’s sweeping charismatic authority over Ethereum governance

This pattern shows no signs of going away. But the shortcomings of the decentralizing ideal need not serve as an indictment of it. The Internet and the Web made something so centralized as Facebook possible, but they also gave rise to millions of other publishing platforms, large and small, which might not have existed otherwise. And even while the wealth and power in many crypto-networks appears to be remarkably concentrated, blockchain technology offers distinct, potentially liberating opportunities for reinventing money systems, organizations, governance, supply chains, and more. Part of what makes the allure of decentralization so compelling to so many people is that its promise is real.

Yet it turns out that decentralizing one part of a system can and will have other kinds of effects. If one’s faith in decentralization is anywhere short of fundamentalism, this need not be a bad thing. Even among those who talk the talk of decentralization, many of the best practitioners are already seeking balance — between unleashing powerful, feral decentralization and ensuring that the inevitable centralization is accountable and functional. They just don’t brag about the latter. In what remains, I will review some strategies of thought and practice for responsible decentralization.

Hat from a 2013 event sponsored by Zambia’s central government celebrating a decentralization process. Source: courtesy of Elizabeth Sperber, a political scientist at the University of Denver

First, be more specific

Political scientists talk about decentralization, too—as a design feature of government institutions. They’ve noticed a similar pattern as we find in tech. Soon after something gets decentralized, it seems to cause new forms of centralization not far away. Privatize once-public infrastructure on open markets, and soon dominant companies will grow enough to lobby their way into regulatory capture; delegate authority from a national capital to subsidiary regions, and they could have more trouble than ever keeping warlords, or multinational corporations, from consolidating power. In the context of such political systems, one scholar recommends a decentralizing remedy for the discourse of decentralization — a step, as he puts it, “beyond the centralization-centralization dichotomy.” Rather than embracing decentralization as a cure-all, policymakers can seek context-sensitive, appropriate institutional reforms according to the problem at hand. For instance, he makes a case for centralizing taxation alongside more distributed decisions about expenditures. Some forms of infrastructure lend themselves well to local or private control, while others require more centralized institutions.

Here’s a start: Try to be really, really clear about what particular features of a system a given design seeks to decentralize.

No system is simply decentralized, full-stop. We shouldn’t expect any to be. Rather than referring to TCP/IP or Bitcoin as self-evidently decentralized protocols, we might indicate more carefully what about them is decentralized, as opposed to what is not. Blockchains, for instance, enable permissionless entry, data storage, and computing, but with a propensity to concentration with respect to interfaces, governance, and wealth. Decentralizing interventions cannot expect to subdue every centralizing influence from the outside world. Proponents should be forthright about the limits of their enterprise (as Vitalik Buterin has sometimes been). They can resist overstating what their particular sort of decentralization might achieve, while pointing to how other interventions might complement their efforts.

Another approach might be to regard decentralization as a process, never a static state of being — to stick to active verbs like “decentralize” rather than the perfect-tense “decentralized,” which suggests the process is over and done, or that it ever could be.

Guidelines such as these may tempt us into a pedantic policing of language, which can lead to more harm than good, especially for those attempting not just to analyze but to build. Part of the appeal of decentralization-talk is the word’s role as a “floating signifier” capable of bearing various related meanings. Such capacious terminology isn’t just rhetoric; it can have analytical value as well. Yet people making strong claims about decentralization should be expected to make clear what distinct activities it encompasses. One way or another, decentralization must submit to specificity, or the resulting whack-a-mole centralization will forever surprise us.

A panel whose participants, at the time, represented the vast majority of the Bitcoin network’s mining power. Original source unknown

Second, find checks and balances

People enter into networks with diverse access to resources and skills. Recentralization often occurs because of imbalances of power that operate outside the given network. For instance, the rise of Facebook had to do with Mark Zuckerberg’s ingenuity and the technology of the Web, but it also had to do with Harvard University and Silicon Valley investors. Wealth in the Bitcoin network can correlate with such factors as propensity to early adoption of technology, wealth in the external economy, and proximity to low-cost electricity for mining. To counteract such concentration, the modes of decentralization can themselves be diverse. This is what political institutions have sought to do for centuries.

Those developing blockchain networks have tended to rely on rational-choice, game-theoretic models to inform their designs, such as in the discourse that has come to be known as “crypto-economics.” But relying on such models alone has been demonstrably inadequate. Already, protocol designers seem to be rediscovering notions like the separation of powers from old, institutional liberal political theory. As it works to “truly achieve decentralization,” the Civil journalism network ingeniously balances market-based governance and enforcement mechanisms with a central, mission-oriented foundation populated by elite journalists — a kind of supreme court. Colony, an Ethereum-based project “for open organizations,” balances stake-weighted and reputation-weighted power among users, so that neither factor alone dictates a user’s fate in the system. The jargon is fairly new, but the principle is old. Stake and reputation, in a sense, resemble the logic of the House of Lords and the House of Commons in British government — a balance between those who have a lot to lose and those who gain popular support.

As among those experimenting with “platform cooperativism,” protocols can also adapt lessons from the long and diverse legacy of cooperative economics. For instance, blockchain governance might balance market-based one-token-one-vote mechanisms with cooperative-like one-person-one-vote mechanisms to counteract concentrations of wealth. The developers of RChain, a computation protocol, have organized themselves in a series of cooperatives, so that the oversight of key resources is accountable to independent, member-elected boards. Even while crypto-economists adopt market-based lessons from Hayek, they can learn from the democratic economics of “common-pool resources” theorized by Elinor Ostrom and others.

Decentralizing systems should be as heterogeneous as their users. Incorporating multiple forms of decentralization, and multiple forms of participation, can enable each to check and counteract creeping centralization.

Headquarters of the Internet Archive, home of the Decentralized Web conferences: Wikimedia Commons

Third, make centralization accountable

More empowering strategies for decentralization, finally, may depend on not just noticing or squashing the emergence of centralized hierarchy, but embracing it. We should care less about whether something is centralized or decentralized than whether it is accountable. An accountable system is responsive to both the common good for participants and the needs of minorities; it sets consistent rules and can change them when they don’t meet users’ needs.

Antitrust policy is an example of centralization (through government bureaucracy) on behalf of decentralization (in private sector competition). When the government carrying out such a policy holds a democratic mandate, it can claim to be accountable, and aggressive antitrust enforcement frequently enjoys broad popularity. Such centralized government power, too, may be the only force capable of counteracting the centralized power of corporations that are less accountable to the people whose lives they affect. In ways like this, most effective forms of decentralization actually imply some form of balance between centralized and decentralized power.

While Internet discourses tend to emphasize their networks’ structural decentralization, well-centralized authorities have played critical roles in shaping those networks for the better. Internet progenitors like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee not only designed key protocols but also established multi-stakeholder organizations to govern them. Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), for instance, has been a critical governance body for the Web’s technical standards, enabling similar user experience across servers and browsers. The W3C includes both enormously wealthy corporations and relatively low-budget advocacy organizations. Although its decisions have sometimes seemedto choose narrow business interests over the common good, these cases are noteworthy because they are more the exception than the rule. Brewster Kahle has modeled mission-grounded centralization in the design of the nonprofit Internet Archive, a piece of essential infrastructure, and has even attempted to create a cooperative credit union for the Internet. His centralizing achievements are at least as significant as his calls for decentralizing.

Blockchain protocols, similarly, have tended to spawn centralized organizations or companies to oversee their development, although in the name of decentralization their creators may regard such institutionalization as a merely temporary necessity. Crypto-enthusiasts might admit that such institutions can be a feature, not a bug, and design them accordingly. If they want to avoid a dictator for life, as in Linux, they could plan ahead for democracy, as in Debian. If they want to avoid excessive miner-power, they could develop a centralized node with the power to challenge such accretions.

The challenge that entrepreneurs undertake should be less a matter of How can I decentralize everything? than How can I make everything more accountable? Already, many people are doing this more than their decentralization rhetoric lets on; a startup’s critical stakeholders, from investors to developers, demand it. But more emphasis on the challenge of accountability, as opposed to just decentralization, could make the inevitable emergence of centralization less of a shock.

What’s so scary about trust?

In a February 2009 forum post introducing Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto posited, “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work.” This analysis, and the software accompanying it, has spurred a crusade for building “trustless” systems, in which institutional knowledge and authority can be supplanted with cryptographic software, pseudonymous markets, and game-theoretic incentives. It’s a crusade analogous to how global NGOs and financial giants advocated mechanisms to decentralize power in developing countries, so as to facilitate international investment and responsive government. Yet both crusades have produced new kinds of centralization, in some cases centralization less accountable than what came before.

For now, even the minimal electoral accountability over the despised Federal Reserve strikes me as preferable to whoever happens to be running the top Bitcoin miners.

Decentralization is not a one-way process. Decentralizing one aspect of a complex system can realign it toward complex outcomes. Tools meant to decentralize can introduce novel possibilities — even liberating ones. But they run the risk of enabling astonishingly unaccountable concentrations of power. Pursuing decentralization at the expense of all else is probably futile, and of questionable usefulness as well. The measure of a technology should be its capacity to engender more accountable forms of trust.

Learn more: ntnsndr.in/e4e

If you want to read more about the limits of decentralization, here’s a paper I’m working on about that. If you want to read about an important tradition of accountable, trust-based, cooperative business, here’s a book I just published about that.

Photo by CIFOR

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Both of these modalities of the digital arts are linguistic in nature. They challenge language, and create new idioms – words, sentences, phrases, meanings – in ways that are meant to be interpreted and performed.

So it is not entirely incorrect to say that artists’ main occupation is to create performative platforms for people’s expression, and to give people new opportunities to re-create the elements of their world by interpreting the artwork (which is, after all, a symbolic representation of the essence of its times, from the artist’s point of view). Art instigates a shared performative dialogue about how we shall perceive our shared reality.

In this sense, artists are indispensable enablers for the creation of our political and cultural commons. Whether their artworks are freely shared (as happens with many digital artists, for example) or not, they continuously contribute shared fragments of collective imaginaries that ultimately constitute our cognitive and psychic commons.

The digital arts pursue this mission through two key, coexisting modalities – the creation of frameworks and platforms for expression, and the re-appropriation and transformation of existing culture. The ubiquitous availability and accessibility of digital media enable artists to produce radical communication performances with relatively low effort, rivaling the expensive, highly produced performances of corporations and governments. This simple fact explains why digital arts are able to create so many insurgent new liberated spaces that can be appropriated, accessed, shared and used as commons.

Let’s examine a few.

The Human Ecosystems project enacts a participatory and inclusive process revolving around public data and information.¹  Data about the behaviors of people in given neighborhoods – transit patterns, hotspots of creativity, commerce, crime, and so forth – are aggregated from various social networks in cities and then compiled to reveal hidden “relational ecosystems” in that city. The idea is to transform real-time digital data streams into source material for visualizing hidden patterns of human interaction. City agencies can use the data to engage communities in participatory decisionmaking and policy-shaping processes. Academics and urban planners are studying the data-based “human ecosystems” to gain new insights into urban design and cultural anthropology. Artists are developing new types of artistic interpretations and public performances about city life. Citizens, designers, researchers, entrepreneurs and public administrators participating in Human Ecosytems workshops are learning how to use this data for diverse purposes, such as the design of innovative city services and peer-to-peer business models.

One outgrowth of the Human Ecosystems project is the concept of Ubiquitous Commons. Millions of citizens are generating vast quantities of digital information via their mobile phones, web visits, public databases and more every day. There are rich new opportunites to create new types of public spaces that could function as commons. The Human Ecosystems project wants to ensure that that happens. But this requires that public datasets using social networking platforms be made freely available and accessible so that the information can be used as a data commons.

With appropriate access, artists can use the data to create visualizations of how emotions, topics and modalities of expression flow across time and geography in the city, or generate sounds which render a city’s emotional expression. Researchers can use the data to make new ethnographic or sociological insights. Citizens and public administrations can use the data to understand how to engage communities and cultures in the city, forming human networks to participate in shared decisionmaking processes. Designers can use the data to invent anything from toys² to innovative services, adding value to the knowledge and expression produced ubiquitously across the city. The interests and relations discovered on social networks can be used to initiate productive dialogues about what citizens really want from urban spaces and city government, and reveal how they actually behave. Any processes of commoning find their origin in political activism. The radical transformation of the ways in which people have learned to communicate through the Internet have brought on major changes in the very definitions of what is (and could be) a “movement” in the digital age. The Arab Spring, the 99 Percent, Occupy³ and Anonymous ⁴ – often in conjunction with the digital arts – are causing a metamorphosis in how we think about personal identity, public space, authorship and aesthetics.

Increasingly, ad hoc movements based on digital collaboration are becoming powerful creative forces in their own right, shaping how people relate to each other and express themselves to the wider society, and self-organize to challenge the state. In Italy, for example, there is a rich history of collaborations between arts and political movements in the digital era. Some of the most notable ones have invented fictitious, shared public identities as a commons-based vehicle for artistic and political commentary. An early example was Luther Blissett (later renamed Wu-Ming), a collective identity used by hundreds of cultural activists starting in 1994 for participatory writing processes and for post-dadaist political actions.⁵  “Blissett” has been the “author” of countless situationist pranks, performances and even a historical novel that sold hundreds of thousands of copies in more than ten languages.

A more recent example is RomaEuropa FakeFactory, a participatory fake cultural institution that was created in response to the stodgy, traditionalist cultural policies of Rome’s city administration in 2008. The REFF argues, “Defining what is real is an act of power. Being able to reinvent reality is an act of freedom.” Its commitment to fake, remixed, recontextualized and plagiarized art projects has made it an international movement, eventually recognized officially by governments and organizations.⁶

Serpica Naro⁷ and San Precario⁸ are two movements that protested against the politics of austerity and its role in eliminating jobs and worsening precarity. Serpica Naro is a fictitious activist fashion designer created by the San Precario and Chainworkers collectives. She is intent on subverting the fashion system’s proprietary luxury brands and marketing, and building instead “open brands” that invite mass participation and creativity. San Precario is a faux saint – the Patron Saint of Precarious Workers and Lives – who was invented in 2004 to protest the growing use of “flexible” working arrangements without social security or other benefits. There is even a specific prayer that can be made to San Precario, which asks for paid maternity leave, protection for chain store workers and holidays for call center operators.

A final collective artistic endeavor that has mobilized dissent toward the politics of austerity, especially as it affects public education, is Anna Adamolo,⁹ a fake ministry of education and the Minister herself, Anna Adamolo. The persona has been used as a way for the Italian people to collectively express their protests against the government. One email issued by Anna Adamolo, for example, declared, “Today, we symbolically build on the Net a new Ministry, the Ministry that we all would want to have in Italy, where the voices of the temporary workers, of the students, of the teachers, of all the citizens, are finally heard.”

All three projects are focused on using fictitious public identities as ways to create shared spaces for responsibility and purpose. All are based on creating a mythological persona that can be used to organize a commons: a collaborative vehicle through which to protest and express alternative proposals and solutions. In effect, these characters are a series of meta-brands – carefully constructed cultural memes that can be accessed and used by everyone.

Again, the patterns for creating digital arts commons are minimal and direct: establish a platform for expression (in these cases, meta-brands, collective identities, fake cultural institutions that act in open-source ways) and a participatory performative dimension (a movement, its mythopoiesis, its practices, meetings, events). For example, the Serpica Naro movement has turned into a toolkit for open source fashion in the digital age, and has developed a rich archive of knowledge and models. San Precario has produced a series of collaboratively collected kits, how-tos, tutorials and surreal protest models against precarity and austerity. Anna Adamolo now hosts an archive of art performances, lessons, open courseware on multiple subjects as a form of artistic practice. It has even proposed new models for formal and informal education systems.

Digital arts often manifest themselves in surprising ways in physical territories, leading to the creation of commons. In Sicily, Italy, the Museo dell’Informatica Funzionante – the Museum of Working Informatics in Palazzolo Acreide – has created a vast collection of old computer systems that people can use both physically and remotely via the Internet. They can enjoy using the amusingly obsolete computers, learn basics of electronic and computer science, and share a piece of our history.¹⁰ The museum is a place where people can conserve, repair and preserve our heritage in digital formats and hardware, but also use the documentation, software, electrical schemes, books, manuals and media of various kinds. This place is, in fact, the only known place in which older software artifacts can function in their native environment, allowing anyone to study and understand the transformation of user interfaces, communication and collaboration functionalities, visual cultures and more.

The point of many art projects is to create new commons through the creation of archives, communication patterns and knowledge sharing. In “Sauti ya wakulima,¹¹ (The Voice of the Farmers), artist Eugenio Tisselli used a few smartphones, some old, cheap mobile phones and other low technology devices to invite farmers from the Chambezi region of Tanzania to document their agricultural practices. The community, working with the artist, then used smartphones and mobile applications to publish images and voice recordings on the Internet, creating a shared digital space that allows easy, curated access to the community’s knowledge and memories. The project has enabled the farmers to communicate with extension officers and scientific researchers in remote locations, and to develop more advanced small-scale agricultural techniques for their harsh environmental conditions. All while making, through art, a powerful act of communication and awareness.

As the previous examples demonstrate, many of the most successful patterns for the creation of commons in the digital arts deal with the creation of archives: open collections of artworks, knowledge, data, content and more. This issue is fundamental to digital cultures that care about preserving the past and avoiding a digital dark age – “a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical electronic documents and multimedia, because they have been in an obsolete and obscure file format.”¹² By creating archival materials only in open, documented, accessible and usable formats, they greatly enhance a society’s ability to preserve digital art, culture and knowledge production for future generations.

Perhaps the most forward-thinking example is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit founded by tech entrepreneur Brewster Kahle to provide free public access to vast stores of digitized materials. The Internet Archive includes websites, text, audio, moving images, software and 4.4 million public-domain books.¹³ Located in San Francisco and operating through donations and collaborations with the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, the Internet Archive also provides specialized services for adaptive reading and information access for the blind and other persons with disabilities.

Are digital archives really commons, or just open platforms? A commons, after all, requires an active social engagement and a “space” for collaboration and mutuality built around a set of shared values and visions. And yet open platforms are also important vehicles for aggregating and sharing the most prized elements of a culture.

One digital project which does succeed in creating a space for participation around a shared set of values is HowlRound,¹⁴ a self-styled theater commons dedicated to the proposition that theater is for everyone. Instead of begging for crumbs from the formal, hierarchical, market-driven universe – while compromising their artistic vision in the process – HowlRound wanted to reinvent nonprofit theater as a commons. Its starting point is that “artists should have more say in how the American theater is run” – which, in the eyes of HowlRound commoners, is theater that is authentic, innovative, community-connected and accessible to all. Its website, video streaming, online journal, conferences and web archives are now a hub for all sorts of American community and nonprofit theater people.

This, in the end, could be the best way to describe how digital arts have built successful patterns of commoning: through artists’ sensibilities they have enacted transgressive actions which have created liberated spaces in the culture, most of the time in open defiance of intellectual property-based economies, in order to enable inclusive participation and free access and use of artworks, knowledge, information and data. The forms of commons enacted in the digital arts varies – from subversive situationist performances through institutional collaborations and everything in-between – but each reflects the active presence of shared values and ethical approaches, enabled by a shift in the perception of the possible. This creates a perception of the possibility of a “new normalcy field,” which is among the most important elements that the arts can make – a continuous redefinition of what the world is, and of what it means to live in a society.

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.

Salvatore Iaconesi (Italy) is a robotic engineer, philosopher, artist and hacker. He teaches Digital Design and Near Future Design at La Sapienza University in Rome and at ISIA School of Design in Florence. He is the founder of Art is Open Source, an international network of researchers, artists and designers dedicated to working across arts and sciences to gain better understandings, and to expose them to the transformations of human beings and their societies with the advent of ubiquitous technologies. Iaconesi is a TED Fellow, Eisenhower Fellow and Yale World Fellow. He is also an independent expert for the European Commission in the areas of ICT [information and communications technologies], design, open data and P2P models for education and production.

Photo by Dittmeyer

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