Theo Bass: European laws have ushered in a new era in how companies and governments manage and promote responsible use of personal data. Yet it is the city that looks set to be one of the major battlegrounds in a shift towards greater individual rights, where expectations of privacy and fair use clash with ubiquitous sensors and data-hungry optimised services.

Amid the clamour for ‘smart’ new urban infrastructure, from connected lampposts and bins to camera-enabled phone boxes, a And how do we ensure that its generation and use does not result in discrimination, exclusion and the erosion of privacy for citizens?

While these new sources of data have the potential to deliver significant gains, they also give public institutions – and the technology companies who help install smart city infrastructure – access to vast quantities of highly detailed information about local residents.

A major criticism has been a lack of clear oversight of decisions to collect data in public spaces. US cities have deployed controversial police technologies such as facial recognition without elected officials, let alone the public, being adequately informed beforehand – something which academic Catherine Crump has described as “surveillance policymaking by procurement”.

Meanwhile the digital economy has flourished around urban centres, with new digital platforms creating rich trails of information about our daily habits, journeys and sentiments. Governments often work with app-developers like Waze, Strava and Uber to benefit from these new sources of data. But practical options for doing so in a truly consent-driven way – that is, not simply relying on companies’ long T&Cs – remain few and far between. There’s no simple way to opt-in or -out of the smart city.

Given the increasing tension between increasing ‘smartness’ on the one hand, and expectations of privacy and fair data use on the other, how can city governments respond? In Nesta’s new report, written as part of our involvement with a major EU Horizon 2020 project called DECODE, we looked at a handful of city governments that are pioneering new policies and services to enhance digital rights locally, and give people more control over personal data.

City governments such as Seattle are improving accountability by appointing designated roles for privacy in local government, including both senior leadership positions and departmental ‘Privacy Champions’. The city’s approach is also notable for its strong emphasis on public engagement. Prior to the approval of any new surveillance technology, relevant departments must host public meetings and invite feedback via an online tool on the council’s website.

Elsewhere cities are becoming test-beds for new technologies that minimise unnecessary data collection and boost citizen anonymity. Transport for New South Wales, Australia, collaborated with researchers to release open data about citizens’ use of Sydney’s public transport network using a mathematical technique called differential privacy – a method which makes it difficult to identify individuals by adding random ‘noise’ to a dataset.

Other experiments put more control into the hands of individuals. Amsterdam is testing a platform that allows local residents to be “authenticated but anonymous”. The system, known as Attribute-Based Credentials, lets people collect simple and discrete ‘attributes’ about themselves in an app (like “I am over 18”), which they can use to verify themselves on local government services without revealing any more personal information than absolutely necessary.

Not all the policy measures we came across are about privacy and anti-surveillance. Local governments like Barcelona are fundamentally rethinking their approach to digital information in the city – conceiving of data as a new kind of common good.

In practical terms, the council is creating user-friendly ‘data commons dashboards’ that allow citizens to collect and visualise data, for example about environmental or noise pollution in their neighbourhoods. People can use the online tools to share information about their community directly with the council, and on their own terms: they decide the level of anonymity, for instance.

Local authorities are more nimble, and in a better position to test and develop new technologies directly with local residents, than other levels of government. As the tides in the personal data economy shift, it will be cities that are the real drivers of change, setting new ethical standards from below, and experimenting with new services that give more control over data to the people.

Theo Bass is a researcher in government innovation at the innovation charity Nesta.

Photo by Cerillion

The post Essay of the day: Data by the people, for the people: why it’s time for councils to reclaim the smart city appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr. Robot hack that takes everything down.

This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers — if that technology could be developed in time.

That’s when it hit me: At least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from a very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is really about just one thing: escape.

There’s nothing wrong with madly optimistic appraisals of how technology might benefit human society. But the current drive for a post-human utopia is something else. It’s less a vision for the wholesale migration of humanity to a new a state of being than a quest to transcend all that is human: the body, interdependence, compassion, vulnerability, and complexity. As technology philosophers have been pointing out for years, now, the transhumanist vision too easily reduces all of reality to data, concluding that “humans are nothing but information-processing objects.”

It’s a reduction of human evolution to a video game that someone wins by finding the escape hatch and then letting a few of his BFFs come along for the ride. Will it be Musk, Bezos, Thiel…Zuckerberg? These billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy — the same survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fueling most of this speculation to begin with.

Of course, it wasn’t always this way. There was a brief moment, in the early 1990s, when the digital future felt open-ended and up for our invention. Technology was becoming a playground for the counterculture, who saw in it the opportunity to create a more inclusive, distributed, and pro-human future. But established business interests only saw new potentials for the same old extraction, and too many technologists were seduced by unicorn IPOs. Digital futures became understood more like stock futures or cotton futures — something to predict and make bets on. So nearly every speech, article, study, documentary, or white paper was seen as relevant only insofar as it pointed to a ticker symbol. The future became less a thing we create through our present-day choices or hopes for humankind than a predestined scenario we bet on with our venture capital but arrive at passively.

This freed everyone from the moral implications of their activities. Technology development became less a story of collective flourishing than personal survival. Worse, as I learned, to call attention to any of this was to unintentionally cast oneself as an enemy of the market or an anti-technology curmudgeon.

So instead of considering the practical ethics of impoverishing and exploiting the many in the name of the few, most academics, journalists, and science-fiction writers instead considered much more abstract and fanciful conundrums: Is it fair for a stock trader to use smart drugs? Should children get implants for foreign languages? Do we want autonomous vehicles to prioritize the lives of pedestrians over those of its passengers? Should the first Mars colonies be run as democracies? Does changing my DNA undermine my identity? Should robots have rights?

Asking these sorts of questions, while philosophically entertaining, is a poor substitute for wrestling with the real moral quandaries associated with unbridled technological development in the name of corporate capitalism. Digital platforms have turned an already exploitative and extractive marketplace (think Walmart) into an even more dehumanizing successor (think Amazon). Most of us became aware of these downsides in the form of automated jobs, the gig economy, and the demise of local retail.

But the more devastating impacts of pedal-to-the-metal digital capitalism fall on the environment and global poor. The manufacture of some of our computers and smartphones still uses networks of slave labor. These practices are so deeply entrenched that a company called Fairphone, founded from the ground up to make and market ethical phones, learned it was impossible. (The company’s founder now sadly refers to their products as “fairer” phones.)

Meanwhile, the mining of rare earth metals and disposal of our highly digital technologies destroys human habitats, replacing them with toxic waste dumps, which are then picked over by peasant children and their families, who sell usable materials back to the manufacturers.

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy — and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.

The more committed we are to this view of the world, the more we come to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. The very essence of what it means to be human is treated less as a feature than bug. No matter their embedded biases, technologies are declared neutral. Any bad behaviors they induce in us are just a reflection of our own corrupted core. It’s as if some innate human savagery is to blame for our troubles. Just as the inefficiency of a local taxi market can be “solved” with an app that bankrupts human drivers, the vexing inconsistencies of the human psyche can be corrected with a digital or genetic upgrade.

Ultimately, according to the technosolutionist orthodoxy, the human future climaxes by uploading our consciousness to a computer or, perhaps better, accepting that technology itself is our evolutionary successor. Like members of a gnostic cult, we long to enter the next transcendent phase of our development, shedding our bodies and leaving them behind, along with our sins and troubles.

Our movies and television shows play out these fantasies for us. Zombie shows depict a post-apocalypse where people are no better than the undead — and seem to know it. Worse, these shows invite viewers to imagine the future as a zero-sum battle between the remaining humans, where one group’s survival is dependent on another one’s demise. Even Westworld — based on a science-fiction novel where robots run amok — ended its second season with the ultimate reveal: Human beings are simpler and more predictable than the artificial intelligences we create. The robots learn that each of us can be reduced to just a few lines of code, and that we’re incapable of making any willful choices. Heck, even the robots in that show want to escape the confines of their bodies and spend their rest of their lives in a computer simulation.

The mental gymnastics required for such a profound role reversal between humans and machines all depend on the underlying assumption that humans suck. Let’s either change them or get away from them, forever.

Thus, we get tech billionaires launching electric cars into space — as if this symbolizes something more than one billionaire’s capacity for corporate promotion. And if a few people do reach escape velocity and somehow survive in a bubble on Mars — despite our inability to maintain such a bubble even here on Earth in either of two multibillion-dollar Biosphere trials — the result will be less a continuation of the human diaspora than a lifeboat for the elite.

When the hedge funders asked me the best way to maintain authority over their security forces after “the event,” I suggested that their best bet would be to treat those people really well, right now. They should be engaging with their security staffs as if they were members of their own family. And the more they can expand this ethos of inclusivity to the rest of their business practices, supply chain management, sustainability efforts, and wealth distribution, the less chance there will be of an “event” in the first place. All this technological wizardry could be applied toward less romantic but entirely more collective interests right now.

They were amused by my optimism, but they didn’t really buy it. They were not interested in how to avoid a calamity; they’re convinced we are too far gone. For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future. They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves — especially if they can’t get a seat on the rocket to Mars.

Luckily, those of us without the funding to consider disowning our own humanity have much better options available to us. We don’t have to use technology in such antisocial, atomizing ways. We can become the individual consumers and profiles that our devices and platforms want us to be, or we can remember that the truly evolved human doesn’t go it alone.

Being human is not about individual survival or escape. It’s a team sport. Whatever future humans have, it will be together.
Team Human, the book, is ready for Pre-Order! Don’t be shy. Everyone who has emailed to ask what can they do to help? Preorder the Team Human manifesto!

———-

Douglas Rushkoff

http://rushkoff.com

Founder, Laboratory of Digital Humanism and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics, CUNY/Queens

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus my new book on what went wrong in the digital economy and how to fix it.

Team Human – my new podcast!

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Republished from Materials for Two Theories: TIMN and STA:C

Notes about the noosphere and noopolitik — #7: new hope for the noosphere and noopolitik — the global commons

UPDATE — May 4, 2018: Here’s my second draft for this section of our forthcoming paper on “The Continuing Promise of the Noösphere and Noöpolitik — Twenty Years After.” I’ve deleted what I originally posted here. This second draft contains considerable new material, but the analytical thrust remains the same.

Thus we’ve noted early cases of NGOs successfully using noopolitik — e.g., the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a coalition of NGOs that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997. And we’ve listed a range of issue areas where state-non-state cooperation can help foster the noosphere and noopolitik: e.g., human-rights, conflict resolution, democracy promotion, and the environment.

To this list, we now add the “global commons” — traditionally, the parts of Planet Earth that fall outside national jurisdictions, and to which all nations have access, such as the high seas, the atmosphere, and outer space. The global commons may turn out to be a pivotal issue area.

While the noosphere and noopolitik are not faring well in the power centers discussed in the prior section, the noosphere concept is progressing better among actors around the world who are concerned about the global commons. This concept is of interest here because it relates closely to the notion of the noosphere. Moreover, actors concerned about the global commons seem naturally attracted to noopolitik.

Indeed, it may well turn out that the noosphere and noopolitik concepts will fare better in the future, the more they are associated with the global-commons concept — and the latter will flourish, the more it is associated with the noosphere and noopolitik. This may be so partly because both the global-commons and noosphere are everywhere viewed as being linked to the biosphere. Recognizing the noosphere’s association with the global commons may then help put noopolitik back on track in various strategic issue areas, despite the negative trends discussed in the prior section.

What makes the global-commons concept potentially pivotal is that it has taken hold from two seemingly contrary directions: One is civilian, arising mainly at the behest of NGOs, IGOs, and other non-state actors who are motivated by environmental and social concerns. The other has been military, motivated by state-centric security interests. Furthermore, while the term “commons” has been used for centuries, the term “global commons” is quite recent. It first appeared in civilian environmental circles — implicitly in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) during 1973-1982, then explicitly in the Brundtland Committee’s report on Our Common Future in 1987. The term spread into military and strategy circles a decade later, notably in the National Defense Strategy document in 2008, then to greater effect in the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2010. Both these civilian and military views were important to President Obama and his Administration. (Among other sources, see Yan, 2012; Kominami, 2012; Ikeshima, 2018)

The “global commons” is thus bracketed by differences in its meanings in environmental science and civil-society circles, on one hand, and on the other, its meaning in military circles. In the past, these different circles rarely interacted; some pro-commons civil-society activists even objected to seeing the term show up in military circles (Bollier, 2010; Morris, 2011). Now, however, as more and more actors recognize the potentially adverse effects of climate change and other global environmental shifts, the views held in these seemingly contrary circles are starting to intersect, as are their calls for reforms and remedies.

In this section, we first discuss perspectives from the environmental science and civil-society circles. Next come military perspectives on the global commons. Finally, we highlight their intersections and the implications for policy and strategy, and particularly for noopolitik.

Environmental science and civil-society perspectives on the global commons:

Among civilians, interest in the global-commons concept comes from two different circles. One consists of scientists and associated actors (international organizations in particular) who are primarily concerned about environmental matters. They have grown into a large, influential circle (or set of circles) and have billions of dollars at their disposal. The other circle consists largely of pro-commons civil-society activists whose agendas include not only environmental issues but also the radical transformation of societies as a whole. This circle is growing around the world too, though in a low-key, low-budget, bottom-up manner.

The two circles have much in common regarding the protection of the global commons. But they are also distinct: The big environmental science circle generally seeks to have government, banking, business, civil-society, and other actors work together to protect the biosphere. This circle tends to lean in progressive liberal internationalist directions. In contrast, the social-activist civil-society circle is decidedly of the Left — but it’s a new kind of Left, for it wants commons-based peer production and other kinds of “commoning” to spread to such an extent that societies experience a phase shift to new commons-based forms of society. This circle has more on its agenda than environmental science and the biosphere.

We discuss each circle in turn, regarding the ways they approach the global commons.

The big science circle: The biggest advances in thinking about the global commons come from scientists and related actors focused on global environmental matters. They have formed into a global circuit of IGOs, NGOs, research centers, private individuals, and government, banking, and business actors — with the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) serving as key collective network hubs. These scientists and their cohorts take the biosphere concept seriously (and at times allude to the noosphere or Gaia). Indeed, the GEF (2017, pp. 8-11) proposes to create a grand Movement of the Global Commons that will “develop a compelling story about needs and opportunities for the Global Commons” and engage people “from communities to corporations to cabinets.” (Also see unenvironment.org and thegef.org)

Initially, decades ago, environmental concerns were mainly about specific local matters, such as pollution. Late in the 20th C., after decades of seeing problems worsened by “global forces of consumption, production, and population,” environmentalists realized their challenge was planet-wide, involving what they began calling “the global commons” — “the shared resources that no one owns but all life relies upon” (Levin & Bapna, 2011) As the global commons-concept took hold, mostly after the Brundtland Committee’s report on Our Common Future (1987), its proponents came to identify the high seas, the atmosphere, Antarctica, and outer space as the resource domains of interest. And they did so “guided by the principle of the common heritage of mankind” and a sense of “common responsibilities”. Which makes for considerable overlap with the military view that the global commons consists of four operational domains: sea, air, space, and cyber.

Some proponents have wanted to expand the global-commons concept further. Thus, “Resources of interest or value to the welfare of the community of nations — such as tropical rain forests and biodiversity — have lately been included among the traditional set of global commons as well, while some define the global commons even more broadly, including science, education, information and peace” (UN Task Force, 2013, pp. 5-6). Proponents for including biodiversity often mention preserving the quality of soil and marine conditions. Which would mean expanding the global-commons concept in social directions that are most pronounced within the civil-society circle discussed in the next sub-section.

Throughout, their analyses (notably, Nakicenovic et al., 2016, pp. 16-17) urge viewing the global commons and “the large-scale subsystems of the Earth system — ocean circulations, permafrost, ice sheets, Arctic sea ice, the rainforests and atmospheric circulations” — as a complex system characterized not only by stable equilibria but also by “regime shifts, tipping points, tipping elements, nonlinearities and thresholds” that may experience “bifurcation points” and then “a new equilibrium state” or a sudden collapse. The threat is that “If one system collapses to a new state, it may set up positive feedback loops amplifying the change and triggering changes in other subsystems. This might be termed a “cascading collapse” of key components of the Earth system.” Which, as discussed later, overlaps with how the military has come to view the domains comprising their global commons as a complex interactive system.

Of particular note for the big science circle, Johan Rockström, Director of Sweden’s Stockholm Resilience Center, has provided seminal studies for years about “biosphere interactions” and “planetary life support systems”. He also formulated new concepts about “nine planetary boundaries that provide a safe operating space for humanity”. In his and his colleagues’ view, several boundaries have already been transgressed, and further slippage looms. Accordingly, humanity threatens to cause catastrophes that can overwhelm the biosphere and thus the Anthropocene age, for “The high seas, the atmosphere, the big ice sheets of the Arctic and
Antarctica, and the stratosphere — traditionally seen as
the Earth’s global commons — are now under suffocating pressure. Yet we all depend on them for our wellbeing” (Rockström. 2017, p. 26). (Also see Rockström. 2009, 2011; Nakicenovic et al., 2016)

As a result, not only further scientific research but also new global perspectives, narratives, organizations, and strategies are needed to assure planetary resilience, sustainability, and stewardship — if possible, to achieve a holistic transformation. According to Rockström and his colleagues, “Governance of the global commons is required to achieve sustainable development and thus human wellbeing. We can no longer focus solely on national priorities” (Rockström, 2011, p. 21). Looking farther out, they (e.g., Nakicenovic et al., 2016) insist that “all nation states have a domestic interest in safeguarding the resilience and stable state of all Global Commons, as this forms a prerequisite for their own future development” (p. 26). Therefore, “Stewardship of the Global Commons in the Anthropocene, with its three central principles of inclusivity, universality and resilience, is an essential prerequisite to guide national and local approaches in support of the Sustainable Development Goals for generations to come” (p. 46).

Rockström (2017, pp. 26-27) goes so far as to predict that, if the right steps could be taken on behalf of the global commons, then “planetary intelligence could emerge on Earth by 2050.” His language sounds much like that of Teilhard and Vernadsky — but falls just short of explicitly mentioning the noosphere:

“Here’s a prediction: planetary intelligence could emerge on Earth by 2050. …

“… planetary intelligence emerges when a species develops the knowledge and power to control a planet’s biosphere. …

“For planetary intelligence to emerge on Earth within three decades we need to change our worldview, our goals and our rules. …

“… we must redefine the global commons. In these new circumstances we can now define them as a resilient and stable planet. That is every child’s birthright, and our common heritage; but it is now at risk. The Anthropocene and the new global commons represent a new worldview — a paradigm shift — as fundamental as Darwin’s theory of evolution or Copernicus’s heliocentricity. …

“If we take the biosphere positive pathway, then the signs are good that we’ll find intelligent life on Earth by 2050.”

As for steps yet to be taken, Rockström (2017) and many of his colleagues believe “We desperately need an effective global system of governance” (p. 25). The concern is that “In a period of increasing interdependence and complexity, global governance remains fragmented, hampered by loud national interests, and unable to address global risks that present non-linear dynamics and repercussions.” What’s needed for the global commons are: new legal norms about planetary boundaries; stronger roles for the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP); stronger commitments by “governments, private actors and the international community” to adopt innovations to safeguard the biosphere; along with “a recognition that transformative change requires engagement and mobilization “from below” … endorsed by the population” (Rockström, 2016). And while much work is focused on defining thresholds and rights for using the commons, other work, notably by the Global Thresholds & Allocations Council (GTAC), is focused on defining fair allocation mechanisms, in a “partnership between leading organizations and individuals from science, business, investment, government, and civil society” (From reporting3.org/gtac/).

Again, these sound much like points made by some military proponents of the global commons, as discussed later.

The social activist circle: For the military, the sea was the first global commons. But, for civil-society activists, “the commons” concept originated centuries ago in England to refer to open land shared “in common”. By now, according to pro-commons civil-society theorists and activists, the concept includes not only natural physical commons — land, air, and water, as “gifts of nature” — it also extends to digital commons (online terrain and knowledge). More than that, some activists include social commons — e.g., cooperatives, where creative work amounts to a shared asset. Culture is sometimes viewed as belonging to the commons as well.

Pro-commons proponents in civil-society circles define commons as shared resources, co-governed by a community (users and stakeholders), according to the rules and norms of that community. All three components — resource, community, rules, in other words, the what, the who, and the how — are deemed essential. Together, they mean “the commons” is not just about resources or terrains; it’s about a way of life called “commoning”. Furthermore, an eventual aim of these “commoners” is to create a new “commons sector” alongside but distinct from the established public and private sectors. If/as this develops, a revolutionary societal transformation will occur. Indeed, a goal of some pro-commons theorists and activists is to “build “counter-hegemonic” power through continuous meshworking at all levels” so that “the destructive force of global capital and its predation of the planet and its people can be countered.” (See Bauwens et al., 2017; Bauwens & Ramos, 2018; Ronfeldt, 2012)

Fifty years ago, the commons concept had no clout in advanced societies — especially not after Garrett Hardin famously wrote “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968). Today, however, pro-commons social movements are growing around the world. They were inspired initially by people experiencing the Internet and Web as a kind of commons, even as a harbinger of the noosphere. Then Elinor Ostrom’s book Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (1990) and her Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 enabled many people to realize, contrary to Hardin and other critics, that common-pool resources can indeed be managed productively. By now, commons movements are slowly, quietly expanding throughout North America, Western Europe, and Scandinavia, gaining inspiration and guidance from a host of new civil-society NGOs, notably the P2P Foundation led by Michel Bauwens, as well as from individual theorists, like David Bollier and Yochai Benkler. In some instances, further impulse comes from Green political parties. In comparison to the big environmental science circle, this is not a hugely influential circle (yet); but it is generating a social movement that is helping raise interest in the global commons and the noosphere.

Much of this innovation is occurring on the Left. German commons advocate Silke Helfrich (quoted in Bollier, 2014) has noted accurately that “commons draw from the best of all political ideologies” — for example, from conservatives, the values of responsibility; from liberals, the values of social equality and justice; from libertarians, the value of individual initiative; and from leftists, the value of limiting the scope of capitalism. Yet this is still largely a set of movements from left-leaning parts of the political spectrum. So far, few conservatives have realized the potential benefits of allowing a commons sector to emerge. Indeed, on the Right, separation from the commons is a central theme — from “America First” to Brexit, the Alternative for Germany, and others.

At first, say two or three decades ago, pro-commons activists focused primarily on local and national matters. But as visions have evolved, more and more activists are redirecting their focus beyond local and national commons toward expansive “global commons” concepts. This turn is well underway. For example, German economist Gerhard Scherhorn (2013) would include in the global commons not only natural resources, but even “employment opportunities, public health systems, educational opportunities, social integration, income and wealth distribution, and communication systems such as the Internet.” A further example is James Quilligan’s analysis, as an international development expert and commons advocate, that,

“While watching markets and states mismanage the world’s
cross-boundary problems, it has dawned on many individuals, communities
and civil society organizations that the specific objectives we are
pursuing — whether they are food, water, clean air, environmental
protection, energy, free flow of information, human rights, indigenous
people’s rights, or numerous other social concerns — are essentially global commons issues.” (Quilligan, 2008)

Meanwhile, many leftist pro-commons civil-society proponents have sought organizational changes that resemble those from the big science and military circles. For example, James Quilligan proposed “that we would gain considerably more
authority and responsibility in meeting these problems by joining 
together as global commons organizations” (2008). In his view, “The challenge is to assemble international representatives from all regions and sectors to discuss global commons issues in a negotiating format which integrates these three [geosphere, biosphere, noosphere] streams of evolution” (2010). He, like others, has also recommended that local communities of users and producers agree to new kinds of “social charters” and “commons trusts” to assure their hold on commons property. If more and more people do so, then “commons management would be deliberated through local, state, interstate, regional, and global stakeholder discussions” — ultimately leading to systems of “global constitutional governance” that favor the commons (2013). However, an early 2008-2009 to create a Coalition for the Global Commons evidently foundered, and no new formal grand movement has re-emerged since.

In contrast to the big science proponents of the global commons, few leftist civil-society actors are so willing to envisage cooperating with today’s government, banking, and business actors. Yet they do generally want to see shifts to network forms of global governance — to network-based governance systems — for they know that uncertainties about global governance mean difficulties for protecting and preserving the global commons. Indeed, encouraging for us to see, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation has remarked that “Right now, the nation-state is no longer a key instrument of change, so we must focus on building transnational open source communities of collective intelligence, i.e. a noopolitik for the noosphere” (Bauwens, 2018).

Military perspectives on the global commons:

The military idea of a commons is uniquely American. It originated from the sea — notably in 1890 when naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote about the sea as “a wide common, over which men may pass in all directions.” Over time, the ensuing construct, “command of the sea,” was expanded, with the identification and inclusion of air and other domains, into “command of the commons” — the construct that prevailed during the mid- and late-20th C. The term “global commons” — hence, “command of the global commons” — arose in U.S. military thinking quite recently, notably with the National Defense Strategy of 2008 and especially the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2010.

In the U.S. view, the global commons contains four military domains: sea (or maritime), air, space, and cyber (five if land were added, by counting Antarctica). What makes them a “global commons” is that they are “areas that belong to no one state and that provide access to much of the globe.” And since no single entity owns or controls them, they become “assets outside national jurisdiction.” Of these military commons, access to and use of the sea domain has been crucial for centuries, air for a century, outer space for about six decades, and cyberspace for about three decades. (See Posen 2003; Jasper, 2010, 2013; Denmark & Mulvenon, 2010; Barrett et al., 2011, p. xvi)

The global commons is thus a multi-domain concept, and many military strategists prefer to view them as a “a complex, interactive system” (Redden & Hughes, 2011, p. 65). Its domains, though not exactly an integrated system, are so interconnected and interdependent that, in operational terms, they function as a whole, not just as an assemblage of parts — thus, “Their value lies in their accessibility, commonality, and ubiquity as a system of systems.” (Barrett et al., 2011, p. 46) Moreover, a weakness or loss in one domain (say, cyberspace) may jeopardize operations in another (say, for an aircraft carrier at sea). Accordingly, “the global commons only functions effectively because each aspect is utilized simultaneously” (Denmark & Mulvenon, 2010, p. 9). With a few word changes, this is not unlike how environmental scientists and civil-society activists view their global commons as a complex adaptive system. (Also see Brimley, 2010)

What makes the military’s global commons strategically important is that they amount to “the underlying infrastructure of the global system … conduits for the free flow of trade, finance, information, people, and technology”(Jasper & Giarra, 2010, p. 2). Our world is so intricately connected across these four domains that “dependable access to the commons is the backbone of the international economy and political order, benefiting the global community in ways that few appreciate or realize.” (Denmark & Mulvenon, 2010, p. 1) Thus, as often pointed out, these commons should be treated as “global public goods” and “global common goods”. It’s even been said —perhaps in an overstated manner — that “every person’s fate [is] tethered to the commons” (Cronin, 2010, p. ix). (Also see Brimley et al., 2008; Edelman, 2010)

Because of the nature of America’s values and interests, the U.S. military has had strategic interests, especially since the end of World War II and throughout the Cold War, in assuring that U.S. military capabilities suffice to keep these commons openly accessible and usable by all actors, especially our allies and partners. What began as “freedom of the seas” evolved into favoring freedom in all the commons — most obviously for vessels, goods, and people, but also to spread neo-liberal values and ideas about openness, freedom, and democracy around the world. U.S. strategy for the global commons thus favored inclusion, not exclusion. All quite reflective of what Teilhard might have recommended, though it’s doubtful that military strategists were thinking about noosphere construction at the time. (See Flournoy & Brimley, 2009)

In that period, U.S. presence in the global commons was so powerful, pervasive, and singular that military strategists commended our primacy, superiority, dominance, and/or hegemony as being of enormous benefit — e.g., as “the key military enabler of the U.S. global power position” (Posen, 2003, p.8 ), “an important enabler of globalization” (Posen, 2007, p. 563), “intrinsic to safeguarding national territory and economic interests” (Jasper and Giarra, 2010, p. 5), as well as “a source of US primacy and also a global public good that supported general acceptance of the unipolar world order” (Edelman, 2010, p. 77). Indeed, most of this has been true, especially in light of the opportunities that U.S. command of the commons provided for acquiring transit rights and forward bases that compounded the ability to operate as a global power and contain the ambitions of adversaries.

Today, however, as the world has become even more globalized and multipolar, the era of the United States as guarantor of the global commons looks increasingly compromised, even jeopardized. As often noted, all four domains have become congested, competitive, and contested; contact in any domain often risks confrontation now. The challenges are conceptual and political as well as military and technological, for apart from NATO, many nations — notably China and Russia — disagree with U.S. views that a “global commons” really exists and the world benefits from U.S. maintenance of it. Such states have laid claims to nearby sea and air spaces, objected to treating outer space as a commons, and/or denied letting cyberspace be a commons, instead asserting sovereignty over portions of it — thereby expanding their security perimeters into all domains. One nation in particular, China, has ambitious plans to extend its political, economic, and military reach abroad, notably via its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), in ways that are sure to create problems in all domains of the global commons, alarming India above all. Other new challenges for the commons come from armed non-state actors — pirates, smugglers, and terrorists. Meanwhile, most all actors, state and non-state, are strengthening their capacities for access-and-area denial by acquiring advanced weapons and communications systems — a lesson they’ve learned from watching recent wars and conflict and seeing “how much U.S. power projection has depended on its dominant access to and use of the global commons” (Denmark & Mulvenon, 2010, p. 15). (Also see Brimley, 2010)

No wonder lawfare expert Craig Allen cautioned a decade ago (2007, pp. 15, 18) “that an aggressive command of the commons posture may backfire and motivate other States to undertake measures to reduce the would-be commander’s access or transit rights” — for “claims to a “command of the commons” seem unnecessarily provocative.” No wonder defense analyst Patrick Cronin (2010, p. ix) wrote a few years later that “Securing freedom in the global commons may be the signal security challenge of the twenty-first century.” No wonder moreover that former Secretary of State George Shultz (2017) warned recently, as he has for many years, of a looming “breakdown of the global commons” — for “that commons is now at risk everywhere, and in many places it no longer really exists.”

Thus, even though U.S. military strategists might wish to continue exercising, if not imposing, a unilateral U.S. role in the global commons, the time for that appears to be passing. A very uncertain new era is emerging. Many analysts still recognize the value of the global commons for America’s global power and influence, but they also increasingly see that new conceptual and organizational approaches are needed to protect and preserve its value. As one report put it, in the heyday of such analysis during the Obama administration:

“These trends are … harbingers of a future strategic environment in which America’s role as an arbiter or guarantor of stability within the global commons will become increasingly complicated and contested. If this assessment is true, then a foundational assumption on which every post-Cold War national security strategy has rested — uncontested access to and stability within the global commons — will begin to erode.” (Flournoy & Brimley, 2009)

The disposition of the Trump administration toward the global-commons concept is far from clear. But in military circles, it’s still alive. In late 2016, the Pentagon superseded its years-old Air-Sea Battle (ASB) concept with the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC), enshrining the concept in the title. Whereas ASB focused on defeating an adversary’s anti-access//area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities, JAM-GC lays out a much broader approach — a “unifying framework” — for assuring freedom of action in all five warfighting domains (including land). Accordingly, “JAM-GC acknowledges that “access” to the global commons is vital to U.S. national interests, both as an end in itself and as a means to projecting military force into hostile territory.” Moreover, besides military elements, JAM-GC recognizes that “other elements of national power — that is, a whole-of-government and coalition approach — including diplomatic, information, military, economic, financial, intelligence, and law enforcement should also be well integrated with joint force operations.” This document is supposed to help determine strategy and doctrine for the rest of this decade and into the next. (Hutchens et al., 2017, pp. 137, 138, 139)

However, following the change of administrations, the Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy (DOD, 2018) never mentions the “global commons” per se, referring only to “common domains” in a couple spots. Thus, “Ensuring common domains remain open and free” is in the list of defense objectives (p. 4). And — to Beijing’s subsequent rebuke — the document states that “We will strengthen our alliances and partnerships in the Indo-Pacific to a networked security architecture capable of deterring aggression, maintaining stability, and ensuring free access to common domains” (p. 9).
At least the global-commons concept lingers here by implication — but as we note below, challenges have begun to loom from outside military circles.

Against this background, analyses about how to continue preserving and protecting the global commons to the benefit of U.S. military and security interests now mostly conclude with calls for negotiating the creation of new multilateral governance regimes, international agreements, and norms of behavior to assure the openness of the commons. Most analysts would prefer that these efforts reflect U.S. leadership, for it’s a widely held view that “America must take a leadership role to ensure that access to the global commons remains a public good” (Brimley et al., 2008, p. 15). But, at this point, the United States is not in a position to impose such regimes, nor would it want to use hard power to do so. It’s become a matter of having to share responsibility and work with allies and partners, in diplomatic soft-power ways akin to noopolitik.

The challenge is that efforts to establish governance regimes for the global commons have to involve not only other countries’ militaries (e.g., NATO) but also various public and private actors. That can result in complex network cooperation and coordination problems. As Jasper & Giarra (2010, p. 3)observe,

“It is misleading to conceptualize or deal with the interests of stakeholders in the global commons independently, that is, to differentiate between the military, civil, or commercial spheres, or to segregate military service roles. This is because the domains of the commons are inherently interwoven — military maritime, space, aerospace, and cyberspace operations overlap with civilian and commercial activities — and because the networks that enable operations or activities in the various overlapping sectors are themselves threaded together.”

Denmark & Mulvenon (2010, p. 2) further clarify the challenge by concluding that “the United States should renew its commitment to the global commons by pursuing three mutually supporting objectives:

“• Build global regimes: America should work with the international community, including allies, friends, and potential adversaries, to develop international agreements and regimes that preserve the openness of the global commons.

“• Engage pivotal actors: The United States should identify and build capacities of states and non- state actors that have the will and ability to responsibly protect and sustain the openness of the global commons.

“• Re-shape American hard power to defend the contested commons: The Pentagon should develop capabilities to defend and sustain the global commons, preserve its military freedom of action in commons that are contested, and cultivate capabilities that will enable effective military operations when a commons is unusable or inaccessible.”

Of potential interest here, their first two recommendations are commonly found not only in military circles but also in civilian circles concerned about the global commons, as discussed above. Variants of their third point also appear in civilian circles, but without the bit about reshaping hard power — unless that reshaping were interpreted to mean a conversion into soft-power measures.

By some accounts, there are also serious organizational challenges at home. Several reports during 2010-2011 advised strategists and planners to revamp their approach to the global commons. One proposed to “depart from the domain-centric mindset” and “employ a holistic approach that breaks down domain stovepipes and treats the global commons not as a set of distinct geographies, but rather as a complex, interactive system” (Redden & Hughes, 2011, p. 65). Another, to reform our “decentralized system of responsibility, in which dozens of agencies and departments are charged with securing specific aspects of the air commons” (Denmark & Mulvenon, 2010, p. 23). Yet another, to overcome “inadequate governance, insufficient norms and regulations, a lack of verification measures to ensure compliance, and more often than not ineffective mechanisms for enforcement” (Barrett et al., 2011, xvii). We’ve found no indications that these organizational challenges no longer exist at home.

So, what we can start to say here is that U.S. military perspectives on the global commons have evolved in directions we’ve been forecasting about the noosphere and noopolitik. What may make this more interesting is that the U.S. military and Department of Defense have lately determined that climate change is real, and that it has potentially threatening security and military implications for the global commons, not to mention other matters. It’s deemed a “threat multiplier” and “an accelerant of instability or conflict”. Key concerns include ways that climate change may affect the military’s roles in humanitarian and disaster relief missions — roles that may require accessing and using all the commons quickly and efficiently. (La Shier & Stanish, 2017)

However, we may have to remain patient about our hopes that positive attention to the global commons will favor a turn to noopolitik anytime soon. For one matter, as pointed out for years, “Washington has yet to articulate a diplomatic strategy to sustain access to the commons.” (Denmark, 2010, p. 166) Making matters worse, the current administration and its attendant policymakers and strategists have so far shown no interest in the global-commons concept. To the contrary, one administration appointee, National Space Council director Scott Pace, recently disparaged it in harsh dismissive terms:

“Finally, many of you have heard me say this before, but it bears repeating: outer space is not a “global commons,” not the “common heritage of mankind,” not “res communis,” nor is it a public good. These concepts are not part of the Outer Space Treaty, and the United States has consistently taken the position that these ideas do not describe the legal status of outer space. To quote again from a U.S. statement at the 2017 COPUOS Legal Subcommittee, reference to these concepts is more distracting than it is helpful. To unlock the promise of space, to expand the economic sphere of human activity beyond the Earth, requires that we not constrain ourselves with legal constructs that do not apply to space.” (Pace, 2017)

Could this be a position that the current administration will extend to the other domains? Will it be touted as another purported repudiation of Obama (even though prior administrations also favored the American role in nurturing the commons)? Too soon to tell. But if so, it augurs a return to a neo-mercantilist approach to taking hold of territories and resources in all four domains, a denial that the global-commons concept has validity or legality, the alienation of the pro-commons environmental science and civil-society movements, a further repudiation of U.S. allies and partners, and new difficulty if not confrontation with China as it expands its global reach to all domains.

If the current White House does indeed go in this direction, it will interrupt America’s long positive progression from supporting freedom of the seas to securing the global commons. Instead, it will mean an inadvisable return to realpolitik, and a further decline in America’s capacity for public diplomacy. We will have to put our hopes for the noosphere and noopolitik on hold for a few years.

Intersecting implications — a new combination of forces for the future?

Comparing the views held in civilian and military circles about the global commons leads to noticing significant overlaps and intersections:

• All their definitions overlap as to the meaning of “global commons” — essentially, material and immaterial terrains and/or resources located outside national jurisdictions, tantamount to global public goods, thus available for mutual sharing and governance.

• All view the global commons as a set of interconnected interdependent domains that, together, comprise a complex interactive if not adaptive system, or system of systems, that girds Planet Earth.

• All see crucial interests in protecting and preserving the global commons, some for humanity’s sake, others more for security’s sake. At the same time, all detect that the global commons are under increasing pressures, if not threats, as a result of people’s behaviors of one kind or another.

• All believe that current governance regimes are inadequate for preserving and protecting the global commons, and that work is urgently needed to create new global governance regimes, associations, and frameworks that are multilateral in myriad senses — they’re inter-governmental, state–non-state, public-private, IGO-NGO, civil-military, local-global, and/or combine hierarchical and networked forms of governance — for purposes that include mutual stewardship and shared responsibility.

• All regard the global commons as strategic resources and/or assets, essential factors for humanity’s future, around which grand strategies should be formulated, at least in part. For military as well as civilian actors, a strategy based on applying soft-power, not hard-power, is considered the way to pursue whatever grand strategy is proposed — in other words, noopolitik, not realpolitik.

There’s something else which all global-commons proponents seem to agree deserves greater attention: sensors to detect and monitor what’s transpiring throughout the global commons. This isn’t missing from current discussions, but it’s rarely highlighted as a crucial matter, especially compared to the attention devoted to organizational matters. Yet the two matters are related — networked sensor arrays and “sensory organizations” look to be part of what’s urgently needed, for social as well as scientific monitoring, including to support humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions.

In addition to these overlaps and intersections, two significant differences stand out between civilian and military intentions toward the global commons:

• The military’s intentions are focused on domain security matters; they say nothing, or very little, about societal matters. In contrast, the civilian circles discussed above do intend to transform societies, in order to make them better suited to living with, and from, the global commons. The big environmental science circle has issued proposals for myriad social, economic, and political reforms, some quite radical. The leftist civil-society social-activist circle foresees societies being radically transformed, entering a next phase of social evolution, as a result of pro-commons forces.

• Both military and civilian proponents of the global commons talk about the importance of “hegemony” — but in opposite ways. An oft-mentioned goal of the military has been hegemonic command of the global commons (though less so now). In contrast, an oft-mentioned goal of civil-society commoners is “counter-hegemonic power” — seeing pro-commons forces grow so strong that they can counter the hegemonic power of today’s established public and private sectors, indeed of capitalism itself. This makes it difficult to imagine today’s pro-commons social activists relating well to today’s global-commons military strategists. But the day may come, especially if/as climate change and its effects become a mutual concern.

These findings support our up-front observation that the noosphere and noopolitik concepts will fare better in the future, the more they are associated with the global-commons concept — and the latter will flourish, the more it is associated with the noosphere and noopolitik. This may be so partly because both the global-commons and noosphere are everywhere viewed as linked to the biosphere. Recognizing the noosphere’s association with the global commons may then help put noopolitik back on track in various strategic issue areas.

True as that may be, optimism and enthusiasm are barely warranted right now. Looking ahead with the current political environment in mind — especially the orientations of today’s leaders in Washington, Beijing, and Moscow — what may be most in need of near-term protection and preservation are not so much the global commons and their domains per se, but rather the very concept itself — “global commons”. The current administration in Washington seems poised to deny and disparage this long-standing strategic concept — hopefully not, but if so, it could play into the hands of Beijing and Moscow, who have never accepted the concept and would rather pursue their grand strategies without it. Leadership on behalf of the global commons — and thus the prospects for the noosphere and noopolitik — would then fall more than ever to the mostly non-state circles we identified earlier.

David Ronfeldt: Professional status: retired. Fields: first 20 years, U.S.-Latin American security issues (esp. Mexico, Cuba); last 15 years, worldwide implications of the information revolution (cyberocracy, cyberwar, netwar, swarming, noopolitik, the nexus-state). Goals: finish “STA:C” framework about how people think; and finish “TIMN” framework about social evolution (past, present, future). Publications: mostly online at rand.org and firstmonday.org.

Photo by SurfaceWarriors

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Transition towards a Food Commons Regime: Re-commoning Food to Crowd-feed the World (PDF Download Available).

Photo by albertstraub

The post Essay of the day: Transition towards a Food Commons Regime: Re-commoning Food to Crowd-feed the World appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Before we start talking about your book, can you tell us a bit about the context that prompted you to write it, and how it fits in your personal quest for understanding social change? I mean, can you say a few words about yourself, your engagement in green politics, and your work with OIKOS?

Twenty-five years ago, I started working as an academic researcher in the field of environmental philosophy and bioethics. With degrees in engineering and philosophy, I tried to understand the role of technology in how people shape their world and dominate nature, to analyse what the importance is of the dominant value system in a society. So, I learned how Modernity radically changed our relation with nature, which from then is an object we as subjects can dominate and manipulate. While this was a rewarding time, it was maybe my engineering background that made me feel that only writing articles and lecturing is not enough to stop the destruction of our living planet. So I joined the Green party and within a few years I first was elected as local councilor of the City of Ghent and subsequently as member of the Flemish Parliament. I learned that politics really matters, being in government we were able to introduce innovative changes in e.g. the care system and energy policy (a law as voted to close the nuclear plants the coming decades). At the same time I experienced that our representative democratic system, established in the 19th century, needs a thorough update. So the first book I wrote was about the need for Deliberative Democracy, acknowledging the value and importance of citizens engaging in an active dialogue.

After being a member of parliament, I founded the green foundation OIKOS, because I believe innovative ideas are the core fuel of societal change. You cannot develop new sustainable systems – think of mobility, energy or food- with old concepts. At the same I noticed how citizens are taking their future back in their hands, becoming from consumer producer again. These citizens’ collectives, commons, are the basis for what I see as the most promising actor of change in our current times.

Your book centers around the tension between freedom, which I read as individual freedom, and security, which I read as more of a collective reality. Can you describe how you see that tension and how you see it as resolvable or not.

In the dominant narrative of our society, we see freedom as an individual quality. But this creates the illusion that we are independent actors that can create our own future and lifeworld on our one. While freedom is maybe the most collective concept we now. How free is someone who is born in a poor country, without a decent educational system? What kind of choices (s)he can make? If freedom is the ability to influence the future development of our world, we can only do it if we work together. That was what the green thinker Ivan Illich meant with autonomy: ‘the joyful capacity to shape the world together’. Anyway, how free are we if the corporations and multinationals determine what we (can) buy. Everyday, we see thousands of advertisements and marketings signals (like logos). Do you really think they don’t influence us in a profound way? So the paradox is that enhancing you personal freedom is working together to change the environment you live. Like the Green mayor of Grenoble did, but getting rid of advertisements boards in public spaces and streets.

Does our welfare system have to change, and if so, how so.

Our current welfare system was built on the assumption of full employment with man working 40 hours a week, staying 40 years with the same employer, in the framework of a decent fiscal system with rich people and big companies paying the fair share of taxes. No need to say that our society has changed in many fundamental ways.

We need what I call a new ‘security package’ for the 21th century, empowering people and allowing them to enrich their community and society. This package is based on the fact that there are three different kinds of work: next to our job, the paid work, there is the care work we do while raising kids, cooking at home etc. and also autonomous work, things we find important, like establishing with people in your town a commons, think about an energy co-op or growing vegetables together. If our goal is a good life for all, we have to make sure people can combine these types of work in a relaxed way. Hence, I suggest the combination of a shorter working week of 30 hours with a universal basic income of 500 euros that for low and middle incomes compensates for the lower salary, in combination with an affordable education and health system.

The number of hours, 30 a week, is not randomly chosen. It is the weekly number most women work who have to combine their job with their family work and personal development. I see the ‘security package’ as a transition model, in the evolution towards a social-ecological society. The more things we do in our autonomous work, products and services who are cheaper and last longer than produced by corporations – think about Wikipedia or platform co-ops for car sharing – will enable to live better with less buying power, allowing to maybe lower the normal working week to 21 hours, as the New Economics Foundation proposes.

What I found very useful in your book is the historical context you are offering about how current social movements, and the surge for the commons in particular, are related to the earlier struggles post-1968. Can you elaborate a bit?

Big corporations – think about Apple – want to make us believe that they invented all the new stuff in our society. Mariana Mazzucato has in a convincing way shown that corporations only can make these products and profits because governments invested loads of money in research and development. On top of this, I want to add that quite a lot of crucial innovations where introduced not by companies or public authorities, but by citizens’ initiatives. Who build for instance the first wind mill to start the transition towards a renewable energy system? It where villagers in the north of Denmark in the 1970’s. Who invented the recycle or thrift shop, the starting point for the circular economy: wise citizens in the Netherlands. The same goes for sharing, with people in Amsterdam experimenting with a bike sharing system, already in the mid 1960’s? These initiatives are part of a broader emancipatory movement with a lot new social movements..

Overall, the emancipatory movement wanted to create more space for citizens by reducing the reach of the state, other traditional structures and multinationals. Looking back, we can say that this movement has been successful, but did not achieve its goal. This is connected with the greater success of the neoliberal freedom concept. This concept of freedom succeeded in reducing the build-up of identity into an individualistic project, where consumption plays a crucial role.

How did it happen? The 1980s and 1990s are the battleground of these two freedom-based concepts. A crucial difference lies in scale: while businesses are organised worldwide, this is less evident for new civil movements and unions. Only the anti-globalisation movement would later bundle forces across borders. Meanwhile, large corporations have taken up the free space for the most part.

A second explanation concerns the evolution of most of the new social movements. Starting mostly from a position of a radical critique, professionalisation and building a relationship with mainstream politicians leads to a pragmatic attitude. Proposals must now be feasible within the framework of the current policy. The increasing dependency on subsidies of many non-governmental organisations has sometimes led to uncritical inscription into government policy options. As said, at the same time, more and more citizens were seduced by the neoliberal narrative that a good life means work hard, earn money and spent it all to be happy. If you don’t feel well, just buy a ticket for a wellness club.

The biggest financial crisis since the 1930’s, which started ten years ago, changed everything again. The crisis is a real wake-up call for a lot of citizens, they realize that if they want a sustainable future for their children, they have to build it themselves. So, we see all over the world a new wave of citizens’ initiatives, rediscovering the emancipatory concept of freedom and autonomy. A crucial difference is that we know live in the age of internet, lowering the transaction costs of cooperation dramatically. What was very hard to realize in the post-68 period, e.g. sharing cars in a neighborhood, is now a piece of cake with digital platforms.

What can we learn from this history? That if social movements want to be successful in a globalized world, they also have to build translocal and transnational networks. It for instance makes no sense that in ten cities in the world, people are trying to build their own digital platform as an alternative for companies like Airbnb or Uber. Transnational networks of commons cities can be the fundament of a new governance model in the future.

Do you have a prescription for our future, and a way to get there? Also to which degree does your book also apply to non-European or non-Western countries?

I don’t have of course the prescription for our future, what I did in preparing my book was observing society carefully, looking for the places and processes of hope. I found two very relevant developments: citizens starting new collective initiatives, commons, for the production of sustainable products and services, and local governments implementing very ambitious policy plans in fields like climate, energy, food and mobility policy.

Slowly but surely, there is a new range of autonomous activities that together form a transformational movement towards a socio-ecological society. It is important to note that we are not only talking about small or isolated projects. Take, for instance, the 20 majestic wind turbines at the coastline of Copenhagen. This project was started by a group of habitants of the city who developed the idea and went with it to their Minister of Energy. Instead of refusing or taking it over, the government decided to start a co-creation process. Civil servants give technical and judicial advice. Half of the shares were owned by a citizens’ co-op, after completion, thousands of families every year receive a financial dividend. Similarly, following the Energiewende in Germany, half of the renewable energy installations are owned by citizens and their co-ops. Even in smaller towns, governments support the local population in setting up renewable energy projects. This adds up to really big business. So, citizens and local governments really can make a difference, and build together the counter current.

My book starts from the history and developments in Europe, so I am really modest on what it has to say to other continents. At the same time, I see the same developments in cities all over the world. There I think the crucial concept of action developed in my book based on the work of André Gorz, revolutionary reformism, really can be very useful. It answers the question how to move a step further, beyond all the individual great citizens’ initiatives and local policy proposals.

The two concepts are each in themselves insufficient. A political revolution that will change everything for good at once – we should not hope for that. And a few reforms of the existing system will not lead to a real structural change. For example, while it’s good that people share cars, this alone will not lead us to sustainable accessibility and mobility. This needs strategic cooperation and planning.

Revolutionary reformism can be defined as a chain of far-reaching reforms that complement and strengthen each other and, at the same time, raise political awareness. In system terms, it is a matter of implementing reforms that are complementary and reinforce each other. This will generate synergy and even positive feedback: virtuous circles. For example, in progressive cities like Ghent you see the establishment of commons if the field of renewable energy, mobility, food, etc. But for most of them they don’t cooperate beyond the borders of their domain. Imagine a food coop distributing their food boxes by another commons specialized in delivery by electric bikes, that in turn only uses green energy produced by the urban energy coop. When they then, supported by the local government, introduce and use the same local currency for connecting their economic transactions, you put in motion a chain in action that will reinforce itself. It is this kind of thinking and action that is crucial for the future, and can be useful all over the world.

The post Freedom, Equality and Commoning in the Age of the Precariat: an interview with Dirk Holemans appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The recent 15th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade towers was a reminder of the terrible consequences when a nation ignores the lessons of history—including its own recent history. The U.S. military budget is a tragic example.

We currently spend roughly $598 billion on defense, which is more than the next seven biggest military spenders combined: China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan. This represents 54 percent of federal discretionary spending. In return, we get an ability to rapidly deploy conventional military power anywhere in the world.

The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was the most devastating foreign-sourced attack on the United States since the War of 1812. It was carried out by a largely self-organized band of 19 religious fanatics of varied nationalities, affiliated with a small, dispersed, and loosely organized international network. We responded by invading and occupying Afghanistan and Iraq. This led to hundreds of thousands of pointless deaths, destabilization of the Middle East, and a cost to the U.S. Treasury of some $4 trillion to $6 trillion.

I view all this in part through the lens of my experience as an Air Force captain during the Vietnam War. I briefed pilots headed for Vietnam on the psychological consequences of bombing civilian populations. I later served in the Defense Department’s office overseeing defense-related behavioral and social science research.

The available research on the psychological consequences of bombing was clear and predictable: It unifies the civilian population, just as 9/11 unified the U.S. population. The same is true for mass military operations against dispersed combatants who blend in with and are indistinguishable from civilian populations. Conventional military operations work only when there are clearly identifiable military targets that can be hit with limited collateral harm to civilians.

The United States bears no risk of invasion by a foreign military force. And the terrorist threat, which comes from bands of loosely affiliated political extremists, is substantially overblown. Furthermore, it is fueled by the much greater security threats created by environmental abuse, global corporate overreach, and the social divisions of extreme inequality. Under circumstances of growing physical and social stress from environmental devastation and inequality, politics easily turns violent. Violence is all the more certain when people feel deprived of alternative avenues to express their rage at being deprived of a dignified means of living.

This all suggests we need a deep rethinking of how we prioritize and respond to security threats. The greatest threat to national and global security is climate destabilization. That threatens our long-term survival as a species; in the short term, it threatens livelihoods, which exacerbates desperation and violence. Investing in a massive effort to quickly get off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy needs to be our first security priority. We must also recognize that poverty and joblessness fuel the conflicts we hope to resolve.

If we want a healthy Earth, justice, peace, and democracy, we need a 21st-century security agenda that addresses the causes of contemporary conflicts, encourages cooperation and diplomacy, and supports every person in their quest for a healthy and dignified life.

We must press at home and abroad for political and economic reorganization that advances democracy and enables all people to pursue a decent means of living in harmony with the living Earth. Scaling back dependence on fossil fuels, the power of global corporations, the international arms trade, and the grotesque inequalities within and between nations need to be high on our list of security priorities. This will lead to dismantling the costly obsolete war machinery of the 20th century.

The leadership in formulating and advancing a 21st-century security agenda will not come from 20th-century institutions forged by global military conflicts and global competition for a dwindling resource base. It must come from the bottom up, from the people who are living a 21st-century vision into being.

Published on Sharing.org; Original source: Yes Magazine

Photo credit: Newtown grafitti, Flickr creative commons

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Denis Jaromil Rojo of dyne.org

Following the sudden and bizarre announcement that popular encryption software Truecrypt ‘may contain unfixed security issues’ and the equally bizarre recommendation by the Truecrypt developers to use Microsoft’s Bitlocker program (source of much derision from security professionals who assume it must be backdoored by the NSA), there has been a great deal of speculation as to firstly, why this has happened, and secondly what to use as a replacement if Truecrypt is indeed compromised. The most common theory to explain the announcement seems to be that the TC devs were put in the same impossible situation as Lavabit had been – pressured to install a backdoor to the software, the leaders decided to close down the project rather than give in to the US government’s demands, and in the case of TC, the recommendation of software presumed to be insecure is a coded message of some sort.

However it could be that an ongoing audit of the TC code had found multiple vulnerabilities and faced with the exhausting prospect of fixing them, the developers decided to throw in the towel instead. However this does not explain the recommendation of Bitlocker.

As to the second question, it appears there is not too much out there in the way of trusted open source software which could replace Truecrypt – proprietary non-open software must be presumed to be insecure as the code cannot be audited. One option might be Tomb, written by Jaromil of the excellent dyne.org.

“Tomb aims to be an 100% free and open source system for easy encryption and backup of personal files, written in code that is easy to review and links commonly shared components.”

Tomb does not appear to be super-complicated to set up, however it is definitely less user-friendly than Truecrypt, and unlike TC it does not work on Windows machines, the advice from the website being:

“…we strongly encourage people in need of strong encryption to not use Winslows, or at least to not generate encrypted partitions with it, since it can contain backdoors in the random number generation…”

Meanwhile we await more details to fill in the background on the Truecrypt announcement…

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