Comments on: The Decline of the Commons? Not Really. https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-decline-of-the-commons-not-really/2011/03/28 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:52:17 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.14 By: happyseaurchin https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-decline-of-the-commons-not-really/2011/03/28/comment-page-1#comment-482674 Thu, 07 Apr 2011 13:52:17 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=14850#comment-482674 nice 🙂
including your warning about word/idea distinction

the same idea or concept constellation
can come garbed in all manner of jargon and popular nomenclature

]]> By: Sepp Hasslberger https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-decline-of-the-commons-not-really/2011/03/28/comment-page-1#comment-481899 Wed, 30 Mar 2011 06:37:26 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=14850#comment-481899 Since this is a long term statistic and it shows a great increase in buzz around the word commons some time around 1750, and then a gradual decrease, I think it does have significance.

We can’t really say like ‘open source’, ‘free software’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ have taken steam out of the use of the word commons. Those are relatively new terms and would barely make a blip, except they’d show up as a spike at the end of the graph.

I find it quite significant how there has been much discussion of the commons and how this has waned over a relatively long time span. Rather than rationalizing that it’s not real, we should try to understand why it was that the term commons fell into disuse over the course of a few centuries, to where it was practically unknown until just a few years ago, when the p2p movement rediscovered it and brought it back into use (not even visible at the end of the graph yet).

What was it that replaced the commons as an important part of our life?

I tend to agree that the rise of the idea of capitalism and its emphasis on private property, as well as the corporations that replaced – to some extent – the commons, had something to do with that trend.

]]> By: Poor Richard https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-decline-of-the-commons-not-really/2011/03/28/comment-page-1#comment-481799 Mon, 28 Mar 2011 23:56:55 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=14850#comment-481799 tomas, your suggestion to extend the search parameters/keywords would surely make this more interesting. AS you noted the terminology changes over time with old ideas getting put in “new bottles”.

Still there is little doubt that over the course of the 1800’s the pre-capitalist commons were rapidly being replaced with capitalist commons called corporations, trusts, etc.

Other terms to include might be guilds, lodges, societies, commonwealths, cooperatives, partnerships, communities, communes, etc. But many of these terms would have to be qualified to tease apart the different kinds of ownership or values that can exist under the same names.

A formidable challenge.

The trick for a Google to pull of would be this: replace the idea of key words with the idea of key documents. The engine would make a semantic and logical analysis of the key documents and then look for matching patterns independent of terminology. This might be similar to the approach that has been so successful in improving machine translation.

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