COMMONS MAGAZINE
You can find a commons in the most unlikely places. Case in point: the clan of surfers at the Banzai Pipeline beach on the North Shore of Oahu, Hawaii. A motley tribe of musclemen maintain order and respect among the crowds of surfers vying to catch the big waves there. This social community based around a shared resource even has a name, “The Wolfpak,” and has been the subject of a documentary film, Bustin’ Down the Door, recently released on DVD.
I recent discovered two fantastic websites that exemplify the power of online collectives to amass some great bodies of knowledge. LittleSis and Spot.us are experiments, and so it is unclear if they will succeed, but both deserve kudos for their imagination, resourcefulness and public spiritedness.
If you have seen me with a distracted, preoccupied look on my face over the past three years – a frequent occurrence – it’s because I’ve been toiling on a book about the long, strange odyssey of commoners to secure a place for themselves on the Internet. I am happy to report that I have snapped out of my writer’s trance — my new book is now out!
The future of the commons took a giant leap forward yesterday as Barack Obama became the improbable 44th president of the United States. Like much of the nation (and world), I was glued to my television. The spectacle was moving, and will keep pundits and future historians busy for years. So much to absorb!
Barack Obama has surfaced some long-buried communal instincts in the American people. Millions of folks were not content to merely watch his campaign in the isolation of their living rooms??“they wanted to talk about Obama face-to-face with friends, neighbors, family, even complete strangers. I remember a rousing discussion last January in the back of a bus rumbling down Selby Avenue in St. Paul with three young men I had never met before.
The video produced by commercial television networks is usually regarded as strictly proprietary – something to be tightly controlled in order to eke out maximum revenue from it. So why has Al Jazeera, the independent Arab news network, announced that its video footage of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza would be available for free, under a Creative Commons license?
Maude Barlow, the international water activist who has long fought for access to water as a basic human right, has been named a senior advisor on water issues to the President of the United Nations General Assembly. The appointment gives the outspoken Barlow a prominent platform for advancing the message that water is a commons to be shared by all, not a commodity to be allocated only to those with money.
It’s no accident that Ernesto “Che” Guevara is as well-recognized as Coca-Cola or Mickey Mouse. One of the big reasons, apart from his revolutionary exploits, is because an image of Che taken by photographer Alberto Korda at a 1959 political rally was in the public domain for decades. Unprotected by copyright, the Che image was free to circulate around the world and be remixed and adapted by anyone.
Yale law professor Robert Ellickson had the insight to see the invisible in the obvious – that our individual households, as systems for managing shared everyday resources, function as a commons. They interact with the law and with the marketplace, but have their own social and economic dynamics. Ellickson’s recent book, The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (Princeton University Press, 2008), is a short but thoughtful exploration about how and why households function as the do.
Days before Christmas, with hardly any notice in the national press, the Federal Highway Administration quietly issued a final rule in the Federal Register. With the news focused on the economic crisis and millions of Americans traveling for the holidays, an obscure regulation issued by FHWA is not going to attract much attention. Which was precisely the point.
One of the easiest ways to defeat the commons is to make it illegal before it can get a foothold. That’s the apparent strategy of Thomson Reuters, the giant information company that is struggling to compete with a popular open-source bibliographic software tool, Zotero. Zotero is an extension to the Firefox browser that is used by many academics to manage bibliographic citations from a variety of different software formats. Zotero lets people copy, organize and share Web links, authors’ names, article titles and other identifying information about Web artifacts.
Is there such a thing as artistic integrity in music-making any more? It depends on where you turn your gaze. As Charles Dickens might say, this is the best of times and the worst of times. The music marketplace is becoming more predictable and sterile even as new Internet-based business models allow fans and artists to connect in healthy – and yes, profitable – ways.
Let’s start first with Jon Pareles’ depressing account in the New York Times about the proliferation of marketing tie-ins for new music.
The latest issue of Newsweek champions Peter Barnes as one of “four thinkers whose philosophies seem to have captured the intellectual moment.”
In its special end-of-the-year/end-of-Bush-Era issue on “the Global Elite,” the newsweekly cites four ideas they view as “transformative.” In addition to On the Commons co-founder Peter Barnes’ commons-based solution to global warming, Cap-and-Dividend, Newsweek hails Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, Harvard legal scholar Cass Sunstein, and genetics researcher Dr. George Church.
If you’re perplexed by the “cap and dividend” policy, check out Cap’n Dividend’s Excellent Climate Solution. It’s an amusing 90-second flash animation for the Web that explains the basic logic of the “cap and dividend” policy, a leading proposal for curbing C02 emissions and global warming. Viewers are invited to send the video to their friends as part of a larger effort to inform more people about the proposal, which is gaining momentum among environmentalists, economists and Members of Congress.
Charles Dickens’ character Scrooge has lasted for more than two centuries because we love to witness a villain who stubbornly refuses to see the value of human connection and kindness – and then, suddenly, gets it! Scrooge comes to mind when re-reading The Deadweight Loss of Christmas (pdf file), a now-classic essay that appeared in the venerable American Economic Review in December 1993 (vol. 83, no. 5, pp. 1328-1336).
Savvy social observer Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs America’s myth of the self-made man in his latest bestseller, The Outliers.
This is a very timely book, coming at the crashing close of an era defined by full-scale worship of self-made men. The conventional economic wisdom for several decades has been that successful people deserve every reward possible—because they alone are the creators of prosperity and progress.
I would not expect the libertarian-minded John Tierney of the New York Times to give a full, thoughtful account of the social dynamics of potlatch on its own terms, and indeed, he doesn’t. In his article in the Science Times section of the Times (December 16, 2008), he uses the potlatch practices of the Kwakwaka’wakw Indians chiefly as a pretext for some irreverent, superficial riffing on the meaning of gift-giving. His editor surely wanted something seasonal.
Photographer Edward Burtynsky once got lost while driving in West Virginia, stumbling onto a surreal landscape. The mountaintops had been dumped into streams and valleys in order to mine the coal deep within the mountains. It was a hideous but fascinating landscape that set him on a path to document mankind’s devastating impact on the earth’s natural landscape. If Ansel Adams became famous for his achingly beautiful images of nature’s grandeur, Burtynsky brings the same fine-arts aesthetic to his images of colossus-sized industrial production.
The City of Toronto has broken new ground in the fight against bottled water by banning the sale and distribution of bottled water on city premises. The city has not only banned an environmentally destructive product, it has committed itself to ensuring access to tap water in all city facilities. Although a number of cities are taking steps to discourage the purchase and use of bottled water, Toronto’s is the most comprehensive municipal plan yet enacted.