COMMONS MAGAZINE
One of the chief causes of apathy and cynicism about government over recent decades is that citizens feel no involvement in the political process, especially in how their money is spent. This is one reason why taxes—in any way, shape or form—have become so deeply unpopular with so many.
It is one thing to talk about the “virtual corporation” and online commons as new organizational forms. It’s quite another to have those forms be legally recognized. Yet in a little-noticed law enacted in June 2008, the State of Vermont has formally conferred “legal personhood” on online communities that wish to form limited-liability partnerships.
Science has never been jazzier. Director Jesse Dylan – the director of the Emmy- award winning Yes We Can Barack Obama campaign video – has teamed up with Science Commons to produce a short video explaining why science is the ultimate remix. It’s a great primer on the special challenges facing scientists in sharing and collaborating, and it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Watch the video here.
_The following is an excerpt from Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back
by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, published by the New Press, 2008.
Last week, in my post about “peak hierarchy,” I referred to a talk by Michel Bauwens of The P2P Foundation at UMass Amherst on November 25. Bauwens, who lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, is a leading student and proponent of “peer production” as a new paradigm of economics and culture. The term comes from the Internet culture and describes the ability of dispersed individuals to come together and collaborate on projects of shared interest.
The following essay is reprinted from the South End News, December 4, 2008, with permission.
Beware of public-private partnerships formed to “rescue” public spaces. They typically start with a manufactured crisis of safety and/or funding; this is used to justify the handover of the space to private “benefactors” who then reap far more than they contribute while they take control of the public realm. Unless we are vigilant, the Boston Common, America’s first public park, is about to be rescued.
Most of us have heard about the impending arrival of “peak oil,” after which oil supplies will inexorably dwindle, causing all sorts of havoc as societies try to cope and remake themselves. But my friend Michel Bauwens of the Peer to Peer Foundation, recently suggested that we may be approaching another inflection point of equal or greater significance, if we have not already – the arrival of “peak hierarchy.” By this, he meant the time at which distributed organizations become stronger and more versatile than centralized hierarchies.
This past decade has been a time of amazing growth for community-based agriculture. Farmers markets are trendy, books about the food system have become New York Times bestsellers, and ‘locavore’ is the Oxford word of the year. The Slow Food movement, the strength of the organics industry, and the cultural fascination with chefs and healthy eating are also indicators of a shift in the public’s perception about food and agriculture.
The ETC Group has long prowled the frontiers of the life sciences and the troubling long-term agendas of those industry sectors. In a new report, the Ottawa-based public interest group describes the alarming concentration of the life sciences and their plans for manipulating nature to create entirely new sorts of markets. “Who Owns Nature?
As Barack Obama became a gale-force cultural phenomenon this year, his popularity naturally gave rise to a small industry of street vendors selling t-shirts, buttons and posters. Many of these items linked Obama to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with such sentiments as “The Dream is Now!” and conjoined images of Obama and King.
One of the biggest factors undermining a commons-based society during the 20th Century was the automobile. Untold billions of dollars of public money was spent to enshrine the private car as essential to modern life, first in the U.S. and then throughout the world.
From Flickr by Lynac, creative commons license, non-commercial.
It’s a pleasure to see Lewis Hyde receive such well-deserved attention in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, in a lengthy profile, “What Is Art For?” by Daniel B. Smith. Hyde has long been a friend of the commons; he even guest-blogged here at Onthecommons.org several years ago.
This is the first in a series of essays about art and the commons based on interviews and research in 2007-2008. Watch for more from Rachel Breen in the near future. Editors
Cap-and-Dividend, the commons-based solution to global warming, came in for more media attention recently, in Forbes magazine.
Environmental author and philosopher Bill McKibben interviewed On the Commons cofounder Peter Barnes, who conceived the idea. Cap-and-Dividend is a policy being considered by the Obama administration. It involves charging companies that emit carbon into the atmosphere above a certain limit (the cap) and then returning the money raised by this process to citizens (the dividend).
Can trust be bought, and if so, what’s the price? Based on the latest news coming out of the Federal Reserve, the price tag for restoring trust in the nation’s markets is now up to $7.4 trillion. (Bloomberg News, Nov. 24) That’s the amount that the Fed is prepared to lend to prevent financial markets from seizing up.
Over time, without my planning it, my house has become part of the commons.
I’ve lived in the same house for 36 years, almost unheard of in this age of family uprootings. I’ve always shared the house with other people, too. I still do.
It’s the simple, everyday things that go ignored, eclipsed by the razzle-dazzle of the new, the exclusive, the advertised. This is especially true of childhood, which is overrun by expensive and glitzy electronic gadgets, games, software, and other flashy toys.
So it is a great pleasure to behold the stick – the simple, versatile and ubiquitous toy of childhood.
With no concern for the impact on air, water and wildlife, the Bureau of Land Management is rushing through dozens of new leases for oil drilling on public lands adjacent to national parks in Utah. More than 40 previously undisclosed areas for drilling were announced on November 4, alarming environmentalists who have long sought to protect these areas of land. The plan is apparently to consummate the deals before President-Elect Obama takes office on January 20.
As the Obama phenomenon moves from campaigning to governance, the future of citizenship and governance could turn on how the President-Elect chooses to exploit the vast database of donors, volunteers and supporters he has amassed over the past 21 months. Obama’s unprecedented campaign gathered some 10 million email addresses and the names of more than 3.1 million donors – a sufficiently important resource that the database has been used as loan collateral.
“You just walk into the mountain,” I was told. And so I walked up to Schlossberg, a large hill that overlooks the city of Graz, Austria, and into a tunnel carved out of sheer rock that extended dimly into the distance. I stepped gingerly onto the metal grating that formed a inclined walkway, and proceeded in amazement for more than 100 yards. The air had the sharp tang of rock dust. I came to a huge open space – a 150-foot “auditorium” with a 40-foot ceiling – again, carved out of sheer rock.