If I found myself at loose ends, trying to find a project to devote the rest of my life to, I’d be pitching funders on building a national, open access portal to build an educational commons.
Although it was not necessarily ‘national’ or ‘open access’, one of the things that was attempted by the Ultranet was an educational commons. The challenge I found with this was around mindset. Even though staff were paid by the government, many teachers saw resources created as their own, not something to be added to a collective repository.
I kind of get the feeling that this maybe what Bonfire is trying to achieve. I have not given it enough time to know though.
We need public spaces, built in the spirit of Walt Whitman, that allow us to gather, communicate, and share in something bigger than ourselves.
Eli Pariser reflects upon Walt Whitman’s creation of Fort Greene Park in 1846 and suggests we need an online version of a shared public space. He suggests that there are three problems with the current space: it encourages a frictionless experience, unequal by design and the lack of maintenance/governance. Pariser discusses three challenges that need to be overcome in the creation of such a space: funding, talent and will.
Private spaces and businesses are critical for a flourishing digital life, just as cafés, bars, and bookstores are critical for a flourishing urban life. But no communities have ever survived and grown with private entities alone. Just as bookstores will never serve all the same community needs as a public library branch, it’s unreasonable to expect for-profit corporations built with “addressable markets” in mind to accommodate every digital need.
Alongside and between the digital corporate empires, we need what scholars like Ethan Zuckerman are calling “digital public infrastructure.” We need parks, libraries, and truly public squares on the internet.
In his commentary, John Naughton spoke about the rise of the automated public sphere, rather than the one that was hoped for.
When the internet arrived, many of us thought it would provide a virtual space that would be like Whitman’s concept, except on a global scale. In my case, I saw it as the first instantiation of Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere”. With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, this looks like utopianism, but it was real enough at the time. The problem was that it blissfully underestimated the capacity of private corporations to colonise cyberspace and create what the legal scholar Frank Pasquale designated an “automated public sphere” – ie, a collection of privately owned spaces (walled gardens) that we know as social media.
In a different take, Richard Flanagan references John Clare and his writing about the enclosure movement in Britain in 19th century to privatize common waste. For Flanagan, we are going through a second great enclosure, where these platforms are enclosing our emotions, soul and fear.
I wonder if that makes someone like Kicks Condor a modern John Clare?
Lin Ostrom never believed in “the remorseless working of things”. Born Elinor Awan in Los Angeles in 1933, by the time she first saw Garrett Hardin present his ideas she had already beaten the odds.
Tim Harford compares the work of Garrett Hardin with that of Lin Ostrom. According to Ostrom there are many flaws to the argument for the ‘tragedy of the commons’, such as the ownership of the land and commonality between different examples. Matto Mildenberger also provides his own recount of the sordid history assocaited with Garrett Hardin’s classic.
Marginalia
The commons were owned by a community. They were managed by a community. These people were neighbours. They lived next door to each other. In many cases, they set their own rules and policed those rules.
Hardin’s article had sliced through the complexity with his assumption that all commons were in some sense the same. But they aren’t.
The logic of Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay is seductive but to read the text itself is a shock. Hardin’s policy proposals are extreme. He believed that the ultimate tragedy of the commons was overpopulation – and the central policy conclusion of the article was, to quote Hardin, that “freedom to breed is intolerable”.
Playing for Team Human today: Jason Schmitt. Jason looks at the big business of for-profit academic publishing in his new documentary Paywall:The Business of Scholarship. Should the the world’s research be locked behind closed doors? Jason makes the case for open access on today’s Team Human.
Jason Schmitt and Douglas Rushkoff discuss the way in which knowledge and scholarship has become locked behind paywalls. The irony of this is that so many of the articles and journals published are written by academics who get little gain out of the time and effort they put in. Schmitt and Rushkoff touch on the open-access work of Aaron Swartz and Alexandra Elbakyan. It is an interesting discussion in a world where many are arguing for more research, yet so much of this research is inaccessible. I remember Karl Trsek, my history teacher in high school, telling me that he continued to maintain a subscription with the university library. I did not understand why this was so important, but now more that ever this is the only means of gaining any sort of access.
Cory Doctorow