 Good evening. Thank you for coming. To begin I would like to acknowledge that we are residing on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Massachusetts people whose name was appropriated by this Commonwealth. We pay respect to the Massachusetts elders past present and future, the traditional custodians of the lands on which we make our work. We acknowledge the truth of the violence perpetrated in the name of this country and make a commitment to uncovering that truth through dialogue, partnerships, and learning. Thank you for being here. Happy Monday. Shana Tova to those who are celebrating Rosh Hashanah and may not be here with us tonight. Hopefully they can tune in later. And welcome to this event, the power of the commons with David Folger. We're so happy to have you here. This event is hosted in partnership with the Center for Economic Democracy, the Emerson Engagement Lab, and the Emerson MA and Media Design. So I would like to really thank our partners, Paul Ariel, for your help in that. And for those who I haven't met, my name is Jamie Galoon. My pronouns are she, her. I am the director and a co-founder of HowlRound Theater Commons. HowlRound Theater Commons is based here at Emerson in the Office of the Arts. We are a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide. We amplify progressive and disruptive ideas about theater and facilitate connection between diverse practitioners. I also want to say hello to those who may be tuning in online because we are live streaming this event on HowlRound TV. We ask anyone as a result who's speaking throughout the evening to use a microphone because it will help those who are tuning in online. When we get to the Q&A portion of tonight, we'll have mic runners and we'll try to make it as easy as possible and we appreciate your patience with that. You'll also notice that we are live captioning this event as part of our ongoing accessibility efforts. So HowlRound Theater Commons is a digital knowledge commons and all of our content is produced, peer produced, and we license everything through the Creative Commons. The Commons, thank you. The Commons is near and dear to our heart. It's really a primary organizing principle of all of our work and David Bullier, who we're lucky to have with us here tonight, is someone who's been deeply influential in our thinking. We have read some of his previous books such as Think Like a Commoner and Patterns of Commoning and been really inspired by his deep knowledge and his belief that arts and culture have a really important role to play in the Commons and are already doing so. We first met David in 2015 and we have been working with him and other arts and culture organizations in an arts culture and comedy and working group for the last year and a half plus. And tonight we can be more delighted to have him here to talk about his new book Free, Fair, and Alive, The Insurgent Power of the Commons. So I'm going to introduce David now. You have a short bio in your program as well. So David is an American activist, scholar, and blogger who is focused on the Commons as a new paradigm for reimagining economics, politics, and culture. He pursues this work as director of the Reinventing the Commons program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and as co-founder of the Commons Strategies Group, an international advocacy project. Bullier has co-organized pioneering international conferences and strategy workshops on the Commons and consults regularly with diverse activists and policy experts in the U.S. and Europe. His blog, bullier.org, is a widely read source of news about the Commons and his book, Think Like a Commoner, a short introduction to the life of the Commons has been translated into six languages. Bullier is an editor and author of many books on the Commons including Patterns of Commoning and The Wealth of the Commons, both with co-editor Silke Helfrich, Green Governance, co-authored with the late Professor Burns Weston, and Viral Spiral, brand-name bullies and Silent Theft. In 2012, Bullier received the Bosch Berlin Prize in Public Policy from the American Academy in Berlin for his work on the Commons. Bullier lives in Amherst, Massachusetts. Welcome, David. Thank you. Do we have Mike here? Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here and thank you, Jamie, and thank you. Thank you, HowlRound staff, for helping pull this together as well as the partners on this project. I'm really grateful to have this opportunity to have a conversation with you about the Commons. I need my... This book is a result of about three years of work with my German activist, scholar, friend and colleague, Silke Helfrich. And we, after both of us being involved in the Commons internationally for, oh, I'd say 10 or 15 years at the time, now it's almost 20, we decided we needed to sort of debrief each other on the Commons in a way that a lot of the academic literature and certainly the economic literature didn't make clear. So my talk is the result of that, and I hope to suggest how there's all sorts of system change that's possible by learning to think like a commoner, and that's what I will try to present today. We start with, I think, the idea that free markets and the whole capitalist narrative is starting to fray. It's proving dysfunctional, especially since the 2008 financial crisis. Its stories just are not credible anymore, and this is allied with the state not performing in the way that it has historically purported to in terms of meeting needs, in terms of wealth inequality, in terms of dealing with climate change, which has been documented for more than 30 years, in terms of dealing with a whole cascade of other social problems in reactive ways or not at all. And we like to, Silk and I like to call it the market-state system, because while we often talk about the state and the market as opponents, in a very deeper level, they're very allied in their vision for what kind of a society we should have and how to achieve it through economic growth, through technological innovation, and all the things that the capitalist narrative provides in conjunction with state power. But as I suggested, the capitalist storylines are starting to fall apart, and this is leaving, I think, a void in our political life and cultural life that has to the moment been filled with a lot of right-wing authoritarians and, well, what the French scholar Bruno Loutour calls epistemological delirium. We don't have some consensual ways for understanding the world. And I'd like to suggest, whoops, I'd like to pose the question, can the commons help us imagine new pathways for growing a new world? And this is necessary, particularly because so much discourse is fixed in this rut of, do we want capitalism or do we want socialism? And it's almost fixated on that, even though I think both arguments are somewhat artifacts of another era and don't speak to some of the realities of our time. It's because of this rut we're in, we often say, well, the state and the market are the only two consequential ways for governing things or producing things we need. And the idea of the commons is dismissed as an archaic relic of medieval times and no longer really relevant to our times. And that's what I'd like to suggest is misguided and we need to revisit. One reason this has persisted so long is because we've had this idea of the tragedy of the commons, which many of you have been drilled into most of us. Many of you may remember, it was a 1968 essay by biologist Garrett Hardin who said, well, imagine a pastor in which anyone can put as many cattle as they want on it. It will result in the overgrazing and ruination of the common, the tragedy. And this has been embraced by property rights advocates and conservatives and politicians and most undergraduate, undergraduate professors as this self-evident tale, which is really kind of a parable. But there's lots of embedded political assumptions in this. As Lewis Hyde, the scholar puts it, it's the tragedy of unmanaged laissez-faire common pool resources with easy access for non-communicating, self-interested individuals. It's really kind of this libertarian fantasy, or at least these are buried within that story. Because in truth, Hardin was not describing a commons. He was describing an open access regime where free for all in which anybody can take whatever they want. And there's no community, there's no governance, there's no rules or punishment of those who break the rules, which is really the definition of a commons. Which is why I really like to call this the tragedy at the market. Because that's more accurately, that more accurately describes what happens when people have no peer governance to constrain themselves. And it was Professor Eleanor Ostrom, an Indiana University professor who over the course of her life through the 70s, 80s, 90s, until her death in 2012, helped really empirically rebut this story through rather exhaustive field work and creative theorizing. This book, Governing the Commons, was her 1990 landmark piece, which was one reason she won the Nobel Prize in 2009 for her pioneering work. And it was interesting, it was 2009 because it was the year after the 2008 financial crisis. And I like to think the Nobel Prize committee wanted somebody a little bit different that year. Somebody who thought that cooperation might actually be consequential in economic affairs, which is what her work was cheaply about. And also as the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics, I think it was significant that she was more attuned to relationality as being important in economics than the standard categories of standard economic thought. But the big takeaway from her work is that the commons is not just a resource, it's a self-organized social system. It's a community plus the resource, plus the social norms and practices. And so it's more than just a resource and actually it's more than just sharing and cooperation. It's kind of a social system or institution for getting things done, which is why her work was so really pioneering. Now one reason I think our commons have become more prominent in our consciousness in the past say five or seven years is because enclosures are increasing. Now enclosures happen frequently when global capital wants free and subsidized resources and they don't want any trouble from commoners. So they often ally themselves with the state to help take possession of shared wealth. And this is happening really across the board, not just in the U.S. but internationally. I'll give you a few examples. I don't want to dwell on enclosures but it's important to realize this is an important part of the story. There's a great international land grab going on where sovereign investment funds, hedge funds, and many others are taking over lands in Africa, Latin America, and Asia and evicting the traditional communities or indigenous peoples there. It's really kind of a replay of the English enclosure movement of the 17th and 18th centuries causing all these people to be basically dispossessed, having to move into the cities, look for work often unsuccessfully, and so forth. This is happening right now. It's a major setup for famine and all sorts of social problems. 20% of the human genome is currently privately owned through patents. And this has all sorts of consequences for scientists who may be reluctant to investigate, for example, the breast cancer susceptibility gene because until a Supreme Court decision it was pretty much locked up in a patent. The copywriting and trademarking of folk culture, which Disney is quite famous for, maybe most famous for but not certainly not the only one who is colonizing all sorts of social culture and then making it private property. One of my favorites is how in the 1990s the music collecting society ASCAP started done hundreds of campfires or campfire girls and summer camps for singing around the campfire because of course singing around the campfire is a public performance for which you should pay a copyright. And they wanted everyone to pay a blanket licensing fee for it. They were eventually rebuffed after the public got wind of this through the news but another example of how market enclosures and property rights are stretching extremely far. It goes in many other realms which we could talk extensively about but this is one reason I think a lot of people are saying we have some shared wealth that we ought to be controlling and people want to push back. So there's the surge of what I call a new old system. I think it's new or newly discovered it's old in the sense that it goes I think as part of the human condition of being a cooperative species as Sam Bowles has written in a book of that title. Interestingly just two weeks ago the Economist magazine that bastion of capitalist cheerleading wrote an article saying who said something like an alternative to nationalization and privatization and it's the commons. I was utterly shocked. The subtitle was more public resources could be managed as commons without much loss of efficiency. Check it out. So I was really pleased to hear that there's some movement going on but let me just give you a quick review of some commons so you have some reference points to think about the commons. In fact about two billion people survive not just bear survival but often quite nicely through subsistence commons of forest fisheries farmland irrigation water wild game and many other things around the world and this is not interesting to economists however because there's no market transactions going on there's no cash being exchanged necessarily and so it's largely dismissed as not significant or bear survival and we've got to do better. Now to be sure all these people are not doing great but it's also true that it is the basis of a stable ecologically benign mode of meeting needs that's not necessarily through conventional or transnational markets. Here in the global north there's a lot of local food sovereignty movements going on which are trying to mimic the same process of gaining more local control over the provisioning of food through local new types of local or regional food chains and this is of course a very robust thing going on right now with many manifestations from csa farms to permaculture to even rethinking the whole value chain of regional food provisioning such as the Fresno commons. In Europe especially especially in global cities that have become overrun with global capital as air bnb hauls out neighborhoods and speculative investment takes place buy up entire buildings there's a movement of this to approach the city as a commons to reclaim the city for the people who live there this is seen in such things as urban land trusts and community gardens there's even efforts to get municipal data systems the city of lintz austria has a whole open commons lintz to make government information available and to give people free server space and email service so there's a lot of efforts to reclaim cities as the basis of the commons and i find this a very encouraging development for developing a different vision for cities than we're seeing in many places one part of this in some cities is developing alternative currencies and the idea is that the value that's created within that community can be captured and recirculated rather than being siphoned away to absentee banks who may or may not care very much about that community i associated with the schumacher center for new economics which pioneered the berkshires in western massachusetts and that's been just a very catalytic kind of way to rebuild community identity while reinvigorating the local economy the web is not often we associate the web so often with facebook or twitter or social media the corporate side of it but we also need to think of it really as a hosting infrastructure for commons because the barriers to using it as commons are very minimal as we've seen in such famous examples as wikipedia but creative commons has helped facilitate this by providing a kind of legal infrastructure for the legal sharing of things automatically which inverts the natural presumption of copyright that everything should be borne private property so that it could be marketized creative commons licenses allows copyright holders to use a variety of open public free licenses to stipulate how their work can be shared and copied and reused for free in advance a part of this whole movement is the open source movement which many of you are no doubt familiar with which has it transformed software and a lot of the infrastructure of of online life creating a whole whole class of decommodified software and functionalities that aren't dependent upon big tech so i think this is a significant development in the commons world but then now there's a whole another generation of innovation on top of that which a number of people refer to as cosmo local production where knowledge which is light and easy to share is shared on these global communities and then local production can occur more cheaply in modular ways in ways that can be modified at the local level so for example with farm hack or a project called open source ecology there's a lot of agricultural equipment that is not patented that can be reused by farmers in lots of different contexts this is especially important in a lot of poor global south context there's actually a wiki speed car that was designed in a similar fashion Arduino is a lot of electronic circuit boards and other electronic equipment that is openly shareable they claim a trademark on certain materials but people can still copy and replicate the equipment and of course fab labs and maker spaces are really engines for a lot of these kinds of innovations as well but when you get right down to it there's no inventory of commons master inventory they can arise anywhere look at howl round who would have thought a theater could become a commons and they've pioneered ways in which regional non-commercial and various ethnically oriented theater latinx commons can function through common aim about more about that in a moment there's a wi-fi system in catalonia that has more than 22,000 modes nodes which is functions as a commons there's the open source seed initiative that's trying to deal with patented seeds by assuring that certain seeds will not be able to be taken private the potato park in peru indigenous peoples having control over vast region to to mean to be stewards of the biodiversity of potatoes there so there's many many places where commons pop up the point is any community can do it when they decide they want to manage something in an inclusive fair participatory way outside of the market and state with a sort of note to the artistic world i want to cite a couple of another the powerhouse productions and the hinterlands in detroit are areas are two projects in which they self-consciously see themselves as doing a lot of commenting with their community itself their art in the community are directly involved just as in providence wrought island as 220 they own some buildings that they basically got the sweat equity from over decades and now they are able to use their equity to provide artists driven artist-centered projects from printmaking to performance to exhibitions and so on so it it inverts a lot of the models of petitioning for foundations or corporations for money by having some control over their artistic life but now i want to get to the point where we get a little more focused on how does the inside of the commons work after all we know we have a lot of narratives about economics and homo economicus were you know rational utility maximizing materialists and so forth how do we see and understand the commons in its own terms i think that's really an important challenge and a major focus of my book with silica helfrich and one thing we started to realize and as we did our research was that old dated world views are often major impediments to seeing how things really are and we came i live in amherst and we came across the story of edward hitchhawk who was a famous geologist in the 1840s and he came across all these fossilized footprints in sandstone in the region and was trying to hypothesize well what could they be and he thought they were giant birds or turkeys but in fact and this this was because the word dinosaur had not been invented darwin had not published origin of the species and he was still in a biblical world view that there wasn't such thing as deep time or or something like that so we saw kind of an example with him of how an old world view all just couldn't you couldn't take cognizance of new evidence in new ways and i think today we're approaching a similar kind of inflection point where the the market capitalist story is just misstating a lot of evidence or not capturing a lot it still thinks that value is best defined by price and money and that progress is really about commodifying and privatizing things and that free trade really should be about extraction of resources and costs of course should be externalized as if there is an outside in a finite planet so i think we're grappling right now with some limited perspectives that we need to find a way to get around an update and i'd like to propose that commenting is a way to help understand some of these phenomena in a better way and in a more humane civilized socially constructive way we start by saying that commenting is generative and value creating it's far from a tragedy it's just that we're not necessarily monetizing the value that's created and this you have to understand that it represents a different world view ethos and operational logic and that's why i think the commons is frequently misconstrued because it takes a lot of work to sort of appreciate some of these other perspectives from from my perspective the commons is about bottom-up experimentation that's very practical it's not an ideological or totalistic scheme it's a very situated and rooted in the local context the history the geography the culture of that community and the historian peter leinbaugh has put it nicely he says the comment there is no commons without commenting which means the really the verb the activity by which a community works together negotiates with each other finds ways to sustainably manage something that's the real focus the the relational process not the noun of the commons the way it's traditionally approached and in my studies of really scores of commons i've seen that there's a whole different universe of values that are being represented by the commons than again standard economics it's about fairness and it's about responsibility by people have that's yoked to entitlements that they receive and long-term stewardship it's about meeting basic needs and not simply wants or profits and a key idea is the inalienability and decommodification that certain things are not for sale shouldn't be for sale and that they're more valuable being protected to have access and use on a non-market way it's about participation and custom and tradition are often kind of the moral and practical gyroscope for keeping a commons ongoing and persistent so a lot of this means learning to see the commons and commenting as about relationality and value as a living phenomena which is why the title of our book is free fair and alive this is about something we're constantly having to renegotiate and live with it's about our relationships with each other our relationships with the earth it's about our intergenerational relationships with our ancestors and with our future but getting to this perspective requires letting go of some old concepts as we worked so can I worked in our book we realized that certain words we just we're not incorrect but they somehow were laden with some wrong valences of meaning for example the word resources I kind of choke on these days because it always implies something other apart for me that's ready to be bought and sold and in fact I have a lot of relation I have a lot of memories or emotional connections or sometimes an entire culture has a connection with certain quote resources so there were a lot of words that I found were not quite right in talking about the commons and so we wanted to invent some new words for example we talk about care wealth which has a different category of meaning than a resource and instead of talking about the individual as economists talk about it we talk about the nested eye because we're nested in these larger communities that we're both beholden to and shape us we talked about Ubuntu rationality this is the South African Bantu term for I am because we are and Ubuntu rationality is about aligning individual and collective needs together as opposed to assuming that the individual needs are paramount and trump everything else and so on so these are some of the words that we use to try to name this there's a video here that I could tell you about it'll be online soon but this is my co-author silka we often had little periods where we had to come up with a word to invent to name things that have gone unnamed or that the conventional discourse simply doesn't recognize and I think that this is important it's not just for its own sake it's about having a precision and a collective language object to orient ourselves around and part of this is I think also about acknowledging our inner life I've struggled with how to convey how the commons flows through us and changes us changes me and this is how the West looks at the great sandy desert in Australia and this is how the aborigines see it and it's the same territory and it sort of suggests a far more deeper emotional even spiritual connection with a quote resource and so I just wanted to use that as a little placeholder for how commons have meaning it's a meaning making process in a way that I don't often find my economic relationships don't don't have and when you get when you get right down to what a commons is about world-making which is a term a lot of sociologists and anthropologists are using a lot these days it's not just for indigenous or traditional communities I think you know online communities are creating a world and in many respects this world needs to be honored I see it as being about a politics of belonging it's about an economics of sufficiency and it's about a culture that decommodifies and shares and this these are some stakes in the ground that help you see how it's a different perspective on the world so in our book we talk about patterns of common aim and the reason is we were inspired by Christopher Alexander some of you may know as this kind of dissenting architect an urban designer who was also a mathematician is also a mathematician and philosopher he's quite old now but he developed what he's what's called pattern languages which is a methodology for looking at phenomena and seeing regularities without saying that they're all universal and the same so he looked at you know why are certain design patterns in buildings and urban spaces so recurrent across cultures and history and his answer was because they serve certain important human needs both inner life as well as socially and we used his methodology for studying actual common so it was a practice-based methodology we're just not making stuff up here to look at commons and decide and learn what patterns they might have and we developed what we call the triad of commenting which consists of three major categories social life provisioning and peer governance and these are all of course interrelated but they're different angles on the same phenomena of common aim and I won't go through all the different patterns but for we had a we came up with about 28 patterns and I might add this is an open ended evolving process these are not necessarily the be all end all patterns but they were the ones that we identified since completing the book we've even concluded that you know it might be worthwhile to have a whole set of patterns dealing with law in the commons and another one having to do with the commons in our inner life but I mean that's the beauty of patterns it's it doesn't purport to be universalistic in the sense that not every commons has all of these but these tend to be present in many of them and I'll just I've put these in in bigger types so you could see some of them to get a sense so for example with peer governance you want to assure commoners consent and decision making you want to ensure transparency in a sphere of trust which is different from transparency where there's not trust because then you simply disclose as little as possible whereas the point is to get as much as you can shared so that you can react more intelligently and so on dealings with money in markets or especially important in the commons because markets tend to colonize the community and the resources managed by commons and so it's important to try to keep those separate so we have we think it's very important to keep commons and commerce distinct and we like to we've invented a category of certain property where it's relationalized meaning it's not simply something that is totally excluded but people have a social relationship with the property that matters and this helps maintain access and control by a large group of people as opposed to say a non-profit board of directors who might decide that they want to shut it down or liquidate the asset so we we've wanted to get into this type of detail the same with provisioning we use provisioning instead of production because production of course means you have to have a consumer but in a commons provisioning is production and consumption is integrated and we think provisioning is a better way to describe that and then of course the social life of comedy matters do you cultivate shared purpose and value how do you strengthen the nested eye well one way is through ritualizing togetherness through fun through festivals through parties through events and there's a practice of gentle reciprocity it's not the kind of even Steven quid pro quo relationship of the market it's like you give to the commons and you will receive benefits in turn but it's an indirect reciprocity as opposed to a strict direct reciprocity and we like to think that these ideas of comedy start at the micro level we can do this anytime we want but that like a seed it works out it can manifest itself at the mezzo level through different types of infrastructures and at the macro level through new types of institutions at very large levels including state-based commons public partnerships instead of just the private public private partnerships which are often an excuse for rating the public treasury commons public partnerships use the resources of government law finance technical assistance to help people common in their own right on their own terms and an inevitable issue which is too complicated to go into here is about state power because we know how formidable state power is we know that it is often jealous of its authority but I take some consolation from an encouragement from Hannah Arendt quote power springs up between people when they meet and act when they act together and vanish the moment they disperse meaning when you get together as a commons it has a potential political implication because it provides a certain moral authority and ability to do things that has larger repercussions we can see this in the way for example linux has become very influential the way the slow food and local food movements have become very influential by withdrawing from some of the circuits of the state and capital to develop functional alternatives with their own moral integrity that's a kind of power in its own right people ask me often how do you scale the commons and build the commons verse well instead of talking about scale which implies centralization and hierarchy I prefer to talk about emulating and federating we can keep the appropriate scale and its rootedness but then we can federate among them and co-learn from each other and coordinate and still have a significant impact and either by ourselves or with the state we can develop infrastructures which are designed to encourage commenting as opposed to simply market exchange and we can develop these sorts of state-based partnerships which I think are especially productive at the municipal level perhaps more problematic for the for the moment at the national or international levels but who knows I'm always being surprised I think one takeaway from all this for me is the next big thing will be a lot of small things and David Fleming this British political thinker said that really large problems don't need large-scale solutions they need their they require small solutions with big pick large frameworks for action and I like to see that the commons provides a large framework for coordinating a huge number of diverse types of small-scale actions and showing that they have a kinship and that they're aligned towards a similar goal while retaining their integrity at appropriate scale action and fortunately there are today many champions of small-scale solutions working within their own traditions and geographies which I think have a lot of potential for adding up to a significant impact in ways that the centralized Leviathans of states often have trouble particularly trouble doing particularly since they have their own legitimacy and trust issues they're grappling with today so I see small-scale bottom-up people-driven solutions as having a huge amount of promise if we can align them properly and get them pulling in the right direction the same direction so with that I'd like to have a larger conversation facilitated by our moderator Paul thank you hi everyone thanks for coming this evening and David thank you for that talk so what I'd like to do is maybe offer a few insights and then we will turn it to the audience to have questions and hopefully some discussion into the reception so and just for context my name is Paul Mihailidis and I'm here Professor at Emerson College and my work aligns a lot with what you said and this was a really inspiring talk and I think a lot of a lot to chew on so I have a few things that I thought might help frame the conversation for us you mentioned the markets and the state a lot of times we look at those maybe this could be one place to start a conversation mentioned the market and state as as oftentimes seen as in opposition to one another or regulating each other but if you look down into it oftentimes when put together they they almost constrain the commons and I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about how that how they're actually working in concert more to either interfere constraint or from not using the right word how you see their impact on the ability for commons to to exist into flourish well I think at you could say there are at a more superficial level there are conflicts over certain political or policy agendas and to that extent of course there is opposition but I think in terms of the deeper world view of the type of society they want to build the faith in economic growth the faith in consumerism as being satisfying human welfare those types of things they're very deeply allied and we know of course politically that they're very tightly allied as well and it's you can see this when left-wing governments have taken over Bolivia for example or Chile or Greece and immediately international capital closes ranks to prevent any alternative from being developed so there is a very tight linkage right and then I'd also love to it is I think we see it and we see it but we often it's it's really interesting to me to frame it in in terms of impacts to a commons as you've understood it the other note that I'd love to start off with before we we open it up is you talked a lot about and I'm really interested in this and I'm actually going to kind of ask what your thought are so you talk a lot about relation and we think a lot about transaction versus relation and I feel like I feel this personally and also professionally but probably more personally that our culture has become one that's embedded in transaction and so ever ever since you know and I think you know technology has has prioritized this in terms of our interface with it I want to be more critical about technology and it's it's values versus the values of commons but I also think everything from our our public systems to our social systems they really prioritize transactions really hard to find that out so I was wondering if you could talk about what what you see as some of the ways that relation I mean you mentioned it briefly but how much you think a culture that has become so transactional and again speaking in generalizations what what way can the commons really push back against that well that that's a big question but it's precisely the question in the sense that I think many people especially the younger generation are choking on the transactional culture which has no intrinsic commitments because everything's exchange value and price and so there's a deep cynicism or alienation that results from that kind of a culture and I think I do a lot of work in Europe where I think the commons has greater resonance and deeper tradition with a lot of other collective action or the welfare state there and there there's a greater sense of looking to the commons as a way to have new conversations about post-capitalist society because they've been they've had a socialist president in France Sariza the left wing coalition won in Greece and they're seeing that a lot of the traditional party politics and left wing approaches are simply not getting us to where we need to go and I guess the chaser in this is climate change so I think there's a lot of open discussion about well how can we have for example commons based finance that's embedded in the community in zero percent interest and it opens up a whole different set of dynamics than how do we repay capital right no it's it is fascinating and not that I don't love my institution but working in higher education you feel this you feel this tension you know every day as you come into the university about its priority what it prioritizes verse what what they the narrative of what should happen at a point I think it's because there's an apparent certainty or almost a fundamentalism towards these quantitative metrics or money whereas there's a greater uncertainty or ambiguity about relationships and how they evolve even though I think as we've seen in many contexts they're far I don't I don't want to say well I would say far more creative and generative because they go to places that the market often doesn't go because there might not be a short term business plan for that right right no it's it's fascinating so I'd love to open it up if folks have questions I know we've got a microphone right there and please we'd love to know your name and pronouns and and and you know we'd love to hear questions about any or all of of David's talk so we can open it up now and kind of go around if anyone has one to start okay we've got a couple thank you for taking the plunge thanks for the talk this was really really inspiring so I recently left a role where I've worked for an international NGO that was um responsible for defining the greenhouse gas emissions accounting protocols for cities and it was always to sort of bottom up like this is the movement of cities is how we account for your your greenhouse gases um I came to realize that a lot of what we were doing it borrowed a lot or mimicked kind of the state and market ways of accounting that I I started to find in practice was or in effect was exclusionary to really empowering local institutions individuals from being involved in in creating the solutions so and and I started thinking about this as well community emissions are really more of a a common bad that we do and I wonder if there's anything that that you can comment on the the framework of commons for rather than sort of optimizing common goods but minimizing common bads well there's a phrase in Silicon Valley that you should eat your own dog food meaning what you produce you should eat and when you are responsible for that and you cannot externalize cost you tend to produce a more holistic answer so I think you know as a general response to your your question I think that helps take account of things that markets often shunt elsewhere and then expect the regulatory system to ineffectually post hoc deal with in effect and not very well in terms of specific greenhouse gas emissions I mean we could talk in many number of arenas about that but I think having greater local and neighborhood control over renewables having even stakeholder trusts for energy the way Alaska does for a portion of its oil the Alaska Permanent Fund and other types of institutions like that that help mutualize the gain minimize the externalities localize in a place-based way the control and thereby minimize the consolidation and abuse of power would all be positive steps and I think the commons can help actualize some of those there are some rudimentary examples but in energy but we have a lot of way a long way to go there thanks do you have a question behind my name's uh Natty he him his I I hesitate oh because I'm confused and I don't know how to ask because I don't know how to understand so a short version out and maybe you can use how round as an example is how literally this works a commons so how round is a theater commons and so I I assume people make money by working at how round and needs to make more money like to stay offering these monitors and water bottles which sounds to I think it might be a non-profit I don't know if that's true and if that's true there's some speaking about non-profit boards and your talk and so I'm there's a hybrid so I am like how does these worlds interact in a quite like literal way if I wanted to leave here and start a commons or be a part of one well I would start by saying there's no pure commons to the extent that after all capitalist economy is ubiquitous and we all need to put food on the table so to that extent I don't think we should aspire to being monks in the monastery and I don't think that's a requirement to the commons either I do think the commons is more like a dimmer switch where some will be brighter than others and I think that people are constantly trying to find workarounds to prevent governing through money whether it's transactional or simply the board that holds all the cards and can take their game if they want to go away so it's a matter of different increments by which one regains greater bottom-up participatory control and yes in the instance of howl round or a lot of other non-profits there's a value to that coordinating function which I suppose it's transactional in the sense that I take this job or not but much of it of course is I think more mission and social driven so the point is to I think try to move as far as one can in that direction and certainly in terms of its engagement with the theater and arts and culture world it has been deliberately empowering of the bottom-up expression and on its own terms setting the terms of engagement with each other as opposed to we the experts from on high deciding this is how it should be so as a two stark comparisons I would suggest howl round is a rather different type of commons albeit as officially legally a non-profit I might add that the legal forms for empowering commons are non-existent the hostel and most of them are workarounds the creative commons licenses were a private contract license workaround to copyright law which has no provisionings for it and you don't expect congress to come up with something like that the same with the general public license for software the same with community land trust law you know so workarounds is the norm for legally empowering commons and we have a long way to go for in that front but I hope I'm speaking a little bit to your your concerns thank you Natty we have question up in the oh we have one here and then we'll go to the back sorry sure so actually my name is Abigail Norman and my question is really another form of yours in fact she her hers I'm the director of an art center in Boston the Elliott School craft school and I struggle I think a way that I might phrase my question to you is when we are working in a community in a self-created community so we have a hundred teachers and thousand students and a strong sense of community and yet I'm devoted to the I'm determined to pay the artists for every second that they work including things that the organization used to take for granted as volunteer hours and I struggle with how do we create a sense of community that is somehow not at the same time poisoned by you know the transaction of money in a unrelated note and interestingly you also brought this up we in order to behave in the marketplace in a way that's sustainable we're we're phased with peers who all are funded through philanthropic dollars and it's the the only way that we can charge people fees and our school partners and libraries and so on fees that make sense is with those philanthropic dollars those philanthropic dollars come from the wealthy and we're obliged to court the wealthy to sit on our boards which after all are our decision-making bodies how do you live in a world without just saying oh well there's some workarounds how do you conceptualize and philosophize a future in which we navigate these contradictions especially in a well really in any field it doesn't have to be the arts it could be agriculture or really anything thank you that's that's a good and perennial question about markets and art which you know I guess my first introduction to a lot of that was Lewis Hyde's book on the gift which does I think a wonderful expression of how art is this well he later wrote some books about the commons as well the book common is there is a fantastic follow-through about how this free meaning freedom to share and collaborate is an essential part of the creative act and creative communities and yes finding ways for the market culture to for an artist to have a livelihood remains a perennial challenge I would just say there are markets and there are markets there's a lot of artist collectives that have been able to empower artists to have more control than say a gallery system which might be preying upon individual artists and there are ways to have different types of relationships with the market but I think the alternative is simply to allow the ultra marketization of everything through expansive copyright control which shuts down the creativity you know when two seconds of sound or illegal sampling and so forth I don't have an omnibus answer for you but I do think there are vehicles for empowering artists to take greater control both of their artistic life as well as how they interact with markets could I just follow up on that for a sec because I think it's I think these questions are really interesting and I'm wondering if there's anything we can learn for I know you mentioned this in your talk and again in an answer about post about about pushing a post capitalist approach to commons and I'm wondering if there's anything we can learn from Europe understand that the comparisons are not necessarily you know there's a lot of different ideological and issues of ethnicity and diversity and political and socioeconomic structures but I wonder if you can talk a little bit about what post capitalism is and maybe other systems that we could learn for because the questions here seem to be like they have a very particular grounding in and what the our capitalistic and our commodified realities our market-based realities are well I guess two things that jump to mind are are your needs met only through market exchange and do we do we require economic growth the way the system of capital and and lending so debt and equity require so for example in a number of transition there's a transition town movement which is basically argues that because we're at a point of peak oil and arguably peak growth they want to relocalize as much of the economy to be self-sufficient and more stable and resilient as possible so this entails in some of those circles trying to devise different ways of financing the system there's a group called local capital in Sweden for example that has devised some zero interest lending it's basically micro lending to within the community that tries to escape the imperatives of growth that that and equity tend to require and by decommodifying and meeting relationships I hesitate to use the word barter because that is such a stigmatic stigmatized word in economics but through all sorts of social relationships the way we see in everything from open source to traditional communities you can meet needs without having those money relationships I know the double-edged theater near Wiley than western massachusetts has a very robust relationship with its local community which helps decommodify having to raise tens of thousands of dollars more to buy what it needs so it's these types of things that open the door for both a more deeply embedded social community but not having the financial burdens my name is sumi day I'm actually one of the media design students and this is a question I've been thinking about a lot as I actually think about my own thesis project so thinking about the system of government governance in an american context where our societies are unfortunately very fragmented how do we create mutual care and concern for common spaces because we all hold different spaces near and dear to our hearts and even in the example that you provided we see the way that aboriginal communities inject meaning differently into certain spaces much differently than a western community might so state your question again please so basically thinking about the system of governance in an american context which is very fragmented how do we create mutual care and concern for so many different common spaces considering we have we all hold different spaces near and dear to our hearts well in some ways i could turn your question around and say that's an advantage the people who want to take care of the river those who want to young farmers who want to take care of the land in more responsible ways those who want to take care of public spaces i think all of them could and should have a role i mean we see the state chartering corporations to do their work ostensibly because chartering corporation serves the public good by promoting market activity i don't see why we couldn't charter certain self-organized commas to take care of certain resources that have public value as well in some ways that kind of stewardship is needed as opposed to just quarantine it as a wilderness so i think any number of people who care about a resource we see a lot of people who care about wildlife and preserving certain types of landscapes the appellation trail club who are functioning in that capacity i think they could be empowered and basically serve a public function in a way that the regulatory state often has trouble doing because it doesn't have the resources or it approaches it through this bureaucratic legalistic system as opposed to through care and care has to take place at the appropriate scale it can't just take place in this universalistic way even though i want to accent it's important to have these larger structures and infrastructures to facilitate care at a smaller scale but by all means let's take feminist economics seriously and give enabling structures for care to occur and i think that will have all sorts of benign and constructive ramifications that are otherwise lost in market externalities we have a question right here hi my name is lear and i take him is i guess my question is similar to a couple of ones that i've even asked but i'm wondering how can individuals contribute to this movement and like more specifically me as a college student i don't think i'm directly involved in any commons movement so i'm just wondering like how i like what my role is in your theory of change well i i think there's two levels one is i think there's commenting happening all over the place it's just not culturally legible we don't name it and therefore it has no value it's a thousand points of light and forget it not that that not that a thousand points of light is necessarily commenting but my point is we don't name it and that's one reason i had that little discussion about vocabulary but then second i think many of us have talents and passions that for which there is a group that is engaged in some of this i that's i guess the best advice i have at least at at this stage of a lot of people thinking about commons because there are not the clearing houses or the on ramps for a lot of commons right now but i do think there are many groups that are doing serious work in that regard whether named or unnamed and part of the necessity that i see is to start to name this so that it can be have more consequence in public discussion and in culture and people seeing oh there's an opportunity that i could play to this larger enterprise thank you we have a question over here coming right along hi my name is syrieva she series um my question is in your opinion is there a way to bring this idea of commenting into systems of higher education which are typically transactionally based where students expect to pay an amount of money and be trained to go into the world and be able to earn money and where there are levels of power and people that are hired as experts to pass along information is there a way of re looking at that well i mean you point to a deep structural problem and you know it's it's i think i'm going to leave the room first the best that one could hope is to identify strategic openings for making headway i mean just this is top of mind for me but just last week i met with 20 or 25 phd students grad students in amsterdam who many of whom are studying the commons and they were frustrated that they didn't have more means both within their university as well as to reach into the genuine communities to have impact and their their answer is to start an international network of grad students and phd candidates and their advisors a network to start to get that conversation going so a lot of these things i think then unfold in unpredictable ways that oh this opportunity or that opportunity but in terms of your your question i think there's there's a lot of different openings that could and should be exploited more open access scholarly communications and publishing i mean i think it's scandalous that administrators have not opened that door wider and funded it properly and how librarians are often the caboose on that or you know still talking about strict copyright instead of how we can share the resources that we taxpayers have already paid for etc so that's one arena there's a number of others but i don't they may or may not speak to your larger structural concern which you know that's a big conversation yeah yes thank you for that question um hi i was hoping you'd talk a bit about um i guess copyright and how commenting can kind of improve that uh because on the one hand i definitely am disheartened by disney's push to renew the or extend the length of copyright renewal processes and all those sorts of things um but i'm i'm an artist and i i make things that are i don't want to say easy to steal um but easy to reproduce and um how do we make sure people are being supported can have a livelihood in some capacity without copywriting uh you know folk songs and you know traditions well the short perhaps unsatisfactory answer is i think we need alternative ways to finance artists to pay artists because to the extent that they're roped in to copyright and then market transactions is the chief way to do it they're always going to be eclipsed by the superstars who constitute one percent of their field and so i think that and moreover they're going to be artistically constrained because they won't have access to the things they want to emulate or borrow from uh you know this is a perennial issue of how artists get paid but i don't think through the market in the straight up ways that favor the big corporations is going to help the individual artist except those brilliant superstars so uh i think artist collectives i think um you know ways to uh assure greater control over the resource and i suppose copyright has historically been the means to do that but increasingly that's a dead letter uh unless you have a you know an army of lawyers to help you anyway so uh i'm sorry i don't really have a truly satisfying answer to me as well because uh there are so many socially vital functions that the market won't support and so we need to find other ways we look at academia you know they're not paid through the market as such they're paid through their institutions i think we could have institutions that could support artists people have talked about you know copyright is a um a government monopoly uh that why shouldn't there be some slice of that that's taken off and put into a trust fund to support artists i think it makes you know on the merits perfectly legitimate sense politically it's not likely to go very fast but you know help me help you to find some new ways to fund artists yeah it you know it does seem like listening to this and and between artists in higher education it often seems not it's not cynical but we know we it often seems like the the structures that be are so powerful i mean you know in higher education it's almost like we say administrators and i don't think i'm gonna get there's no i hope there's no administrators in here tonight but it does like that the narrative of the market is actually it's taken such a hold that that but see that's why why it's important to carve out these spaces right as existence proofs of an alternative way of doing things yes and that has unforeseen complications down the road the way open source software has grown and grown and grown and that's right and those spaces cannot be kind of counter-revolutionary because the the the institute of education gets it and so they'll carve out spaces that they call common they like they label it commons and they talk about but it's really all within the this kind of marketized mechanism right to keep so they really have to be kind of they have you have to kind of go around the institution itself sometimes there there are some worthy experiments in institutional innovation for education and co-learning uh that are commons oriented there's a if you go to the my book patterns of commoning.org online there's an essay on a variety of different experiments but you know there's a lot of capital in bigger higher education but it does i mean the notion what you mentioned that kind of generative bottom-up experimentation and different value sets though those don't lose their value they just need to be prioritized at a real at a real basic level and in a certain way they become the battering realm right because when that when you have the moral integrity and authority the way certain artistic troops do you know and if that can't be bought then they play in their own terms i mean that's that's an important beachhead for advancing something how are we you have a question okay i thought that i didn't know what sign this was there a secret sign well maybe this should be the last this could also be the last question if we wanted it to be until i move to the reception um my question is you spoke a little bit in your presentation about how you feel artists and folks who work in arts and culture are uniquely positioned to contribute to commons and acts of commoning can you elaborate on that a little bit more based on your experience i think people don't appreciate that commons commoning isn't embodied situated process and it's not just about cognitive knowledge and it's about the human condition i started getting involved in the commons as a washington person i worked for nadir uh and i was into it at the policy and economic level but over the past 20 years increasingly i've seen this is a deep human mystery about our relationality our relationship to the earth and i think artists have a special voice in speaking to that in a way that's not just right side of the brain and in some ways express things that everybody's feeling but hasn't been expressed except through art so that's why i think the role of artists and cultural organizations is so important and by framing it as a commons enterprise as opposed to a wannabe market enterprise you have a greater integrity of vision in pursuing that that's the last question all right this is your fault uh my name is ron malice i run an on profit on the arts art in public places uh when i got going in this i went to a presentation by the woman who at the time was head of art place america carol coletta and she talked about the key criteria that art place uses to evaluate grant applications the primary criterion was how the applicant deals with the question what is it we can do together that we can't do separately and that has informed pretty much everything that i've been doing since then including developing a concept called the arts commons which physically is essentially a repurposed shipping container serving as a black box for performances installations whatever and you know it's gradually getting to where we wanted to go and i have to say too that the notion of the arts commons was because of uh this person here and the theater commons and i said well why not an arts commons but this business about what is it we can do together that we can't do separately i mean granted it's getting it down to a micro level but that's i think where you gotta go otherwise this becomes absolutely theoretical and rhetorical and and whatever so uh imposing that question in connection with the notion overall of what you're talking about a fair free and alive commons start with that the other subsidy sort of the subsequent question of course is who is we so i'll leave that alone well that's a fair enough question um who is we because i think well let me just say when silk and i were thinking about commons a lot of people said oh what's the boundary around it and we came to the realization that there's not a boundary in a property sense there's a semi permeable membrane as a living tissue like the blood brain barrier so the bad stuff gets screened out and the good stuff can get in and to that extent you have a more living breathing relationship with other people and it's not like you're out i'm in uh and i think you can be more flexible the way most traditional commons are a little more flexible and situational about such questions so i mean that's not entirely an answer but i think you see where i'm driving what i'm driving at that uh people who contribute to the commons should have preferential entitlement to the benefits uh because that matters as a moral and ethical issue but it shouldn't be so hermetically sealed like a club good as economists would talk about it by definition open ended yes and the open ended aspect is what life's all about yes i somewhere i am um struggling to make a great deal of sense out of what you have given us which to me is at the abstract level and i'm dying to get you to talk about a few examples of commons and tell us what makes them a common and how they differ from each other and they're all commons so just to be very concrete well we could talk about the the a sequia water irrigation ditches in new new mexico which the indigenous people native born people there manage and it's an area of great aridity not much water and in contrast to the local developers who suck as much water as the way as they can these communities all have to participate in digging and cleaning the ditches in which the water they use to irrigate is used they uh a lot it based on how much land or other needs of that family and they make sure they don't go over the carrying capacity of how much water there is and this is a way that in a very arid way they've used a very finite resource to meet people's needs without more more more more now that's maybe a prototypical commons in the sense that there's a shared resource that is stewarded sustainably managed through very specific localized rules that are perceived by all its participants as fair and meet their needs so that that's just spinning out an example for you but you can see that kind of stewardship occur the resource might differ like in software code where it's not finite and the issue is not is people are people taking too much the issue is are people adding bad code or being mischievous and therefore we need to curate the code in a way that makes sense for the evolution of the project and some people will disagree and say no i'm gonna fork the code and go my own way i'll take whatever code is there which can be taken i'm just gonna move it in a different direction so that's there's a whole culture in the software world for managing shareable code which is very different from the way microsoft or you know oracle or some of the big tech companies do it where you are given this little bit of code to program and you give it to someone else and it's all proprietary and nobody can share it or reuse it etc so it'll those are very different examples is the terms of how they're similar we use this patterns methodology which is based on recurrent problems that a commons will face recurrent problems just decision making who's in and who's out uh sharing of knowledge punishing people who break the rules and we looked at many different commons and saw these regularities of the way people tended to deal with it now of course it's going to be different in new zealand from canada in terms of certain specifics but there are certain levels of generality that one can make without saying this is the universal rule so that was our methodology for trying to identify commonalities of commons as a social system which is very different from the way the economists approach it as the unowned resource ocean space the internet right so so i think that's we're going to transition jamie so i'd like to thank you i mean that you know it's really not a question but you really make me think as we pose a forward is in digital culture can commons exist in completely mediated environments maybe not something to maybe something that we can discuss over the reception so i'm going to turn it back to jamie who's eager to transition us and yeah if we can all just give um paul and david a round of applause thank you thank you so much and thanks to all of you for coming in for having such a vibrant discussion we are now going to transition for those who care to stick around we'll be selling some books we have some snacks and drinks you're welcome to stick around and keep the conversation going and if uh if you have to head out that's fine too but thank you so much we really appreciate it thanks again to center for economic democracy for helping us put this together and the emerson engagement lab in the ma and media design program thank you thank you