my hypothesis of the Pulsation of the Commons, in times of civilizational degradation, the commons return, and in dark ages, commons institutions even become hegemonic.
for - definition = pulsation of the commons - Michel Bauwens - Throughout history, - in periods of dark ages - capitalism (self interest) rules - in times of civilizational degradation - even commons institutions can be compromised
‘Chambers of the Commons’
for - definition - Chamber of the Commons - integrating commons with generative businesses
‘Assemblies of the Commons’,
for - definition - assembly of the commons - unite citizens
support of local and national authorities, local commoners can rely on translocal support structures.
for - scaling the commons - support - There is a real need for support here. - There is a huge population of idling resource in the commons waiting to be supported and unleashed
for - source - Donna Nelham - @Fellowship of the Commons Telegram group zoom meeting - 2025, May 6 - article - Linkedin - Bayo Akomolafe - I am against "worldview" - to - article - Substack Annik De Witt - Toxic Polarization is killing us. A new worldview can save us - https://hyp.is/OChhXCvdEfC0MEOwIi_joA/annickdewitt.substack.com/p/toxic-polarization-is-killing-us
for - from - Christina Bowens - Network Coordination Commons meeting - Dialogue on Convening Systems: What does it take? What does it look like on the ground?
Redefining Progress: New Frontiers for the Field of Social In
for - program event selection - 2025 - April 3 - 10:30am-12pm GMT - Skoll World Forum - Redefining Progress: New Frontiers for the Field of Social Innovation - Stop Reset Go - Progress traps - Cosmolocal production - commons - Deep Humanity - TPF - LCE - relevant to - event time conflict - with Aligning Profit and Purpose - adjacency - progress trap - Deep Humanity - Cosmolocal production - social innovation
The Future of Foreign Aid
for - program event selection - 2025 - April 3 - 12:30 - 1:45pm GMT - Skoll World Forum - The Future of Foreign Aid - Fellowship of the Sacred Commons - LCE - relevant to - funding the commons
Philanthropy at a Crossroads: Can We Fund
for - program event selection - 2025 - April 2 - 10:30am-12pm GMT - Skoll World Forum - Philanthropy at a Crossroads: Can we Fund at the Speed of Impacts? - Fellowship of the Sacred Commons - LCE - relevant to - event time conflict - with Building Citizen-led Movements - solution - watch one live and the other recorded - funding the commons
for - adjacency - commons - funding. - how to communities can become self-sustaining - Will Ruddick - community economics - adjacency - funding the commons - Will Ruddick - Michel Bauwens - cosmolocal Summary - Will Ruddick articulates a way to use money more wisely that follows the " teach a man to fish" cliche in order to build self-sustaining communities - To mobilize a global transition requires careful analysis at multiple scales - employing cosmolocal strategy would accelerate and make Ruddick's proposal more resilient
for - organization - commons - Funding the Commons
Funding the Commons
for - event - Funding the Commons - Bangkok conference 2024 - Michel Bauwens - guest - SOURCE - Youtube Ma Earth channel interview - Devcon 2024 - Cosmo Local Commoning with Web 3 - Michel Bauwens - 2025, Jan 2 - to - Funding the Commons - Bangkok conference 2024
to - Funding the Commons - Bangkok conference 2024 - https://hyp.is/fF-mVNBJEe-OWvM5g4ZLOQ/www.fundingthecommons.io/bangkok-2024
coalition of community land trusts. They're all local, doing their work locally, but they also have a global commons. That global commons has all the common protocols of cooperation, the common knowledge, the common patterns, but also it's a vehicle to attract capital that can go local.
for - bottom up mobilization - leverage the strength of the commons - create global coalition of local projects within in a common area - IE. Land trust - SOURCE - Youtube Ma Earth channel interview - Devcon 2024 - Cosmo Local Commoning with Web 3 - Michel Bauwens - 2025, Jan 2
I had a wonderful conversation with an American a few years ago when he was interviewing me and he said Graham this is really intriguing because it sounds like you end up with very light need for regulation that this would appeal to the libertarian end and I said absolutely there's almost no need to tax these companies because the state may be a stakeholder with rights to dividends and capital gain so you don't need to tax the company you don't need regulation
for - FSC - fair share companies inherent design - obviate need for external regulations because - sufficiently strong self-regulation - Graham Boyd - adjacency - FSC - fairshare commons companies - self regulation - libertarians - the sacred as highest form of self-regulation
adjacency - between - Fairshare Commons (FSC) companies - Libertarians - FSC are self-regulating to hlghest ethics - The sacred as the highest principle of self regulation - adjacency relationship - It seems that another way of articulating the Fairshare Commons is to use the language of the sacred - A living principle of the sacred implies intrinsically valuing existence and reality itself and all its manifestations - Modernity is barren of the sacred as a living principle, transactionalism has alienated us from nature and from each other - To embed a living principle of the sacred in FSC DNA would ensure the highest form of self-regulation and obviate the need for regulations, after all - when we act out of love of something, we do it voluntarily and with the greatest investment of our time, energy and resources, - and that is far superior than acting where there is no love and an external force is required to motivate action
for - YouTube - Fairshare Commons - interview - Graham Boyd - etymology - company - Fairshare Commons principle of inclusivity - reflects influence of unfairness of Apartheid exclusivity - from - YouTube - Fairshare Commons - 8 principles of - Graham Boyd
from - YouTube - What is the best way to turn a regenerative company? - Fairshare Commons - 8 principles of - Graham Boyd - https://hyp.is/6aAtWLXpEe-CbZPjBOu6ew/www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEIMB-odmRU
Summary - It was insightful to hear the association between Fairshare Commons company and Eleanor Ostrom's work on the commons and to recast the company as a group of people stewarding a commons - Graham introduces the etymology of the word "company", as an intentional community that has its roots of people " gathering in the company of others to break bread" - Also interesting to know he is Sorry African and his experience with Apartheid informs his inclusivity principle off the Fairshare Commons
for - YouTube - What is the best way to turn a regenerative company? - Fairshare Commons - 8 principles of - Graham Boyd - to - YouTube - interview - Graham Boyd
to - YouTube - interview - Graham Boyd - https://hyp.is/V_pmiLXqEe--vkvZJO7ehw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGwtwDQW1do
for - climate crisis - Youtube - climate Doomsday 6 years from now - Jerry Kroth - to - climate clock - adjacency - Tipping Point Festival - Indyweb / SRG complexity mapping tool - Integration of many fragmented bottom-up initiatives - The Great Weaving - Cosmolocal organization - Michel Bauwens - Peer-to-Peer Foundation - A third option - Islands of Coherency - Otto Scharmer Presencing Institute - U-labs - Love-based (sacred-based) mini-assemblies interventions to address growing fascism, populism and polarization - Roger Hallam - Ending the US / China Cold War - Yanis Varoufakis
YouTube details - title: climate Doomsday 6 years from now - author: Jerry Kroth, pyschologist
summary - Psychologist Jerry Kroth makes a claim that the 1.5 Deg C and 2.0 Deg C thresholds will be reached sooner than expected - due to acceleration of climate change impacts. - He backs up his argument with papers and recent talks of climate thought leaders using their youtube presentations. - This presentation succinctly summarized a lot of the climate news I've been following recently. - It reminded me of the urgency of climate change, my work trying to find a way to integrate the work of the Climate Clock project into other projects. - This work was still incomplete but now I have incentive to complete it.
adjacency - between - Tipping Point Festival - Indyweb / SRG complexity mapping tool - Integration of many fragmented bottom-up initiatives - The Great Weaving - Cosmolocal organization - Michel Bauwens - Peer-to-Peer Foundation - Islands of Coherency - Otto Scharmer - Presencing Institute - U-labs - Love-based (sacred-based) mini-assemblies interventions to address growing fascism, populism and polarization - Roger Hallam - Ending the US / China Cold War - Yanis Varoufakis - and many others - adjacency relationship - I have been holding many fragmented projects in my mind and they are all orbiting around the Tipping Point Festival for the past decade. - When Indyweb Alpha is done, - especially with the new Wikinizer update - We can collectively weave all these ideas together into one coherent whole using Stop Reset Go complexity mapping as a plexmarked Mark-In notation - Then apply cascading social tipping point theory to invite each project to a form a global coherent, bottom-up commons-based movement for rapid whole system change - Currently, there are a lot of jigsaw puzzle pieces to put together! - I think this video served as a reminder of the urgency emerged of our situation and it emerged adjacencies and associations between recent ideas I've been annotating, specifically: - Yanis Varoufakis - Need to end the US-led cold war with China due to US felt threat of losing their US dollar reserve currency status - that Trump wants to escalate to the next stage with major tariffs - MIchel Bauwens - Cosmolocal organization as an alternative to current governance systems - Roger Hallam - love-based strategy intervention for mitigating fascism, polarization and the climate crisis - Otto Scharmer - Emerging a third option to democracy - small islands of coherency can unite nonlinearly to have a significant impact - Climate Clock - a visual means to show how much time we have left - It is noteworthy that: - Yanis Varoufakis and Roger Hallam are both articulating a higher Common Human Denominator - creating a drive to come together rather than separate - which requires looking past the differences and into the fundamental similarities that make us human - the Common Human Denominators (CHD) - In both of their respective articles, Yanis Varoufakis and Otto Scharmer both recognize the facade of the two party system - in the backend, it's only ruled by one party - the oligarchs, the party of the elites (see references below) - Once Indyweb is ready, and SRG complexity mapping and sense-making tool applied within Indyweb, we will already be curating all the most current information from all the fragmented projects together in one place regardless of whether any projects wants to use the Indyweb or not - The most current information from each project is already converged, associated and updated here - This makes it a valuable resource for them because it expands the reach of each and every project
to - climate clock - https://hyp.is/R_kJHKGQEe28r-doGn-djg/climateclock.world/ - love-based intervention to address fascism, populism and polarization - Roger Hallam - https://hyp.is/wUDpaKsAEe-DM9fteMUtzw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKWCHAcS7E - ending the US / China cold war - Yanis Varoufakis - https://hyp.is/Yy0juqmrEe-ERhtaafWWHw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BsAa_94dao - Cosmolocal coordination of the commons as an alternative to current governance and a leverage point to unite fragmented communities - Michel Bauwens - https://hyp.is/AvtJYqitEe-f_EtI6TJRVg/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/a-global-history-of-societal-regulation - A third option for democracy - Uniting small islands of coherency in a time of chaos - Otto Scharmer - https://hyp.is/JlLzuKusEe-xkG-YfcRoyg/medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/an-emerging-third-option-reclaiming-democracy-from-dark-money-dark-tech-3886bcd0469b - One party system - oligarchs - Yanis Varoufakis - https://hyp.is/CVXzAKnWEe-PBBcP5GE8TA/www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BsAa_94dao - What's missing is a third option (in the two party system) - Otto Scharmer - https://hyp.is/M3S6VKuxEe-pG-Myu6VW1A/medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/an-emerging-third-option-reclaiming-democracy-from-dark-money-dark-tech-3886bcd0469b
What is missing is a convergence between these two worlds, that of local productive communities engaged around the common access to vital contributory common goods, and that of the capacity to global coordinate such projects around the world, and finance them
for - adjacency - awakening the sleeping giant - of the commons - bridging Cosmo with local - Michel Bauwens - the Indyweb - from - Medium article - An Emerging Third Option: Reclaiming Democracy from Dark Money & Dark Tech Seven Observations On 2024 and What’s Next - Otto Scharmer - organizing around shared intentions
adjacency - between - awakening the sleeping giant - of the commons - bridging Cosmo with local - Michel Bauwens - the Indyweb - adjacency relationship - Using the web to enable cooperation at global scale between localities all over the world is Cosmo local - This lays at the heart of the Indyweb - To awaken the sleeping giant of the commons - requires completing the incomplete capacity of local communities
from - Medium article - An Emerging Third Option: Reclaiming Democracy from Dark Money & Dark Tech Seven Observations On 2024 and What’s Next - Otto Scharmer - organizing around shared intentions - https://hyp.is/Mxp1GqtFEe-pKzNGX6BrhQ/medium.com/presencing-institute-blog/an-emerging-third-option-reclaiming-democracy-from-dark-money-dark-tech-3886bcd0469b
for - Substack article - A global history of societal regulation - metacrisis, polycrisis - role of the commons and cosmolocal coordination - Michel Bauwens - from - Illuminem article - Proximity: The antidote to fascism - Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov - on horizontal and vertical decision-making
article details - title: A global history of societal regulation - publisher: Substack - date_ 2024, Nov 20 - author: Michel Bauwens
Summary - Michel presents a history of economic and societal coordination and makes the claim that the commons has an important role to play in maintaining a wellbeing species that balances: - human activity - health of the natural environment - peace between different human groups - In particular, he observes the important role that cosmolocal coordination may play - Michel takes us to a journey through history to explore the various different systems that different cultures used in the past - It's very interesting that in modernity, we have a system which is seen as absolute but a study of history shows how relative it is - That raises the question of why the current system feels so intractable? What gives it its entrenchment - Perhaps it's that the global spread of neocapitalism around the globe has made it "too big to fail"? - and it will actually require failing before a new phoenix can emerge from the ashes? I hope not!
from - Illuminem article - Proximity: The antidote to fascism - Kasper Benjamin Reimer Bjorkskov on horizontal and vertical decision-making - https://hyp.is/0Tv_Rqr3Ee-_-X8fKkCfpg/illuminem.com/illuminemvoices/proximity-the-antidote-to-fascism
cosmo-localization, i.e. the combination of interconnected local commons with global (‘cosmic’) digitally enhanced cooperation, may be superlinear, and thus, exactly what is needed to ‘inflate’ the commons.
for - definition inflating the commons - Geoffrey West - superlinear relationship - of cosmolocalization - via digital cooperation - Michel Bauwens - adjacency relationship - inflating the commons - indyweb
adjacency - between - inflating the commons - indyweb - adjacency relationship - Indyweb could be one way to inflate the commons by weaving together cosmolocal groups around the group into a mycelial network
Magisteria of the Commons
for - definition - Magisteria of the Commons - Michel Bauwens
definition - Magisteria of the Commons - Michel Bauwens
Comment - Michel envisions these magisterial providing the counterweight to regulate the markets
Domain-specific alliances
for - adjacency - SRG planetary boundary / earth system boundaries working groups - domain specific alliances - Magisteria of the Commons
adjacency - between - SRG planetary boundary / earth system boundaries working groups - domain specific alliances - Magisteria of the Commons - adjacency relationship The domain specific alliances of the Magisteria of the commons is similar to the SRG idea of developing funds version divisions of wealth system boundaries
But surely, purely local commons, which have been under centuries of pressure in the capitalist order, are not enough to be such a counter-weight ? Indeed, they are not
for - quote - local commons - alone cannot solve the metacrisis / polycrisis - Michel Bauwens
quote - local commons - alone is insufficient to solve the metacrisis / polycrisis - Michel Bauwens - (see below) - But surely, purely local commons, - which have been under centuries of pressure in the capitalist order, - are not enough to be such a counter-weight ? - Indeed, they are not, if they have to face - not only the pressure of potentially hostile nation-states, and - the combined power of transnational capital. - They are a necessary - entropy can only be remedied at the local level, - but not sufficient condition for a return to ecological and social balance. - Too many aspects of the response to the meta-crisis still need planetary cooperation and coordination.
organizing around shared intention, planetary healing and societal regeneration
for - to - Substack article - A global history of societal regulation - metacrisis, polycrisis - role of the commons and cosmolocal coordination - Michel Bauwens
to Substack article - A global history of societal regulation - metacrisis, polycrisis - role of the commons and cosmolocal coordination - Michel Bauwens - https://hyp.is/wlywbqkTEe-ROXfhSmA3bA/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/a-global-history-of-societal-regulation
To effectively combat the roots of fascism, it is crucial to integrate both horizontal and vertical decentralized decision-making structures.
for - commons - new definition - pathological conservatism - new definition - benign conservatism - new definition - beneficial conservatism - adjacency - citizen assemblies - cosmolocal - community organization - horizontal and vertical decision-making as cosmolocal - Fair Share Commons - FSC - pathological conservatism - hypocrisy of modern conservatism that cannot acknowledge first nations - TPF as a vehicle for citizen assembly in each ward and district of a city - to - Youtube - Trump won, now what? - Roger Hallam - to - Substack article - - A global history of societal regulation - metacrisis, polycrisis - role of the commons and cosmolocal coordination - Michel Bauwens
adjacency - between - citizen assemblies - cosmolocal - community organization - citizen assemblies - horizontal and vertical - Fair Share Commons - FSC - town anywhere - TPF - one per city ward or district - progress traps - wicked problem - pathological conservatism - deep conservatism - ECOnomy is a subset of ECOlogy - Modernity has many forms of shallow, pathological conservatism - Indigenous and first nations peoples practice deep, beneficial conservatism - adjacency relationship - One of the biggest progress traps is pathological conservatism when - a technology has become popular and ubiquitous but an unintended consequence becomes exposed - In that case, incumbents who profit from the established supply chain will defend it at great cost, even if the harm it causes becomes increasingly obvious. - They will do this until it reaches a point that the harm is so great that it can no longer be defended. - Often, great harm is done before that point is reached, if it is reached. - Misinformation, gaslighting and fascism can emerge as a form of pathological conservatism in an attempt to preserve the harmful aspect of the status quo. - Fossil fuels, internal combustion engines and the climate change they cause are an example of this, creating a wicked problem in which those trying to solve the problem are also contributing to it - Citizen assemblies are a bottom up response and counterweight to centralized power that is driving pathological conservatism - In contrast to the pathological conservatism, environmental awareness is a practice of benign and beneficial conservatism - the conservation of our natural environment - In fact, many who call themselves conservatives and nationalists are hypocritical because - if they went further in their conservativism logic, they would have to acknowledge the first nations people who came before them - The natural resources that were part of indigenous peoples lives for millenia that colonialists have built their entire fortune on represents even greater degree of conservatism, yet the hypocrisy is that - modern conservatives often cannot acknowledge this reality of a deeper form of conservatism as it threatens their false entitlement - This brings into question their claim of practicing conservatism - pathological conservatives act as if the ECOlogy is subordinate to the ECOnomy when in fact, the ECOnomy cannot exist without a functioning ECOlogy - citizen assemblies can be implemented in each ward and district of a large city - On top of these, Fair Share Commons and community cooperatives can be built as formal structures to drive specific projects - In order for participatory democracy to work effectively requires education on Deep Humanity and conflict resolution, otherwise risks low resiliency due to internal conflicts and derailment of vision - In order to scale, it requires both horizontal and vertical components or organization. This implies a cosmolocal strategy: - horizontal decision-making with local group is local, whilst - vertical decision-making with non-local groups based on broader issues is cosmo - A global Tipping Point Festival that employs social tipping point theory to emerge a global network of citizen assemblies / commons assemblies / people's assemblies in each ward and district of a city to relocate healthy power back to the people
to - Youtube - Trump won, now what? - a love-based approach to replace power-based approach for dealing with fascism and polarization - Roger Hallam - https://hyp.is/wUDpaKsAEe-DM9fteMUtzw/www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiKWCHAcS7E - Substack article - A global history of societal regulation - metacrisis, polycrisis - role of the commons and cosmolocal coordination - Michel Bauwens - https://hyp.is/wlywbqkTEe-ROXfhSmA3bA/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/a-global-history-of-societal-regulation
for - book - The Destiny of Civilization - from - Substack article - A global history of societal regulation - Why commons-based institutions now need to regulate the market and state, ‘cosmo-locally’ - Michel Bauwens
from - Substack article - A global history of societal regulation - Why commons-based institutions now need to regulate the market and state, ‘cosmo-locally’ - Michel Bauwens - https://hyp.is/ID3F7KiwEe-26QsBOrdtlQ/4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/p/a-global-history-of-societal-regulation
zebras unite
for - question - @Michael - Is this the Zebras Unite you are referring to? - https://zebrasunite.coop/ - If so, that brings up another question: - What is the difference between Fair Share Commons and a Cooperative?
beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable.
for - quote / critique - it is upon us, beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable. - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - alternatives - to - mainstream companies - cooperatives - Peer to Peer - Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) - Fair Share Commons - B Corporations - Worker owned companies
quote / critique - it is upon us, beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable. - Andrew Carnegie - The Gospel of Wealth - This is a defeatist attitude that does not look for a condition where both enormous inequality AND universal squalor can both eliminated - Today, there are a growing number of alternative ideas which can challenge this claim such as: - Cooperatives - example - Mondragon corporation with 70,000 employees - B Corporations - Fair Share Commons - Peer to Peer - Worker owned companies - Cosmolocal organizations - Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO)
for - from - Fair Share Commons discussion thread - Marie - discussing the use of the word "capital" in "spiritual capital" - webcast - Great Simplification - On the Origins of Energy Blindness - Steve Keen - Energy Blindness
for - from - recommendation - from - Michel Bauwens - on Fair Share Commons chat thread, 2024 Oct 17 - context Karl Marx liberation of the individual - to - substack article - Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens article details - title: From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body: A Labor Theory of Revolutionary Subjectivity & Religious Ideas" (2016) - author: Benjamin Suriano
to - Substack article - Why Human (Contributive) Labor remains the creative principle of human society - Michel Bauwens - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2F4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com%2Fp%2Fwhy-human-contributive-labor-remains&group=world
Michael Sonenscher
for - capitalism - etymology - modern - book Capitalism: The Word and the Thing - Michael Sonenscher - from - Discussion of "spiritual capitalism" on Kansas Missouri Fair Shares Commons chat thread - to - youtube - New Books Network - interniew - Captialism: The word and the thing - Michael Sonenscher
Summary - Michael Sonenscher discusses the modern evolution of the word "capitalism". Adding the suffix "ism" to a word implies a compound term. - Capitalism is a complex, compound concept whose connotations from the use in 18th and 19th century France and England is quite different from today's. - How meaning evolved can give us insight into our use of it today.
to - youtube - New Books Network - interniew - Captialism: The word and the thing - Michael Sonenscher - https://hyp.is/ftWWfoxQEe-FkUuIeSoZCA/www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpNaxyPpOf0
Users run self-sovereign Knowledge interoperability hubs within their own browsers. They can connect to collaborate with other
FOR This is a very e very exciting development towards VALUE CREATION in the COMMONS
Notions such as the common good, commonsense, and common culture could sometimes cause as many prob-lems as they purported to solve.
Are the commons (common good, common sense, and common culture) anathema in an uber-capitalist society where everyone is generally out for themselves and often only "covering" when their needs align with societies' needs?
“democratic” portion of democratic culture?
How is he defining the idea of "democratic" here and throughout the piece?
I find it interesting that in common parlance there's a subtle (hidden?) meaning of "individual ownership over" which ties in with "the commons".
“The crux of the issue is we’re thinking about the focus on encampment closure without access to housing,” said Charley Willison, a Cornell professor who has studied the influence of police on cities’ homelessness policies.
for - Tools for the Commons
These institutions are designed to support individuals and their habitats, reversing the current dynamic where people and their environments appear to serve institutions.
for - flipping the institutional web - Tools for the Commons - to create regenerative institutions
continent of coherence"
Friedman called such benefits ‘neighbourhoodeffects’—the benefits that come from services that aren’t paid for.
The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.
Perhaps there's a framing of "the commons" as a larger entity from which we not only draw, but to which we contribute and in which we participate that glues us all together.
Link under: https://hypothes.is/a/mEgAiEIFEe6trVPf7HjFhQ
The task is to have a communitynevertheless, and to discover means of using specialties topromote it. This can be done through the Great Conversa-tion.
We need some common culture to bind humanity together. Hutchins makes the argument that the Great Conversation can help to effectuate this binding through shared culture and knowledge.
Perhaps he is even more right in the 2000s than he was in the 1950s?
I should like to add that specialization, instead of makingthe Great Conversation irrelevant, makes it more pertinentthan ever. Specialization makes it harder to carry on anykind of conversation; but this calls for greater effort, not theabandonment of the attempt.
The dramatic increase in economic specialization of humanity driven by the Industrial Revolution has many benefits to societies, but it also has detrimental effects when the core knowledge and shared base of the society is lost.
Certainly individuals have a greater reliance on specialists for future outcomes (think about the specialization of areas like climate science which can have destructive outcomes on all of humanity or public health outcomes with respect to vaccines and specialized health care delivery), but they also need to have a common base of knowledge/culture and the ability to think critically for themselves to be able to effect necessary changes, particularly when the pace of those changes is more rapid than humans have generally been evolved to accept them.
Based on yesterday's discussion at Dan Allosso's Book Club, we don't include defense spending into the consumer price index for calculating inflation or other market indicators. What other things (communal goods) aren't included into these measures, but which potentially should be to take into account the balance of governmental spending versus individual spending. It seems unfair that individual sectors, particularly those like defense contracting which are capitalistic in nature, but which are living on governmental rent extraction, should be free from the vagaries of inflation?
Throwing them into the basket may create broader stability for the broader system and act as a brake via feedback mechanisms which would push those corporations to work for the broader economic good, particularly when they're taking such a large piece of the overall pie.
Similarly how might we adjust corporate tax rates with respect to the level of inflation to prevent corporate price gouging during times of inflation which seems to be seen in the current 2023 economic climate. Workers have seen some small gains in salary since the pandemic, but inflationary pressures have dramatically eaten into these taking the gains and then some back into corporate coffers. The FED can increase interest rates to effect some change, but this doesn't change corporate price gouging in any way, tax or other policies will be necessary to do this.
he decimation of the existing incentive models for internet creators and communities (as flawed as they are) is not a bug: it’s a feature
replacing the incentives to share on the open web are not a mere by-effect of it being abstracted away by generative AI, but an aimed for effect. As it may push people to seek the gains of sharing elsewhere, i.e. enclosed web3 services.
the tragedy of the Commons is not so much that it's Commons per se but that it's a cooperation problem that he described I 00:01:48 think very clearly that environmental degradation is often a social dilemma is often a cooperation problem and be it a commons or not the regulatory structure 00:02:02 or the the social structure can vary but cooperation problems are are important however of course he said his famous line this paper is you know solution is mutual coercion mutually agreed upon and and so that's 00:02:18 institutions right so the solution is institutions and of course we have other people who have said that very clearly and with a lot of wonderful evidence to back it up Elinor Ostrom being at the 00:02:31 top of that list and and her work on common pool resources and contains this fantastic list of sort of key design 00:02:44 elements that have emerged from studying small-scale common pool resource communities and and these are these are factors that tend to make those communities more successful in managing 00:02:56 those resources sustainably so so that's great
!- mitigating : tragedy of the commons - Elinor Ostrom's design principles - It's often a cooperation problem - it is a social dilemma pitting individual vs collective interest
Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this in his 1840 treatise on America as self-interest properly understood. In fact, the full title of the chapter from his book,Democracy in America, is, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by theDoctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.” His basic premise was that“one sees that by serving his fellows, man serves himself and that doing good isto his private advantage.”6
tighter regulations and highercorporate taxes increase costs and make firms and nations less competitive.
!- tragedy of the commons : DSG example - A Deep Humanity analysis can add insight to unpack the problem - When I read this sentence, it triggers the following words to emerge from my salience landscape: - self / other dualism - different levels of othering - at each level, the self is competing to maximize sales - the other is alien, nebulous, unknown and this helps reinforce competition and not caring for the other, dominating the other - in ALL cases, each self-centered business entity views regulations as reducing competitive price advantage - this view is myopic because it does not consider the bigger picture of how the production is impacting nature and people - the normal view is habitually NOT a circular WEconomy view - manufacturing products that create environmental externalities present in the manufacturing process, in its usage and end of life is based on an assumption of negligible impact on nature. Total net impacts were far from planetary boundaries. - however, due to the exponential increase in the scale of production due to population pressures, this assumption has become obsolete a long time ago - Producers of products that continue environmental damage are enabled by current policies so will not change on their own because they all need the short term benefits the jobs provide - as an example, the fossil fuel industry and its millions of direct employees are knowingly destroying the life support system of the planet - when externalization exists, it is a policy reflecting collective disconnection from nature because it we are deeply connected to nature and externalization on this scale destroys our life support system - regulations are constraints that are needed for our own good. Instead of seeing it as anti-competition, the bigger picture is that it is pro-civilization - when each business looks out for itself for its own wellbeing and competing against others within an externalizing economic system, a tragedy of the commons occurs
The real issue with "learning in public" is them emphasis placed on "being an expert," which is *everywhere*. It's a capitalist mindset, convincing people that even as beginners they should consider themselves "experts" bc this is how you get exposure aka how u scale.
The public online commons, by means of context collapse, allows people to present themselves as experts within an area without actually being experts.
Some of these "experts" or "gurus" primarily have expertise in communication or promoting themselves or a small piece of a topic about which they know a little more than the average public.
Hans Monderman (19 November 1945 – 7 January 2008) was a Dutch road traffic engineer and innovator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Monderman
Suggested by Jerry Michalski: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/bd9c210a-ac8a-0e34-b309-f62e61e72778/attachments/724c3cbf-7aba-4ac7-5b1a-392125168c09
to do our own work to develop our own teams to 00:13:48 grow our own networks so based on that we decided to organize a movement to build these kinds of new models to arrive at much more sustainable public goods funding not just sustainable ideally regenerative 00:14:01 systems with possible externalities they're not just sustaining themselves at some level but actually creating a lot more value around themselves and we hope to also create structures for much better value alignment within these networks 00:14:13 so we decided to throw an event uh last year uh so it's less than a year ago um there's probably a number of other people that helped put this on if um uh i in my memory yesterday i remembered a set of folks who are here uh which i 00:14:26 want to thank for for driving this and really creating this this event but it really takes a village to put this on especially the pl events team um uh and many others who have helped uh and since then we've now had uh three 00:14:37 events two virtual one and one in person and we're scaling the community in the size of the conversations the um systems that we're reviewing the mechanisms that we're exploring the studies that we're doing and so on uh so 00:14:50 in this conference we've gone from you know 11 18 talks and now 56 really encourage you to like attend all of them simultaneously of course you can do that of course you can later in time they're all recorded 00:15:02 and we're also very fortunate to be working with a whole bunch of other folks in the ecosystem building out the broader public goods movement in the blockchain space great uh 00:15:15 thanks to the github community and shelling point and many other manila groups that are very focused on building regenerative structures so all of this leaves me uh very hopeful um you know our impact so far has been 00:15:28 to explore a set of funding mechanisms here's a few uh that i pulled from the youtube uh channel a bunch of these mechanisms are explained explaining explored and so on some of them also have kind of experimental review still early days so 00:15:41 a lot of it is still kind of not very systematic not very well experimented upon and so on but i'd love to kind of crank that up and get to drastically better study to the point where we can like analyze these systems with the same 00:15:53 level of rigor that we analyze things like network protocols or like hardware devices and things like that we've also [Music] sort of revived the impact certificates um 00:16:05 idea and and field we've um gotten to explore a number of novel entity types i know that a few of these are actually getting booted up now which is really awesome impact for just a few months of talking about things um and we've 00:16:19 created some uh we've talked about some coordination systems that could be um extremely useful i think this is a very promising area but probably under under um understudied and an area that that is 00:16:31 maybe harder or seems um diffic much more difficult to get traction on so it doesn't get studied as much
Funding the Commons Event
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWkwOefBPZY
Some of the basic outline of this looks like OER (Open Educational Resources) and its "five Rs": Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and/or Redistribute content. (To which I've already suggested the sixth: Request update (or revision control).
Some of this is similar to:
The Read Write Web is no longer sufficient. I want the Read Fork Write Merge Web. #osb11 lunch table. #diso #indieweb [Tantek Çelik](http://tantek.com/2011/174/t1/read-fork-write-merge-web-osb110
Idea of collections of learning as collections or "playlists" or "readlists". Similar to the old tool Readlist which bundled articles into books relatively easily. See also: https://boffosocko.com/2022/03/26/indieweb-readlists-tools-and-brainstorming/
Use of Wiki version histories
Some of this has the form of a Wiki but with smaller nuggets of information (sort of like Tiddlywiki perhaps, which also allows for creating custom orderings of things which had specific URLs for displaying and sharing them.) The Zettelkasten idea has some of this embedded into it. Shared zettelkasten could be an interesting thing.
Data is the new soil. A way to reframe "data is the new oil" but as a part of the commons. This fits well into the gardens and streams metaphor.
Jerry, have you seen Matt Ridley's work on Ideas Have Sex? https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_ridley_when_ideas_have_sex Of course you have: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/3e2c5c75-fc49-0688-f455-6de58e4487f1/attachments/8aab91d4-5fc8-93fe-7850-d6fa828c10a9
I've heard Jerry mention the idea of "crystallization of knowledge" before. How can we concretely link this version with Cesar Hidalgo's work, esp. Why Information Grows.
Cross reference Jerry's Brain: https://app.thebrain.com/brains/3d80058c-14d8-5361-0b61-a061f89baf87/thoughts/4bfe6526-9884-4b6d-9548-23659da7811e/notes
There’s many examples around the world of communities banding together to collectively govern a shared resource, like forestry, grazing grounds, and wells.
If we all take action to do these things collectively, then it isn't a "tax" on any individual or corporation.
Who can integrate bidi links into a larger system, expand in concentric circles, and take them to their logical conclusion — ubiquity across all information surfaces. ... Across Closed Worlds (Chat, Notes, Projects) to Open Worlds (Twitter, Blogs, Feeds) & everything in between The [[wiki link]] is just like #'s and @'s — public-domain innovations in hypertext. But just cause your social app has @'s and #'s doesn't mean people will use it.
This is a fine sentiment, but a networked version of wikilinks is bound to cause conflicts in folksonomies and issues with sourcing and verifiability. The potential for context collapse is potentially too great to have these scale for this type of knowledge production. One would need to have trusted groups to create usefulness. Search at scale for these is likely to be at issue as well.
Are the affordances beyond the local scale really any better than current web technologies? What about the potential effects on the commons?
Raw capitalism mimics the logic of cancer within our body politic.
Folks who have been reading David Wengrow and David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything are sure to appreciate the sentiment here which pulls in the ideas of biology and evolution to expand on their account and makes it a much more big history sort of thesis.
DoS a federal agency, then charge for access
Capitalism run amok. Force a public good or commons into a corner so it's unusable, then charge for access to it.
contrasting 00:28:28 climate change against uh the kobe 19 pandemic is very revealing while both of them are now considered to be a crisis and they are very different in nature 00:28:40 the pandemic is an immediate threat and the government failure to respond to the the kubernetes pandemic is in the eyes of the constituencies 00:28:54 a real failure and and they will uh lose their future votes and because of this failure for these politicians while climate change is more of a 00:29:07 creeping uh risks it's coming slowly it is a crisis and uh and it's also everybody's crisis right then this is a a typical 00:29:21 collective action problem failure to come up with the funding for addressing climate change in the eyes of the local and domestic 00:29:33 constituencies is not considered to be such a bad thing so uh and then a lot of politicians will choose to be a free writer on this then 00:29:45 uh you know what happens and we all understand this too well will be the tragedy of the comments i think the it's really the nature of the this uh two problems to crisis are very different 00:29:58 and this is really really the talent the i think the ultimate talent for the human beings to when it comes to solve this collective action problem
The speaker points out that covid-19 is perceived as a more immediate threat, while climate change is less directly perceivable as a immediate threat. It takes place graduallyl over time. Climate change is a tragedy of the commons because a lot of individual leaders choose to free-ride.
Land rezoning and infrastructure decisions, such as rezoning from industrial or farmland to residential land, or building a new transport hub, generate windfall gains to private owners. While some of this is captured in the form of development contributions, the private value capture is much greater than what it contributes back to public coffers.Rezoning of land and infrastructure investment decisions undertaken by government create enormous amounts of private value:Throughout Australia, when land is rezoned from industrial to high-rise residential, a charge is levied to help fund the required infrastructure. A well-situated industrial site in Sydney’s inner west was bought for $8.5 million, rezoned high density residential, then sold again for $48.5 million. The 470% windfall was the result of a government decision: rezoning.
Rezoning is a key leakage of value from the commons to the private sector. This needs to be addressed in creative ways so that the commons can flourish. Rezoning can be viewed as a form of predatory capitalism, a form of theft from the commons by the private sector. Land owners who reap the benefits don't even think they are committing this theft because it is such normative behavior!
Twitter, the president of one major cultural institution told me, “is the new public sphere.” Yet Twitter is unforgiving, it is relentless, it doesn’t check facts or provide context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYsMtroVLeA
Buzzwords for understanding the new internet
Importance of words (neologisms) for helping us to communicate.
retweets as a means of bringing new faces into your stream to expand your in-group.
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Kevin Marks </span> in Epeus' epigone: Publics, Flow, Phatic, Tummeling and Out-groups - New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web (<time class='dt-published'>09/06/2021 15:15:38</time>)</cite></small>
reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create
reflecting on the year after george floyd for me is that the different responses that we all have right are valid and true and authentic and they create possibilities when they're read in you know its full context um but some of what is happening or some of what the role of the the classroom or the the person is to do is to try to say this is the range of the acceptable response and i feel like as a teacher our role is to kind of say you get to choose how you want to show up but base it in something that's real that's authentic that's not just about you this but it's about the collective so how do we cultivate that connection to collectivity how do we cultivate that ethical uh commitment and conviction to one another but at the end of the day how do we allow young people and everyone really the agency um to decide how they want to like show up—Christopher R. Rogers (autogenerated transcript)
This is a powerful teaching philosophy. Return to reflect on this.
“Monetising what we see as sacred knowledge, our way of being – driving, walking – is sacred knowledge and the only people who should have any purview over that is our community. … What if we look at what the data could do for our community and how to achieve that? … We are gathering our data because we love our people, we want a better future for the next generations. What if all data was gathered for those reasons? What would it look like?”
A great quote and framing from Abigail Echo-Hawk.
This reliance on going to community elders (primarily because they have more knowledge and wisdom) is similar to designing for the commons and working backward. Elders in many indigenous cultures represent the the commons.
This isn't to say that we shouldn't continue to innovate and explore the evolutionary space for better answers, but going slow and fixing things is far more likely to be helpful than moving fast and breaking things as has been the mode for the last fifteen years. Who's watching the long horizon in these scenarios?
This quote and set up deserves some additional thought into the ideas and power structures described by Lynne Kelly in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture
I worked on a recent project to sketch out for a centre-right German think-tank how a European data commons might work. I tried to steer it away from property rights and towards what you’d get if you started with the commons and then worked back to what data could be harnessed, and to which collective purposes. This is eminently do-able, and pushes you towards two distinct areas; groups of people who are served poorly or not at all by current data regimes, and existing cooperatives, unions and mutual societies who could collect and process their members’ data to improve collective bargaining, or licence access to it to generate revenue and boost affiliate membership. Viewing personal data as a collective asset points towards all sorts of currently under-provided public goods (I briefly describe several, on p. 74 here – yes, oddly enough, this stuff got shoved into an annex).
Apparently lots of reading to catch up on here.
I definitely like the idea of starting with the commons and working backwards, not only with respect to data, but with respect to most natural resources. This should be the primary goal of governments and the goal should be to prevent private individuals and corporations from privatizing profits and socializing the losses.
Think of an individual organism in analogy to a country or even personkind. What do we call a group of cells that grows without check and consumes all the resources? (A cancer). The organism needs each cell and group of cells to work together for the common good. We can't have a group of cis-gender white men aggregating all the power and resources for themselves at the cost of the rest otherwise they're just a cancer on humanity.
I particularly enjoyed the California water commons, with its quiet nod to Elinor Ostrom’s original post-graduate research on emergent cooperation between county water-boards.
A quiet nod here in it's own right. Now I want to dig into Elinor Ostrom's research and work.
banning DDT also seemed ludicrous until it wasn’t.
And even with the ban, we can find dumped barrels nearly 60 years later which become problematic: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/us/ddt-barrels-california.html
If instead of commenting, you write a response on your blog, you are standing behind your words, and associating them with the rest of your writing. The social dynamics are very different; you think more before responding instead of posting a quick flame. You can't really spam, as you are only soiling your own garden.
There's a reasonably good overview of some ideas about fixing the harms social media is doing to democracy here and it's well framed by history.
Much of it appears to be a synopsis from the perspective of one who's only managed to attend Pariser and Stround's recent Civic Signals/New_Public Festival.
There could have been some touches of other research in the social space including those in the Activity Streams and IndieWeb spaces to provide some alternate viewpoints.
What this means is: I better refrain from writing a new book and we rather focus on more and better docs.
I'm glad. I didn't like that the book (which is essentially a form of documentation/tutorial) was proprietary.
I think it's better to make documentation and tutorials be community-driven free content
Meanwhile, politicians from the two major political parties have been hammering these companies, albeit for completely different reasons. Some have been complaining about how these platforms have potentially allowed for foreign interference in our elections.3 3. A Conversation with Mark Warner: Russia, Facebook and the Trump Campaign, Radio IQ|WVTF Music (Apr. 6, 2018), https://www.wvtf.org/post/conversation-mark-warner-russia-facebook-and-trump-campaign#stream/0 (statement of Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.): “I first called out Facebook and some of the social media platforms in December of 2016. For the first six months, the companies just kind of blew off these allegations, but these proved to be true; that Russia used their social media platforms with fake accounts to spread false information, they paid for political advertising on their platforms. Facebook says those tactics are no longer allowed—that they've kicked this firm off their site, but I think they've got a lot of explaining to do.”). Others have complained about how they’ve been used to spread disinformation and propaganda.4 4. Nicholas Confessore & Matthew Rosenberg, Facebook Fallout Ruptures Democrats’ Longtime Alliance with Silicon Valley, N.Y. Times (Nov. 17, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-democrats-congress.html (referencing statement by Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.): “Mr. Tester, the departing chief of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, looked at social media companies like Facebook and saw propaganda platforms that could cost his party the 2018 elections, according to two congressional aides. If Russian agents mounted a disinformation campaign like the one that had just helped elect Mr. Trump, he told Mr. Schumer, ‘we will lose every seat.’”). Some have charged that the platforms are just too powerful.5 5. Julia Carrie Wong, #Breaking Up Big Tech: Elizabeth Warren Says Facebook Just Proved Her Point, The Guardian (Mar. 11, 2019), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/11/elizabeth-warren-facebook-ads-break-up-big-tech (statement of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)) (“Curious why I think FB has too much power? Let's start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether FB has too much power. Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn't dominated by a single censor. #BreakUpBigTech.”). Others have called attention to inappropriate account and content takedowns,6 6. Jessica Guynn, Ted Cruz Threatens to Regulate Facebook, Google and Twitter Over Charges of Anti-Conservative Bias, USA Today (Apr. 10, 2019), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/04/10/ted-cruz-threatens-regulate-facebook-twitter-over-alleged-bias/3423095002/ (statement of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)) (“What makes the threat of political censorship so problematic is the lack of transparency, the invisibility, the ability for a handful of giant tech companies to decide if a particular speaker is disfavored.”). while some have argued that the attempts to moderate discriminate against certain political viewpoints.
Most of these problems can all fall under the subheading of the problems that result when social media platforms algorithmically push or accelerate content on their platforms. An individual with an extreme view can publish a piece of vile or disruptive content and because it's inflammatory the silos promote it which provides even more eyeballs and the acceleration becomes a positive feedback loop. As a result the social silo benefits from engagement for advertising purposes, but the community and the commons are irreparably harmed.
If this one piece were removed, then the commons would be much healthier, fringe ideas and abuse that are abhorrent to most would be removed, and the broader democratic views of the "masses" (good or bad) would prevail. Without the algorithmic push of fringe ideas, that sort of content would be marginalized in the same way we want our inane content like this morning's coffee or today's lunch marginalized.
To analogize it, we've provided social media machine guns to the most vile and fringe members of our society and the social platforms are helping them drag the rest of us down.
If all ideas and content were provided the same linear, non-promotion we would all be much better off, and we wouldn't have the need for as much human curation.
Capitalists and market-thinkers inevitably seek to enclose the commons, privatizing benefits and externalizing costs onto society.
Put another way, many tools for thought are public goods. They often cost a lot to develop initially, but it’s easy for others to duplicate and improve on them, free riding on the initial investment. While such duplication and improvement is good for our society as a whole, it’s bad for the companies that make that initial investment. And so such tools for thought suffer the fate of many public goods: our society collectively underinvests in them, relative to the benefits they provide
More information about CC and open licensing
Additional Resource: I would like to recommend adding Uploading Godzone https://www.tohatoha.org.nz/2018/11/uploading-godzone/
A non-North American view of how community members view and use CC licenses to contribute to the Commons.
Elinor Ostrom’s 8 Principles for Managing a Commons by On the Commons
I found this article to be a succinct description of the 8 key principles for managing The Commons. It made me curious to explore more about the range of research that Elinor Ostrom undertook about the Commons. (June 2020 cohort CC Cert)
More information about the Commons
Additional Resource: I would like to recommend adding State of the Commons https://stateof.creativecommons.org/
I found it really helpful to have visualisations, and to also spend time digging into the data, playing with different tools and exploring links for the Global Network chapters.
In 1968, Garrett Hardin, a biologist, published an article about social dilemmas in the journal Science, called ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’.
I am not, and will never be, a simple writer. I have sought to convict, accuse, comfort, and plead with my readers. I’m leaving the majority of my flaws online: Go for it, you can find them if you want. It’s a choice I made long ago.
The classic libertarian solution to this problem is to try to find a way to privatize the shared resource (in this case, the lake).
This is a hard problem, but the lake must have an owner, or some bizarre magical special juridical property that someone must come up with. Anyway, this whole example treats it as "public" resource, hence the tragedy of the commons follow.
Ok, it seems that the lake may be owned by someone and the rivers that go into it owned by other people, so the problem arises. This seems to me to be a case for law: https://hypothes.is/a/PBirDvnYEeaWvjeIs4H9kg.
Probably there could be a way for the lake owner to sue the people who are damaging the lake, or these sue the lake owner for their lack of productivity.
The reason we find ourselves in this mess with ubiquitous surveillance, filter bubbles, and fake news (propaganda) is precisely due to the utter and complete destruction of the public sphere by an oligopoly of private infrastructure that poses as public space.
This is a whole new tragedy of the commons: people don't know where the commons actually are anymore.
Experienced maintainers have felt the burden. Today, open source looks less like a two-way street, and more like free products that nobody pays for, but that still require serious hours to maintain.This is not so different from what happened to newspapers or music, except that nearly all the world’s software is riding on open source.