Michel Bauwens on Expanding Identities Through Commoning and Cosmo-Localism

Video via https://cw.heysummit.com/talks/cosmo-localism-expanding-identities-through-commoning/

Description

"Is it possible to expand identities through commoning ?

Identities have always been complex assemblages, but for the last two centuries, national identity was certainly a part of it. Today, to the degree that nation-states are failing to successfully tackle important planetary scale issue, and to the degree that global elite institutions are losing legitimacy as well, perhaps we might rethink other ways for expanded and generous forms of identities.

David Goodhart and Matthew Goodwin have stressed that contemporary class identities have become cultural, with the Somewheres returning to more rooted and 'close at hand' ethnic, national and relgious identifications, and the cosmopolitan class of Anywheres/Nowheres is becoming sensitive to the intersectional identification with individualism as the sum total of oppressions. This mutual trend is feeding the polarisation and fragmentation of our Culture Wars. The ideational glue that was holding our national identities together is being lost.

In this task, we want to suggest a third possibility: that of cosmo-local identity formation around the shared love for social objects, which we find in commons-centric communities. Today, we have an explosion of shared knowledge production, free software and open design collaboration, even distributed manufacturing that is connected to shared technology commons. The commons, the age old institution that has preserved resources for hundreds of years before the Enclosures fatally weakened them, are back on the stage in a high tech version that marries both relocalized production, which is attractive to the Somewheres , and translocal , transnational cooperation into global commons, which is attractive to the Nowheres’, or, as I like to call them once transformed into 'commoners': the Everywhere’s."