Silence as a Commons

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Discussion

L.M. Sacasas:

"Ivan Illich’s argument for a commons of silence. I’ve cited that same essay by Illich before, but allow me to do so again here. “Just as the commons of space are vulnerable and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic,” Illich argued, “so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modern means of communication.”

“As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep,” Illich continued, “so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.”

Let me add something else that Illich wrote about the commons in another context:

“A commons is not a public space. A commons is a space which is established by custom. It cannot be regulated by law. The law would never be able to give sufficient details to regulate a commons. A typical tree on the commons of a village has by custom very different uses for different people. The widows may take the dry branches for burning. The children may collect the twigs, and the pastor gets the flowers when it flowers, and the nuts from it are assigned to the village poor, and the shadow may be for the shepherds who come through, except on Sundays, when the Council is held in the shadow of the tree.

The concept of the commons is not that of a resource; a commons comes from a totally different way of being in the world where it is not production which counts, but bodily, physical use according to rules that are established by custom …”

Illich spent the latter part of his life trying to resuscitate concepts like the commons, the vernacular, and subsistence. In each case, he was trying to preserve ways of being in the world that were not dominated by the logic of the market.

As Austin observed, “a Facebook or Microsoft metaverse would be the opposite of a commons: a theater for intellectual property in which sensory experience is a fully commoditized resource, every lacuna a content opportunity, and every moment of silence a reason for someone else to speak louder.”

Or, as McLuhan put it nearly 60 years ago, “Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.”

(https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/notes-from-the-metaverse?)


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