Solving the Metacrisis by a New Institutional Trinity That Includes the Commons

Text originally requested by Weconomy.

Discussion

Michel Bauwens:

1.

Quite a few people are noticing that there are less obviously influential ‘public intellectuals’. One of the reasons may of course be the fragmentation of our fields of communication because of the role of social media, which have evolved from being affinity-based meeting places, to filter bubbles and even ‘fortresses’. We are a long way from the ideological pillars that divided the population in a few large groups, with each of them having dedicated and engaged intellectuals.

Intellectuals before the internet, say before 1993 when the web was democratized, also did not have to cope with an explosion of sources. One thing is sure, Marx and Kant did not have to contend with keeping up with social media, but we do.

Every minute spent on the web or on Youtube, to keep up with a fast evolving cultural landscape, is a minute not spent in reading or in intellectual meditation. One solution may be to think about creating more collective entities, ‘organic and collective public intellectuals’. This is what we attempted by the creation of a global network of peer to peer researchers, the P2P Foundation, based on a prior analysis of what needed to be done to overcome the limitations of current intellectual forms. Today, we are full on in the process of the decline of previous dominant media (Joe Rogan beats CNN with ease in audience numbers), matched by the rise of a para-academic or post-academic networks of online learning communities, that are competing with the ‘politically correct’ academic social sciences. Many of these parallel projects are doing well, including economically. The most successful media strategies are now subscription based, not advertising based. They are often more open-minded and more seriously engaged in truth seeking, offering long form conversations that classic media said were impossible. While mass media speak to your 8 year old inner self, these new vehicles of collective thinking aim for wisdom and high intellectuality. In some ways, we are back to the Republic of Letters of the 18th cy, which emerged after the collapse of the religious universities, which were destroyed by the civil wars of the Reformation era. The current culture wars may well have a similar effect.

2.

This difficulty of conducting scholarship is compounded by the toxicity of social media. If we are indeed ‘forced’ to spend so much more time online to monitor important developments, then it matters a lot to our well-being that the environment is less toxic than it is today. Is it solvable though? One theory is that the private ownership of social media is what exacerbates the toxic effect, as the owners will choose what keeps our attention, seeking to turn us into addicts, while nudging us towards certain behaviors that are in their interest, not ours; another, perhaps deeper explanation is inspired by the theory of mimetic desire of Rene Girard: in short, status differences keep an order in our communication, and lack of such clear distinctions leads to permanent competition that leads to periodic outbursts of scapegoating. This would explain the explosion of cancel culture that has emerged at the same time as social media. For such analyst, social media are therefore a neutron bomb for our sociality: you cannot connect 5 billion people and hope all will go well.. It does not help that, at the same time, our societies are facing metacrises and require transitioning, a factor that creates generalized anxiety in the ‘real world’ and is unavoidably reflected online. This last explanation suggests social media are less the cause, than the amplifier of existing social crises, just as the Volkswagen Beetle and the radio expanded the reach of the Nazis, but cannot be said to have caused it.

The solution may be the same as what we found for the real world: the development of civility. Civility does not solve the underlying conflicts, but makes sure they are expressed in ways that don’t exacerbate them. This is why the current algorithmic censorship is so counterproductive: instead of censoring the form of communication, it censors opinions and aims to enforce mainstream narratives, in cooperation with partisan governments leading to the generalized surveillance of dissent, and the ‘cutting off’ of dissenters from the financial streams necessary to physical survival. What started as a weapon to Wikileaks has been perfected by the Canadian government of Trudeau in a weapon to destroy a powerful social movement..

If we cannot change the situation at the macro level, this should not prevent us from creating healthy and smaller scale communities, where the rules of civility can be maintained, and expanded once they are consolidated.

3.

It is here that the practice of ‘commoning’ can be helpful, if not actually, a vital necessity. So what are the commons?

It’s best to see commons as the third human institution, next to markets and states, an institution that has always existed as a regenerative and protective institution, existing as a counterweight to the extractive dynamics of markets and states. Whereas the latter are geared towards competition and growth, even conquest, the commons are cooperative arrangements intent in cultivating and protecting a shared resource. So a commons is a ‘thing’, possibly immaterial, a resource to be shared; but also: a human community (which can be extended to other beings of the web of life) which has made a decision to share and protect, but most of all it is characterized by self-regulation. The original commons were physical resources, like forests and rivers and the mountain flanks in Switzerland and Austria; later commons were social, as the mutualization of life risks undertaken by the labor movement which gave us the welfare state institutions. Today, we saw a tenfold increase in the number of urban commons since 2008, as city dwellers are self-organizing to insure their access to organic food, renewable energy, even housing and transport. But commons can be intangible: they can be knowledge commons. It is these knowledge commons which are the new collective agents, who can act as the spine for collective intelligence and through their self-regulation, create the civility necessary for knowledge exchange. This is why we claim that “the next Buddha will be a collective”.

4.

One of the characteristics of times of civilizational transitions is that, either because of a loss of means by the society or because of a new technology introduces a higher level of differentiation, is that the old institutions are no longer able to hold the society together: fragmentation occurs, and as a consequence of that, the polarisation of social groups. Think of the struggle between the pagan church and that of the christians, the Catholics against the Reformation, and today, the ‘culture war’. This is also reflected in social antagonisms, such as the ‘secession of the Plebs’, already a known phenomenon in Roman times. Today, we would argue, it takes the form of a sociological split between the physicals and the virtuals, the somewheres and the nowheres, as documented by social scientists such as David Goodhart, Eric Kaufmann, and Matthew Goodwin. We believe that, when the major institutions lose the trust of the people, a well documented phenomenon in the last decades, and the ideational glue that holds our societies are loosening, then people ‘regress’ to less complex identities, smaller scales of trust, if you like. If you are a physical/somewhere person, not able to move and directly impacted by deindustrialization, then it is likely you will yearn for a strengthening of traditional identities: religion, nation, ethnicity. On the other hand, if you are a movable virtual/nowhere person, and better able to navigate globalized de-territorialization, you are most likely to be impacted by the new intersectional identities. Both reactions feed the polarization, but are indicative of a search for new identities and communities that can ‘protect’ against the uncertainties of the current polycrisis.

My contention is that commons-based, cosmo-local, identities can help rebuild a new type of glue. Indeed, what happens if you are a commons-contributor ? Take permaculture as an example. You are with your feet in the mud, this is the metaphor for a reconnection with the territory and the soil, without its cultivation no one can survive. Your heart is in the local community of permaculturists. But there is no question that your brain, and the other part of your heart, is in the global permaculture commons. In other words, you have extended your identity beyond the local, you have acquired a trans-local, trans-national identity. Furthermore, you have done so not through an alienating concept of corporate globalization, as an uprooted elite individual, but you have done so through a deep participation in a real constructive community, that is contributing to solving the very metacrisis that is alienating most of us. As we spent two thirds of matter and energy consumption of transport, relocalizing the material economy makes a lot of sense, as does maintaining the collective intelligence of our global culture. Cosmo-localism stands for rooted but extremely rapid global innovation. If you are a nowhere, we suggest you become a ‘Everywhere’, using your virtuosity as a digital nomad to be at the service of relocalized production, pollinating local communities with the knowledge of other local communities.If you are an entrepreneur, etymologically ‘taking in between’, we suggest you become an entredonneur, ‘giving in between’.

5.

This revival of commons forms is not a historical accident, but a recurring phenomenon, that I call the pulsation of the commons. We know from many studies of macrohistorians, such as Peter Turchin in his landmark book on ‘Secular Cycles’, that societies evolve cyclically, in ascending and descending phases. What people are less aware of is the counter-cycle. Markets and states, which are powerful historical institutions with thousands of years of existence, are essentially growth or conquest oriented institutional formats, and they <always>, without exceptions, end up in regional overshoot, until today, where we have achieved global overshoot. But people are less aware of the counter-cyclical ebb and flow of the commons. When people’s life is challenged in the descending phases of market and state systems, they always revive the commons institutions, i..e. Institutions that mutualize risk and regenerate and preserve their bioregional soils. In the European Middle Ages, the most power pubic ritual was the Rogantide Procession, in which the parishioners circled their village, reconfirming their commons by using milestones. The ceremony was called ‘Beating the Bounds’ and was of prime importance in local identity formation, coupled with their Christian cosmogony. Yes, they were already cosmo-local! Global capitalism has made overshoot trans-local, planetary. This means that today, our response must be <both> local and translocal, bioregional and planetary. This helps us to see what is next, <after> the ‘chaotic transition’ we are presently engaged in.

According to the Hungarian political economist Peter Pogany, the Mercantilist period of the Ancien Regime created the premises for a global system (Global System 0), which created, after the chaotic transition of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, the ‘Smithian’ capitalist system (Global System One), based on the dominion of capital over labour and which only functioned with competitive alliances of countries, whole rivalry culminated in the chaotic transition of the two world wars. These ended in Global System Two, based on an alliance of capital and labor in western countries (the welfare state compromise), and ‘weak multilaterialism’, i.e. institutions geared to protect the free flow of goods in neoliberal markets; it is this system which is presently disintegrating in a new chaotic transition.

So what is next ? First of all, an extension of the social contract to the world as a whole, securing the lives of the whole of humanity. Second, establishing strong protective institutions which can defend human and non-human communities, what we propose to call the Magisteria of the Commons. Imagine the international state system and the transnational financial system, equilibrated by civic driven multistakeholder commons organizations. Pogany calls it ‘strong multilateralism’, which should not be mistaken for world government or the private-public governance proposed by the WEF. But finally, following suggestions by Latour and others, what is at stake is the very civilizational model: we need a social contract between humanity, and the web of life on which it depends. This is an unprecedented task for our civilizational model, premised on the opposite principles of considering nature as a mere object of human management and enjoyment. Today, in the Anthropocene, these beings cannot live without us, and we cannot live without them. The means to achieve this is neither market nor state dominance, but a consensus between our three historical institutions, and it must therefore, include the commons.