Transnational Republics of Commoning
* Article: Transnational Republics of Commoning: Reinventing Governance Through Emergent Networking. By David Bollier. Friends of the Earth, 2016.
Summary
Excerpt from the introduction on page 2, by David Bollier:
"This essay explores a promising path for moving beyond our current impasse. I argue that the creative use of new digital technologies on open network platforms could inaugurate liberating new forms of “open source governance.” Tech infrastructures and software are enabling ordinary people to meet basic needs and self-govern important aspects of their lives. They can create their own cultural spaces to deliberate, collaborate and share resources without market and state structures that are often cumbersome, expensive, anti-social or predatory. This paradigm shift is not just conjectural; it already well underway, as analysts such as Jeremy Rifkin, Yochai Benkler, Don Tapscott, Michel Bauwens and Paul Mason have documented.3
To be clear: this is not an argument that states and transnational corporations will disappear, or that bioregional social economies will suddenly eclipse capitalism. My argument is more modest – that new tech platforms offer practical, politically attractive pathways for reinventing the market/state as now constituted and developing a more robust, potentially transformative Commons Sector.
Predicting the future is an inherently risky proposition, especially when there are so many active variables shaping today’s world. Still, the innovations now unfolding in various tech spaces suggest the outlines of new post-capitalist institutions that, with struggle and luck, could transcend many of the structural and cultural problems we face today. In the next section, I explore some of the more promising ones. They include new types of group deliberation and governance software platforms such as Loomio and Co-budget; digital platforms that enable better management of ecological resources; and “blockchain ledger” technology, which is enabling new forms of networknative self-organization, collective action and “smart contracts” that bypass the conventional legal apparatus. They also include new types of online guilds that blend market activity, social cooperation, philanthropy and friendship; urban commons that reinvent city bureaucracies and empower citizen initiative; open design and manufacturing communities that are extending opensource principles to the physical production of vehicles, furniture, electronics and other things; and citizen-science that mobilizes massive participation in assessing environmental problems and orchestrating collaborative solutions.
In these collaborative worlds, people are self-consciously engaged in a process of commoning – the bottom-up coordination, disputation, negotiation, social practices and ethics needed to create functioning commons."