It’s no secret that everything’s up for grabs in this brave new and rapidly unfurling world, but journalist/media critic/activist David Bollier has found himself ahead of the curve by going back to basics. In his new book “Viral Spiral: How The Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own,” Bollier expounds on the virtues of the “free culture” movement of the commons, which can best be described as people helping each other out without the umbrella of government, commerce, or corporate media. MinnPost caught up with Bollier in advance of his appearance tonight (7:30 p.m.) at Magers & Quinn in Minneapolis.
MinnPost: What is the commons, and what isn’t it?
Bollier: A lot of people think that everything happens through the market of government, but the commons is about things that people do through collaboration of sharing. It can range from local things, civic associations or PTAs, on up to a more federal level, where Social Security is a kind of intergenerational commons, or public libraries, or the airwaves that belong to the public that we sometimes auction off to cell-phone companies and sometimes give away to broadcasters.
So the commons is both the shared resources that we all collectively own, and the social relationships for managing them. I think the most robust commons are the things you see online. With things like open-sourced software, Wikipedia, and Craigslist, people can come together and create their own resources and manage them themselves with no money changing hands, or contracts, or advertising, or lawyers, but it still creates valuable stuff.
MP: Before the Internet, what has the commons historically signified?
DB: Commons were most often associated with public assets like federal forests, grazing lands, national parks, or the airwaves. But in recent years, it’s taken on a more global feel to name things that otherwise aren’t named. The whole point is to assert that there’s a common ownership and that the market doesn’t presumptively have the right to turn everything into a commodity.
MP: Is the concept of turning everything into a commodity specific to this time? Meaning that, as a human being, it can often feel that that phenomenon has been ratcheted up over the past 20 years. The appeal of the commons is that there is a purity to it, a sense that you are not being dictated by outside forces and great value is being ascribed to stuff that is normally taken for granted.
DB: I think that’s exactly its appeal. And I think it’s an attempt to assert that there are certain things that should exist apart from the market, and there might be some ways to interact constructively with the market. It’s not as if it’s an anti-market, or anti-corporate, per se, it’s preeminently about saying, “There are certain things we don’t want to put a price tag on; there are certain kinds of value that don’t have a price.” The book is really an untold cultural history of the evolution of online commons over the past generation, starting with free software.
MP: It’s very refreshing, and bold, in that it places a real value on cooperation versus competition.
DB: Absolutely, and I think this is an ethic that people are thirsty for, which is one reason why the commons is popping up all over. It’s not as if it’s some rhetorical movement, it’s international. People use it for different purposes, but in general it’s to assert the importance of cooperation — not just as an economic matter, but as a personal matter in their lives.
MP: With this culture, though, being so competition-driven, be it sports or business or keeping up with the Joneses, do you ever feel that this is some sort of pie-in-the-sky concept?
DB: No, because there’s functional proof. There are functional artifacts. Facebook and MySpace work. Wikipedia works. Free software works. For some people, [the commons] is sort of a social movement to put on their sleeve, and for other people it’s simply something that works better and is a more satisfying way to go. And one could say that many of our economic troubles can be traced to a failure to adequately take account of the commons. Right now, people don’t trust the financial system, and why not? Because there was too much profiteering and free-riding on the rest of the financial market. So I think there’s a strong functional case to be made, as opposed to just a feel-good or cultural issue.
David Bollier. 7:40 p.m., Wednesday, May 13. Magers & Quinn, Minneapolis.
