[iDC] Roberto Verzola: Abundance and the Generative Logic of the Commons

[jeremy hunsinger]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: nettime's avid reader <nettime at kein.org>
> Date: November 24, 2010 9:01:57 AM EST
> To: nettime-l at kein.org
> Subject: <nettime> Roberto Verzola: Abundance and the Generative Logic of	the Commons
> 
> Keynote for the International Conference on the Commons, Berlin, Germany, 
> Oct. 31 ??? Nov. 2, 2010.
> 
> 
> I will present my talk in the form of ten assertions about abundance and 
> its relation to the commons. Some of the ten are quite obvious and 
> uncontroversial. Others may provoke intense debate. Hopefully, they can 
> help clarify the issues covered by this conference.
> 
> 1: The Internet is creating an abundance of information and knowledge
> 
> This is hardly news by now. New technologies have made possible a global 
> digital infrastructure, which, in turn, has given rise to a new information 
> economy. This economy has one obvious feature: the abundance of free or 
> low-cost information and knowledge. With few exceptions, I usually find a 
> needed piece of information, skill or knowhow ??? if it is public knowledge ??? 
> on Wikipedia, YouTube, a blog, a Web site, or a mailing list somewhere.
> 
> Disturbing issues remain, such as inappropriate content, unaffordability, 
> exclusion, embedded value systems, toxic production and e-wastes. But if we 
> are looking for abundance, the Internet definitely has it. To turn this 
> wealth of information into wisdom though, users have to pick true from 
> false, grain from chaff.
> 
> 2: The abundance concept is even more neglected than the commons
> 
> The commons concept was denigrated for decades by mainstream social 
> scientists who thought that all commons inevitably collapsed. They made the 
> ???tragedy of the commons??? a sound-bite. However, the need to manage 
> threatened global commons like the atmosphere, the oceans and biodiversity 
> and the rise of Internet-based commons forced a second look at the rich 
> literature on this topic. The 2009 Economics Nobel Prize award to Elinor 
> Ostrom for her work on the commons put the concept back on the mainstream.
> 
> Abundance is even more neglected. The most fundamental assumption in 
> economics is scarcity. This, in effect, assumes away abundance. Thus, most 
> mainstream economists are not prepared to deal with abundance. They have 
> few concepts that explain it. They have no equations that describe it. 
> Confronted with it, they fall back on inadequate theories based on 
> scarcity.
> 
> The growth of the information economy, however, has made it imperative to 
> deal with the phenomenon of abundance. Unlike the long history of commons 
> research, studies of abundance are few; thus, we are just starting to build 
> theories about it.
> 
> 3: The wellspring of information abundance is the human urge to communicate
> 
> How did information goods become so abundant? For one, ideas grow ??? not 
> diminish ??? with sharing. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: ???Its peculiar character 
> ??? is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the 
> whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself 
> without lessening mine???.??? Also, digital technology has further lowered the 
> cost of exact copies over any number of generations, leading to a marginal 
> cost of almost zero. ???Too cheap to matter,??? as Wired editor-in-chief Chris 
> Anderson puts it. Furthermore, it does seem that ???information wants to be 
> free???. Something is driving it to multiply. This driving force, I suggest, 
> is the human urge to acquire and exchange knowledge. We did so when it cost 
> much. We will certainly do so even more, now that sharing costs practically 
> nothing.
> 
> On the Internet, we can fully express the primal human urge to communicate. 
> This is why we have information abundance.
> 
> 4: A second wellspring of abundance is the urge in every living organism to 
> reproduce
> 
> Nature???s abundance is hard to miss: bacteria can double their numbers every 
> half hour; some plants release a million pollen in a single day; a fish can 
> release one to ten million eggs in one breeding season; one rice grain can 
> produce a thousand grains within a planting season. (Even pets with five to 
> seven litters a year are more than most of us can handle!) In seas, lakes, 
> swamps, grasslands, forests, and other ecosystems ??? abundant life blooms. 
> Where they do not anymore do so, something must have upset the natural 
> abundance. Even such damaged ecosystems, if left alone, soon teem with life 
> again.
> 
> While abundance in nature can last indefinitely, it does not grow without 
> limit. As species multiply, they soon settle into balance with other 
> species and the natural environment. The food chain of plants, herbivores, 
> carnivores and other predators, and decomposers such as arthropods, fungi 
> and bacteria becomes webs of material and energy cycles and exchanges, 
> highly-productive ecosystems that provide us perpetual streams of natural 
> income ??? new soil, clean air, food, materials for clothes and houses, 
> medicine, fuel, industrial inputs, a thousand other goods and services and 
> psychic rewards too.
> 
> The generative logic we see in many commons, I suggest, comes from these 
> inner logic of sharing in humans and reproduction in living organisms.
> 
> 5: The massive bulk of water, carbon, iron, silicon and other minerals on 
> Earth as well as energy from the sun are also wellsprings of abundance
> 
> The Earth???s mineral abundance is non-renewable and must be managed 
> differently from renewable solar energy.
> 
> As oil production peaks, for instance, cheap abundant oil will soon come to 
> an end. Peak oil should teach us an unforgettable lesson in abundance 
> management. Those who miss the lesson will go for more coal, nuclear power 
> and agrofuels. Those who get it will shift to clean renewables, energy 
> efficiency and planned ???descent???. Transition towns are already leading the 
> way.
> 
> Solar energy makes possible other abundant energy sources such as water, 
> wind and wood. In 2009, renewables supplied 25% of total world energy 
> capacity, thanks in part to China???s surging interest in biogas, wind power 
> and photovoltaics. Germany, too. Photovoltaics are made from semiconducting 
> silicon, the material base of the digital revolution. (Do you recall how 
> expensive LCD projectors were ten years ago?) If photovoltaics follow 
> similar plunging price trends as other digital goods, we can look forward 
> to a Solar Age soon. Hydrogen from water also promises another abundant 
> energy source.
> 
> In passing, let me cite one more wellspring of abundance: webs of positive 
> human relationships in caring communities, which generate feelings of 
> peace, contentment, love, happiness and other psychic rewards which defy 
> quantification.
> 
> 6: Abundance creates commons
> 
> I have now identified several archetypes of abundance. All these archetypes 
> have created commons. (???Question: before refrigerators, what did people do 
> when they had too much food? Answer: they threw a party!??? ) Human societies 
> learned early on to deal with abundance ??? including temporary ones ??? from 
> forests, rivers, and other hunting and gathering areas by managing them as 
> commons. Taken for granted for a long time, the oceans, the atmosphere, and 
> other global commons are just getting due attention. Likewise, the creative 
> commons of information, knowledge and culture are now getting renewed 
> attention with the rise of the Internet which, by the way, has become a 
> great showcase of both the concepts of commons and abundance (and their 
> problems, too).
> 
> Markets and governments are also public spaces. Therefore, rather than 
> dismiss them outright as completely anathema to the commons, should we not 
> try to reorient them, to be managed as commons? (After all, public markets 
> and village meetings still show features characteristic of commons. 
> Perhaps, we should see the failures of markets and governments ??? the 
> financial bubbles in the West or the communist collapse in the East, for 
> instance ??? as the real tragedies of the commons, from which valuable 
> lessons can be drawn.)
> 
> 7: Under conditions of abundance, reliability becomes more important than 
> efficiency
> 
> Efficiency ??? maximizing gain and minimizing waste ??? is very important when 
> resources are scarce. It has been the focus of mainstream economics.
> 
> But when resources are abundant, efficiency recedes in importance. Some 
> biological processes are ???wasteful???, like releasing millions of sperm 
> although only one will actually fertilize an egg. As hardware became 
> cheaper, electronic designers have likewise learned to put integrated 
> circuits, processing power, storage, and bandwidth to uses considered 
> wasteful years ago.
> 
> It often makes sense to give up some efficiency to ensure the continuity of 
> abundance. Among engineers, we call a process that seldom fails ???reliable???. 
> This term has familiar equivalents. A process that lasts indefinitely is 
> called ???sustainable???. Since future generations can enjoy the same abundance 
> that we are enjoying, sustainability also means ???intergenerational equity???. 
> A process that benefits only one sector of society is not reliable because 
> it fails for the other sectors. If all sectors benefit, then we have 
> ???social justice??? or ???equity???. For high reliability, we need to minimize any 
> risk that can cause a failure of abundance; this sounds like ???risk-
> aversion???, or the ???precautionary principle???.
> 
> In short, reliability means ensuring that the fruits of abundance are 
> enjoyed without fail by all social sectors, our generation, as well as 
> future generations. We optimize it by putting risk-reduction ahead of gain 
> accumulation. If abundance is a goose that lays golden eggs, we???d rather 
> ensure that the goose stays fit and alive, than force it to lay two eggs 
> instead of one each day.
> 
> 8: We can learn to make one abundance lead to another and create cascades 
> of abundance
> 
> People with access to land often stay poor simply because they have 
> forgotten how to tap and build on the abundance that nature lays at their 
> feet. Beyond tapping existing abundance and making it last indefinitely, we 
> can learn to recognize the conditions that generate each archetype, so that 
> we can subsequently create cascades of new abundance. To cite examples: the 
> System of Rice Intensification (SRI) improves yields dramatically; 
> permaculture creates through conscious design a self-regenerating ???forest??? 
> of food and cash crops; remineralization rejuvenates our soils; biodynamic 
> farming taps distant forces to raise the quantity and quality of farm 
> produce.
> 
> On the Internet, the original protocols have spawned cascades of abundance. 
> First came mailing lists, download sites and home pages; then the search 
> engines; other innovations followed, such as blogs, wikis, video sharing 
> sites, and social networking portals, with no end in sight.
> 
> Creating cascades of abundance is hardest in the industrial sector because 
> its substantial material and energy needs (and wastes) tend to disrupt 
> ecological systems. If industrial processes could be turned into closed 
> material loops fuelled by renewables, this may yet provide the key to 
> cascading industrial abundance.
> 
> As we get better at cascading abundance, new commons will emerge that can 
> provide our communities with even more continuous streams of goods, 
> services, psychic rewards and other benefits.
> 
> 9: Abundance spawns two contrary mindsets: monopolizing it for private 
> profit-making, versus holding it in common for the good of the whole 
> community and future generations
> 
> These two will compete for our minds. Which mindset will ultimately win is 
> by no means clear.
> 
> An example in agriculture is the contest between farmers who share 
> commonly-held seed varieties among themselves, versus multinationals who 
> extract monopoly rents from their proprietary seeds through plant variety 
> protection, patents, F1 hybrids, and the ???Terminator??? technology.
> 
> In the industries of the West, very little is commonly-held now; the 
> corporate mindset holds sway. Curiously, however, the world???s main source 
> of industrial abundance today is China. which boasts of a huge but less 
> dominant State sector, in precarious balance with a growing corporate 
> sector, under the Communist party???s schizophrenic ideology of ???market 
> socialism???.
> 
> In the information economy, user movements for copyright and patent 
> exemptions, open access, free software and other forms of non-exclusivity 
> have made big inroads in building commons of information techniques, tools 
> and content for sharing. However, corporations and governments are trying 
> to stem the tide of sharing by tightening IPR enforcement and through 
> agreements like the GATT/WTO and the up-and-coming ACTA.
> 
> 10: Corporations are undermining abundance held in common
> 
> Unfortunately, we created corporations and gave them life before Asimov 
> drew up his Three Laws of Robotics. The First Law was: ???A robot may not 
> injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to 
> harm.??? The Second: ???A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings 
> except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.??? We would be 
> much better off today if all corporations ??? which, like robots, are man-
> made automata ??? were constrained by these laws.
> 
> Our legal systems instead put into these business automata a single urge ??? 
> to seek profits. This one-track mind has made them take over commonly-held 
> sources of abundance ??? from seeds, to land, to knowledge ??? and turn these 
> into monopolies because it is profitable to do so. What they could not take 
> over, they have undermined or sabotaged, to create artificial scarcity. 
> Corporations have destroyed the fertility of our soils, substituting 
> commercial synthetics in their place; they have stopped the natural flow of 
> mothers??? milk in favor of commercial formula; they have bought out 
> independent seed companies, to force-feed us with genetically-modified 
> toxic foods, all in pursuit of profit. They have become, in Wolfgang 
> Hoeschele???s words, ???scarcity-generating institutions???.
> 
> We conceded to corporations legal personhood, turning them into a de facto 
> man-made species of business automata. They have become super-aggressive 
> players in our political, economic, and social worlds. Beating us in our 
> own game, they have taken over governments, economies, and media. Having 
> become masters in domesticating Homo sapiens, they now house, feed, train 
> and employ tamed humans to serve as their workhorses, pack mules, milking 
> cows, watchdogs, stool pigeons and smart asses.
> 
> Thus, I will argue, corporations are now the dominant species on Earth. 
> They routinely ignore human orders, injure human beings and foul up 
> ecosystems in violation of laws for automata; these man-made mammoths now 
> occupy the top of the food chain and have become the greatest threat to our 
> well-being and the survival of many species on this planet."
> 
> 
> http://shareable.net/blog/10-hypotheses-about-abundance-and-the-commons
> 
> 
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Jeremy Hunsinger
Center for Digital Discourse and Culture
Political Science
Virginia Tech



Everything you can imagine is real.
--Pablo Picasso