David Bollier – The commons and emergent democracy

New genres of online collaboration are producing robust new types of “democratic practice” online, claims David Bollier. Whether and how they will affect conventional politics and governance may be another issue, since it is not yet clear that the new social technologies will significantly intervene in the conduct of power and make it more accessible and accountable.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the conventional, centralized institutions of the 20th Century are ill-equipped to meet the complex challenges of our time. They are just too slow, bureaucratic, secretive, politically compromised and/or unresponsive. Meanwhile, we are witnessing the rise of all sorts of distributed online networks that are proving to be highly efficient, versatile and reliable. Wikis, social networking websites, blogs, streaming video websites, podcasts and other innovations are changing how we learn, form social relationships and create culture. They are substituting “social production” for commercial transactions. They are generating new forms of political power and institutional authority.

This raises the tantalizing question, Can the new online technologies of cooperation usher in a new type of “wiki politics” and governance?

This much is clear: the new genres of online collaboration are producing robust new types of “democratic practice” online. Whether and how they will affect conventional politics and governance may be another issue. The great appeal of the wiki culture, of course, is that it gives people a way to become more personally engaged, participatory and creative. They have the chance to “own” – morally and legally – the works that they create. This is surely an advance over the role that conventional mass media assigns to people, namely, to be obedient, passive consumers.

But however attractive wikis and other technologies of cooperation, can we jump to the conclusion that they will transform our politics? They could. But it is not yet clear that the new social technologies will significantly intervene in the conduct of power and make it more accessible and accountable.

Since we are in such an early stage of this revolution – both in terms of the development of the technologies as well as their popular usage – it seems frivolous to make grand predictions. But here’s what I find hopeful: the economic, technological and social trends driving the wiki culture are likely to intensify. And these trends, especially the radical efficiencies and participatory ethic of networked media, are likely to empower individuals, foster innovation and provide greater accountability of powerful institutions.

Centralized Media such as film studios, record labels, newspapers and book publishers have expensive fixed cost structures. By contrast, PCs connected to each other via the Internet represent a media system of distributed capital that can perform more nimbly, efficiently and creatively. It can host material that is more culturally authentic, diverse and timely than that hosted by the mass media. This is a significant “political” advantage, not in an ideological sense, but in a cultural sense.

Conventional media corporations are hostages to blockbuster business models, mass advertising and lower-common-denominator content. By contrast, companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay are structured to serve the “long tail” of small, niche markets. They are also structured to leverage people’s innate social tendencies. eBay uses buyer-based reputation ratings of sellers and cultivates a community ethic of trust and goodwill. Amazon invites consumers to make product recommendations and reviews of books. Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Flickr are entirely based on informal social production without market exchange and its apparatus of cash, property rights and individual ownership.

While Centralized Media are not going to disappear soon, their economics will only grow more troubled as distributed online media step up the competition. Online media will become more attractive because they are more accessible to ordinary people, culturally authentic and responsive. They are more hospitable to quirky, idiosyncratic, non-commercial concerns in ways that Centralized Media simply cannot be without undermining their economic foundation.

As this economic and cultural transformation accelerates, and as more people orient more of their lives to online communities, a new set of social relationships and cultural assumptions will begin to take root. This is already happening. People who once gave their trust and loyalty to governments, political parties or news organizations, are giving their political and social allegiances to new sorts of intermediaries.

In the United States, we see this in such upstart Internet-based organizations as MoveOn.org (more than 3 million members) and the DailyKos blog site (hundreds of thousands of visits per day). Americans also turn to dozens of news aggregator websites and millions of web logs. In truth, this sort of innovation is happening all over the world. Brazil’s Overmundo website is a new type of multi-media zone for user-generated and -rated content. OhMyNews in South Korea uses 36,000 citizen-journalists to write up to 200 online stories a day.

If the economics of Centralized Media are endangered, as I believe they are, and if the social integrity of online communities can be protected from corporate enclosure, then it seems quite likely that we will see new models of democratic practice emerge. The pioneering model, of course, is free and open source software. Thousands of software projects are managed by communities that honor transparency, community participation and consensus, and that balance individual with community need. So, too, with the blogosphere, wiki projects, online repositories, remix and mashup communities, and other collaborative ventures. They exemplify a participatory, egalitarian ethos that is notably absent in conventional democratic institutions. They embody a sensibility that Lawrence Lessig has called “free culture.”

The international appeal of free culture can be seen in the remarkable international adoption of Creative Commons licenses. More than 36 nations have now ported the U.S. licenses to their national legal systems, and another 30 are in the process of doing so. Meanwhile, all sorts of online communities have adopted the CC licenses as a way to signal their commitment to creative sharing, open decision-making, and cultural freedom.

A proto-movement of hackers, artists, civil libertarians, librarians, scientists and scholars, citzen-journalists, open business entrepreneurs, and many others, are taking this ethos to a new level at annual iCommons gatherings. iCommons – an organization that grew out of the Creative Commons – is a new international initiative to promote the commons as a new organizing principle for culture. Its upcoming conference in Dubrovnik, Croatic, in June 2007, will likely resemble the beginnings of a new international movement inspired by the idea of free culture.

At the moment, the rise of the commons is more of a cultural movement than a political one. It does not yet engage regularly with conventional politics, law and government. But Centralized Media will surely intensify their own political demands on governments to extend the scope of copyright, patent and trademark law; to empower corporations at the expense of consumer choice and free expression; and to chip away at the Internet’s open, end-to-end structure. The freedoms of the commons will be threatened in distressing ways – count on it — and this is likely to politicize and galvanize the constituencies mentioned above. When this happens, we will know far better whether a wiki politics will, in fact, emerge.

Even though the commons movement is not currently storming the gates of politics, policymaking and the courts, the rise of a diverse and internationally connected free culture community is a thrilling development. We are seeing that a new kind of international, pluralistic movement dedicated to open participation, social solidarity and democratic accountability is indeed possible. It can be the basis for a new type of social order — online, at least. Since the online world has a way of migrating back to affect who we are in the “real world,” it could well provide the base for building a more politically engaged movement.

Wikipedia, open source software, the blogosphere and related communities embody a refreshing ecumenical spirit. Their participant-members are less concerned with conservative or liberal or libertarian ideology than with reinvigorating democratic practice itself. Thus, when American conservatives decided they wanted to start Conservapedia because they found Wikipedia too liberal, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales was happy to bless it: “Free culture knows no bounds…..We welcome the reuse of our work to build variants. That’s directly in line with our mission.”

If this is wiki politics, we need much more of it. Its spirit will go a long way toward rebuilding the fractured, intolerant, autocratic world of contemporary politics with new forms of democratic practice.

Further links

On the commons

The commons rising

Special issue: recent articles, wiki politics
Tags: bollier, collaborative knowledge, commons, new media, wikipedia