Brad (lt) and Vernon (rt) present the WeJay at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco.

I blogged about the project on MySpace for a while, but Myspace is overrun with ads and became too annoying. I’m going to try this space out as a new home. You can follow progress of the making of the “transmedia experience” we call What We Got. Here is my first entry.

In June of 2008 I met Tim Kring, the writer and creator of the NBC hit series Heroes, while participating in a Bay Area Video Coalition-sponsored new media workshop. He told me that we are inventing a new form with What We Got. He was talking about the documentary/fiction post-modern sensibility of our film, but the same can be said for the entire project. It’s become what some might call a “transmedia experience”, morphing our outreach remix and share strategy and the storytelling into a single muti-modal force hurtling forward in real and cyber space.

Here is my paraphrasing of wikipedia’s definition of transmedia storytelling:

Transmedia storytelling, also called multiplatform or enhanced storytelling, is storytelling across multiple forms of media. By using different media, it attempts to create “entrypoints” through which audiences can become immersed in a story franchise’s world. The aim of this immersion is decentralized authorship across multiple new media forms like television, movie theaters. video games, the internet, and mobile platforms. By encouraging the sharing of assets and user generated content, transmedia conveys a complex story through numerous media sources.

Since the institute, we no longer think of ourselves primarily as filmmakers. We think of ourselves as content producers. This is a term that Jim Sommers of the Independent Television Service emphasized at one of the BAVC institute’s seminars. And we embrace the notion that we are one set among many storytellers telling the story of the commons. We will enable and embolden others to share that mission through our transmedia strategy to transform viewers into doers who shape the story and join a community working online and offline to name, claim and protect commons.

We have a clear, conceptual understanding for what we are doing. That’s the good news.

That’s the bad news, too.

The bad news, if you wish to call it that, is that we are working hard at the “bleeding edge” of storytelling form, new media, and web 2.0 strategy. Conceptualizing this project has taken far more time that we anticipated. Consequently, we have not met some our key goals. We had hoped to have developed a script, a website, and the plan for our first outreach summit by now. Instead, we have busied ourselves with the work of figuring out how to tell our story of the commons and educating ourselves about web 2.0, shifting our focus from a website to a multiplatform digital strategy to organize our outreach engagement campaign. Whereas we once thought of our storytelling (the film), our remix strategy (the user-generated versions) and the on-the-ground outreach organizing (partnerships and events) as separate but related, we now think of them as one in the same, each a dynamic within a single ecology: a transmedia experience.

In short, we’ve spent more than a year trying to figure out what the heck we are trying to invent for What We Got. Thanks to some invaluable mentorship and the building of a fantastic team, we are making steady progress.

The script writing journey has been at turns exciting and frustrating. What compelled me to think I could write a script for a fiction/documentary hybrid, a kind of post-modern comic book-styled film, as Tim Kring describes it? The script challenges have delayed this project because so much of our fund raising depends on its completion.

What We Got is wholly different from anything I’ve ever done. Every documentary I’ve produced up to this point — and there have been many — consists either mostly of “cinema verité” footage or a combination of archival and interview footage. While storytelling is always a challenge, each successive film has been, increasingly, terra firma. This one is terra incognita. Personally, that is a significant attraction — to do something new. I swallow hard when I admit that it took a full year of attempting to write a script before concluding that I will not be the person to write this film. This conclusion comes after great effort and half a dozen writing retreats with my directing partner, Vernon.

We have amassed a mountain of research and a stack full of real and virtual note cards with potential scenes. We’ve honed our stylistic approach. Now we will turn over all of our work to a writer. In line with our new plan, we are currently vetting a short list of writers and expect to hire someone within weeks. Novelist Jonathan Lethem will help us. A Brooklyn native, Jonathan has not only written nearly a dozen novels, including Motherless Brooklyn and Fortress of Solitude; he’s written a gorgeous essay about the Commons — The Ecstasy of Influence — that was published in Harper’s Magazine last year and included in Paul Miller’s (DJ Spooky) new anthology Sound Unbound. Jonathan’s website hosts a project called Promiscuous Materials wherein Jonathan grants one-dollar licenses to much of the material he’s written, challenging conventional notions of authorship and intellectual property. Jonathan has agreed to help us vet writers and work with our team to shape a script.

One of the most helpful undertakings in the course of climbing this steep learning curve was producing our first shoot with Paul (DJ Spooky). Motivated by the need to have some media to bring with us to the BAVC producer’s institute, we shot Paul on a green screen in a studio, featuring him in snippets that I think of as “commercials for the commons”. I wrote, Brian Glazer produced, and Vernon and I directed four scenes:

• T-Shirt – Spooky mixes and grooves as he moves through different commons environments, each of which turns to text on his t-shirt — Who Owns the ___? The blank is filled in by “sky”, “water”, “language”, “internet,” etc…

• Electric Company – Two Spookys in silhouette sound out the names of different kinds of commons.

• Copyright – Spooky reads the original copyright act as graphics around him depict the ever-escalating term of copyright.

• Goose – Spooky is a carnival barker shouting a 17th century poem through a megaphone about punishing the person who steals the goose from off the commons, but letting the greater crime of stealing the commons from the goose go unpunished. He’s accompanied by a remixed chorus of voices while flash animations dance around him.

Producing the shoot taught me an enormous amount about directing this kind of filmmaking, about co-directing with my partner, Vernon, budgeting, systems, post-production technology and tested our newly formed team — especially our producer, Brian Glazer. The shoot confirmed that we will not only work with Brian, but we’ll work with a number of people he brought onto the production and post-production team for this shoot. We learned how much we trust and enjoy working with Brian, a first-rate producer with loads of television (HBO, Sundance Channel, PBS...) and independent movie experience. His experience complements mine. Whereas I’ve worked primarily on PBS indie docs, Brian has worked with larger budgets and with celebrities on shows like Sundance Channel’s Iconoclasts. He also brings to the team a funding and producing network and the skills to help realize our funding goals. Last, but certainly not least, he “gets” the commons and has already been an insightful creative influence on the project.

Making these scenes is my first serious foray into the world of motion graphics, especially using the program After Effects. The creation of these scenes deepened my understanding of how to use motion graphics and animation in our storytelling.

We’ve completed nearly one entire After Effects and animation pass of T-shirt and created a rough cut of the Electric Company sequence. Our plan is to finish these four scenes and release them online through various portals including zoominonline.com and through our WeJay, the online dj mixing console widget we created at BAVC’s producer’s institute. More on that later. This will mark the beginning of our sharing of media for this project.

I predict that we will have a script and storyboard by February of 2009. We hope to premiere the film in March of 2010 at the South By Southwest film festival, followed by a summer of “commons” screenings organized by our partners and each featuring remixed versions of the film and locally determined commons-oriented events. We’ll follow the commons event season with a limited theatrical release and a broadcast on PBS that leads into a season of meetups to motivate continued momentum and activism on behalf of the commons.

One of the most important assets that Brian and Jonathan bring to our effort is the proven ability to engage audiences on a political level without being didactic. Their projects do what we hope ours will do: communicate powerful political ideas that foreground artistry and entertainment over grandstanding to win new audiences. A delicate balance between entertainment/engagement and messaging is crucial to achieving the kind of cultural awareness and protection of the commons that we hope our work will help to catalyze.

We have also added a number of other talented souls to our original team of Vernon Reid, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), Sam Pollard and myself. Henry Poole is our internet strategist. One of those freaky smart kids, Henry was hacking computers in middle school during the 1970s and 80s, and had already started and sold several businesses before he was old enough to legally drink. He’s been solving tech problems ever since, floating effortlessly between the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds. His currently company, Civic Actions, has built web presences for organizations like Creative Commons and Amnesty International, and a massive human rights media hub online for Witness. The Hub is a participatory website enabling people anywhere in the world to use their cameras, camcorders and cell phones to document and share their human rights-related footage to promote discussion, action and policy change. Henry’s colleagues have figured out how to standardize and handle the uploading and downloading of massive amounts of multiple formats of media in order to make Witness’ The Hub work. This achievement and the rest of his long-view strategic skills and network of talented tech problem-solvers will help us achieve our transmedia storytelling and organizing goals.

Norman Lear came on board over a year ago as a creative consultant. Needless to say, Norman has legendary producing and storytelling advice to share. I’ve leaned on him during the process of finding a writer to help.

We have not hired an outreach staff, yet…but we had an opportunity to meet a very talented young woman, Mattie Weiss and at one point hoped that she might begin this part of the work. Mattie is currently the director of Campus Camp Wellstone at Wellstone Action in Minneapolis. We were simultaneously fortunate and unfortunate that this hire did not work out. Unfortunate, because Mattie is a proven talent in organizing youth and savvy in the use of technology and grassroots techniques. Fortunate, because we weren’t ready when the opportunity was presented to us. Since that time we have restructured our outreach approach, and, hence, the job. We’ll likely hire an outreach director and staff in February of 2009.

From the beginning, we have talked about having a robust online presence and the goal of going “viral” with our media. In the months since this grant was approved we have learned what that really means — our journey to understanding our project as a transmedia experience.

I must single out participation in the Bay Area Video Coalition’s (BAVC) Producer’s New Media Institute as transformative in the development of our transmedia strategy. The Independent Television Service sponsored our attendance. We spent 10 days working with web developers, game developers, designers, Second Life experts, mapping experts and other talented folk re-imagining public media strategy. While we wrote in our proposal that we want our project to be “viral” and to build community through online sharing and remixing, we actually figured out how to make those goals a reality in the hive of BAVC’s institute. There we not only worked with all of the talented mentors — some of whom we’ll continue to work with — but also worked together as a team (Henry, Vernon and me from points East, West and Midwest) in an environment that breathed into us a heightened state of productivity. The crux of our strategy is to de-emphasize a single address on the web (a website) and to focus on portability, being everywhere and anywhere on the web by using applications and widgets and by using networks to grow communities concerned with the commons. To this end, we dreamt up our WeJay, a remix and share widget that we prototyped at the BAVC institute. It’s a “toy” that can live anywhere, Facebook, Myspace, the iPhone. It could really make “viral” a reality.

What the WeJay does is simple, which is its beauty. Tony Walsh, a game developer based in Toronto, was key in pushing us in that direction. And the style that complements its “toyness” was the result of hard work by designers Abigail Rudner and Laura Hilliger. Creative Commons organized a focus group to test our WeJay prototype.

The WeJay is a widget we call a “toy.” Our goal was to make something fun that promoted the experience of the commons through direct engagement. The WeJay is an online DJ console that enables users to scratch media, change its backgrounds, change it’s soundtrack, just by moving a cursor across it’s face. It invites you to play with media. Delve deeper into its modes and it is a powerful tool that allows for video, audio and background remixing, downloads and uploads, sharing and publishing to and from networks like Flickr and Facebook, and naming through tags of commons: water, sky, language, internet, etc… Most powerful, perhaps, is the social graphing of all derivative works. We can gather the network of authors using WeJay media (the bank of which grows as users use it) and push them toward commons actions and outreach events, most notably our 125+ screenings of different versions of What We Got. I have attached a keynote presentation that demonstrates the WeJay. We are working hard to launch the WeJay on the iPhone, followed by Facebook.

Of course we will still build a website, and there will be other widgets and applications to come. The WeJay is the first, expressive of the commons in form and function and making our project real by putting our commercials for the commons out there.

We have already begun to work with outreach partners. Corporate Accountability International supplied advice and footage about the commons of water for our commercials for the commons. The Long Now Foundation informed our ideas for the commercials for the commons through their Rosetta Project’s effort to preserve the world’s languages, and, thus, traditional and indigenous knowledge. We have attended numerous gatherings and conferences on the commons, forging valuable relationships with people and organizations connected to every commons one can imagine. Indeed, the people behind the site you are on right now convened many commons gatherings that have helped us develop our ideas. The next gathering for me is the International Association for the Study of the Commons in England where there will be plenty of opportunities to network with a global array of commons protectors. Our short list is a long list of nearly 250 organizations with which we hope to partner. This will provide our outreach director and team a guide and set of relationships when they begin their work.

I welcome your thoughts, comments and ideas. Thanks for reading.

I was unfamiliar with Rovics, but after browsing his website, it is clear that he has paid some serious dues as a self-published songwriter, a constantly touring performer and a progressive activist. Thanks to a YouTube video that Kim Klein recently brought to my attention, I discovered Rovics’ stirring song and video, The Commons. It’s a succinct and spirited affirmation of the commons against the corporate enclosures of our time.

Rovics works in a time-honored tradition. Several years ago, when researching my book Silent Theft, I came across a folk poem that railed with wit against market enclosures:

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the commons.
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the commons from the goose.

Rovics builds on this sturdy poetic tradition, puts it to music, and adds some animation behind him on a green-screen. Check out the video for the full effect, but here’s a sampling of the lyrics to The Commons:

You build your fences, and say there’s nothing we can do.
Say the world around us belongs purely to the few.
But about six billion people no doubt will agree
This world is our home, not your property.

You claim to own the harvest with your Terminator seed.
You claim to own the genome with every animal that breeds
You claim to own our culture and the music that we play
And with each song that we download to your copper we must pay.

You’d even own my name and say it’s for the best
Maybe you’ll let us on the radio if our songs will pass your test.
You own country, you own western, you say you’ve given us a choice,
You may own the airwaves But you’ll never own my voice.

It’s the commons, our right of birth.
And you who would enclose the land all around the earth
Our future is your downfall when we cut this ball and chain.

The song is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (BY-NC-SA).

You can check out Rovics’ upcoming gigs and albums at his website

As Marty Tenenbaum and John Wilbanks put it, the current system is plagued by “debilitating delays, legal wrangling and technical incompatibilities that frustrate scientific collaboration…. Biomedical knowledge is exploding, and yet the system to capture that knowledge and translate it into saving human lives still relies on an antiquated and risky strategy of focusing the vast resources of a few pharmaceutical companies on just a handful of disease targets.”

Tenenbaum and Wilbanks are two of the champions behind an ambitious new project, Health Commons, which aspires to build a new ecosystem for scientific research.

Photo by shareski, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. http://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/465487261

Even though huge advances have been made in decoding genes, it takes 17 years to go from gene to cure. Scientists and their institutions send too much time with lawyers, negotiating how to retain control over their work, and too much time doing research that someone else had already figured out was a dead-end. What if researchers could more easily pool their research data, share their tissue specimens, and use computers to search more efficiently through the journals in adjacent fields of research? What is there were a much larger, open platform for collaboration?

Health Commons is a new spinoff of Science Commons, which itself was spawned by Creative Commons in 2005. Health Commons aims to re-imagine and reinvent the ways in which health scientists carry out their work. John Wilbanks, vice president for science at Creative Commons, and Marty Tenenbaum, an Internet commerce pioneer who founded CommerceNet and CollabRx, lay out the case for Health Commons in an excellent paper, “Therapy Development in a Networked World,” You can also watch a six-minute video explaining Health Commons here. The project is a partnership among Science Commons, CommerceNet, CollabRx and Public Library of Science.

A key goal of Health Commons is to establish “a collaborative ecosystem of knowledge and research services that can be rapidly assembled to develop new therapies with unprecedented efficiencies and economies of scale.” Although Tenenbaum and Wilbanks do not allude to Wikipedia, free/open source software and social networking websites, Health Commons clearly has in mind exploiting the same kinds of “value-creation” that occur on open platforms. This would be a stark contrast to, and huge advance over, the stodgy, conventional ways that scientists tend to work.

Getting science to exploit the Web’s potential is more difficult than the “Social Web,” however, because science can’t just look to the “wisdom of crowds” or “smart mobs.” It has developed some elaborate systems of hierarchical, highly specialized knowledge, and so the Web platforms must take account of these realities, discipline by discipline. Here is how Tenenbaum and Wilbanks envision the operation of Health Commons:

Health Commons is a coalition of parties interested in changing the way basic science is translated into the understanding and improvement of human health. Coalition members agree to share data, knowledge, and services under standardized terms and conditions by committing to a set of common technologies, digital information standards, research materials, contracts, workflows, and software. These commitments ensure that knowledge, data, materials and tools can move seamlessly from partner to partner across the entire drug discovery chain. They enable participants to offer standardized services, ranging from simple molecular assays to complex drug synthesis solutions, that others can discover in directories and integrate into their own processes to expedite development — or assemble like LEGO blocks to create new services.

So, for example, participants in Health Commons would agree to standardized legal contracts and pre-negotiated licenses that will make it easier to access and share data, knowledge and physical materials. They would adapt their research to a “uniform platform architecture” so that scientists could readily share their private information and resources – “initially to one’s lab, then to collaborators, and ultimately to the greater research community.” Scientists would agree to use common digital information standards so that different databases, for example, could share datasets.

Over time, Tenenbaum and Wilbanks hope to change the very business models for developing new therapies. Instead of everyone working on their own, on in short-term, ad hoc partnerships, collaboration would be the rule until it became clear that there was something of potential value to commercialize. At that point, participants could negotiate their proprietary interests.

No one in the fashion industry owns the color pink or the pleated trouser – and yet everyone can still assert a proprietary interest (through trademarks of their brand name and logo) and make money. So, in science, it would be far more sense to exploit the radical efficiencies and economies of scale of “an ecosystem of shared knowledge,” and then develop new sorts of business models “on top” of that ecosystem. The music industry is itself undergoing an analogous transition right now, as it discovers that “owning the music” is a losing proposition for the industry . It can thwart the development of a more robust creative ecosystem and hardier business models.

The vision that Tenenbaum and Wilbanks sketch is particularly exciting in how it might transform research funding. “Some 2,500 foundations invest hundreds of billions annually seeking cures to hundreds of diseases,” they write, “yet there is little coordination, resource sharing or cross-learning among initiatives and no effective processes for moving research into the clinic.” Similarly, the current system makes it too costly and complex to do research on more than 5,000 rare, orphan and neglected tropical diseases. The new Health Commons could help ameliorate both of these structural flaws in health research.

If there is one problem that I have with the Health Commons, it is its unexamined assumption of health as an object of technological solutions – pills, treatments, expert-driven interventions. We surely need these approaches; they can do a world of good. But it would be a shame if the Health Commons’ vision of health as something that is delivered through scientists and drug companies were to eclipse the social dimensions of health and well-being. Besides better, faster, cheaper research, we also need a health commons that reintegrates human beings into communities of meaning and support. It hardly needs adding that we could also use a “health insurance commons” that can socialize the risks of disease and injury, much as Social Security socializes the risks of old age and disability. I’d be happier if the new project were called the “Health Research Commons.”

This is a quibble. The Health Commons is attempting something extraordinarily significant and transformative. It will be fascinating to watch the evolution of this ambitious project in the coming months and years.

The bad news is that proprietary drug makers are using all sorts of subterfuges to extend the life of their patents in order to prevent their high-cost drugs from entering the generic marketplace. It is a rank ripoff of consumers that reneges on the patent-monopoly deal that the public makes with drug makers in the first place: the patent term is limited, after which it belongs to any safety-certified competitor.

Photo by rodrigo senna, via Flickr, licensed under a CC BY license. http://flickr.com/photos/negativz/74267002/

There are many ways that big drug companies use to thwart generic competition. They make some modest alterations to an existing drug in order to obtain a new patent. They try to require that generic manufacturers submit generic drugs to new rounds of clinical testing, ostensibly because of the safety risks to consumers. (Funny thing, Big Pharma isn’t in favor of stricter testing for first-time approval of new drugs.) Proprietary drug makers also make sure that the brand-name drug has an easy-to-remember name, while the generic is invariably a tongue-twister that only a linguist can pronounce.

Generic drug makers, for their part, are no longer as scrappy and competitive. The industry is consolidating, which means that competition in the generic marketplace is decreasing. Generic companies are also mimicking their proprietary adversaries in lobbying for legal privileges that are hugely profitable. For example, the first maker of a drug that has “gone off patent” has a six-month right to be the exclusive generic marketer. During this time, the price remains close to the brand-name price, so that the consumer savings are minimal but the profits are huge. Generic price savings generally don’t kick in until that six-month period of exclusivity expires.

The latest example of the enclosure of the generic commons involves Lipitor, a cholesterol drug made by Pfizer. It made quite the splash in the news a few days ago. Pfizer announced that it had struck a deal with the Indian generic drug maker Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. to delay the sale of a generic version of Lipitor by 20 months. Since Pfizer is making about $13 billion a year from Lipitor, this privately negotiated delay is a boon for the company – and a unmitigated ripoff of consumers.

It’s against the law for a proprietary drug company to make payoffs to stifle generic competition, of course, but that’s what lawyers are for: to meet the strict letter of the law while avoiding its intent. The prohibited practice is called “reverse payoffs.” A Pfizer antitrust lawyer primly called the deal with Ranbaxy “simply a compromise on the time of the patent.”

The Federal Trade Commission has said it will “take a very close look at this deal,” but nudge, nudge, wink, wink, we already know the likely result. In this second Gilded Age, don’t expect our government, and especially this administration, to protect consumers from corporate predators. The fix is in.

The whole generic drug marketplace illustrates how government-managed commons are vulnerable to the stealth corruption of corporate influence. There’s the political contributions and lobbying of Congress. There’s the arcane language of the law that only insiders can decipher, let alone take action against. There’s the murky regulatory review process by antitrust officials, who are themselves creatures of politics. And there are the generic manufacturers, who are adept at gaming the system to maximize their returns, as well.

At the retail level, this is what proprietary meddling with the generic drug market means: Lipitor now costs from $2.50 to $3 a day, while the generic equivalent could cost one-tenth of that sum. Another anti-cholesterol drug, simvastaitin – a generic version of Zocor – went off patent in 2006. It now costs 75 cents to $1 a day. At some discount pharmacies, it sells for as little as 10 cents a day.

Now that Pfizer has struck a deal with the leading would-be generic maker of Lipitor, other generic makers will likely fall into line and wait their turn to compete. That should come six months after Ranbaxy starts selling a generic version of Lipitor in November 2011 — 26 months after the drug will have gone off-patent.

In the meantime, just pray that you don’t have high cholesterol and need to take the Pfizer drug. You’ll be coerced into paying a kind of privately imposed tax to Pfizer, a small portion of which Pfizer will then use to buy a round of gauzy, feelgood advertisements extolling its deep concern for human health and well-being. It’s time for our legislators to bolster the generic drug commons so it can deliver the benefits it was intended to provide.

Then AP goes a step further by stipulating in its license that it “reserves the right to terminate this Agreement at any time if Publisher or its agents finds Your use of the licensed Content to be offensive and/or damaging to Publisher’s reputation.” In short, not only do you have to pay for content that is in fact available to you for free under the fair use doctrine, you are prohibited from using the excerpt in a way that might reflect poorly on the AP! So much for media criticism!

Part of the problem is the very language of “property.” Once a work is regarded as “intellectual property,” that vocabulary suggests that its “owner” has an absolute right to control how it may circulate and be used. “You wouldn’t use my car or walk into my house without permission, now, would you?” is the standard analogy used by various media industries.

As a matter of law, however, copyright is a public policy bargain between authors and the public, not an absolute property right. The public has explicit rights to quote copyrighted works for free, without advance permission, for noncommercial, personal, educational and academic purposes. This right is the so-called “fair use doctrine.” What AP is trying to do is to impose its own private system of fees for its content, fair use be damned.

The whole issue came to light after the AP sent a legal notice to blogger Rogers Cadenhead, who runs a parody of the Drudge Report called the Drudge Retort. AP said that several of its articles had been used in an improper way. When the blogging world got wind of AP’s powerplay, it went berserk. The widely read Boing Boing blog published a stinging rebuke and Media Bloggers Association also checked in with a complaint.

Perhaps chastened by the outcry, AP said that it would develop guidelines for use of its articles – which further inflamed bloggers. Why should AP get to dictate what the rules for excerpting will be when we have a body of copyright law and court decisions that describe (however vaguely and inconsistently) the scope of fair use rights?

AP insists that it has a legitimate journalistic concern in preventing its articles from being quoted out of context and a business interest in protecting the value of its articles. Ah, but that’s just the point of fair use: the copyright holder does not have the authority to determine what sorts of follow-on uses may occur. That’s our prerogative, not the copyright holders’.

The AP might wish to tread a little softly here. What if its news sources decided that they needed to be paid for their comments to reporters? After all, aren’t they helping AP create value? And what about those trademarked corporate logos that occasionally appear in the background of AP news photos? Isn’t AP using them without permission? Perhaps universities should charge AP for letting it use portions of their scientific reports.

This is the madness that AP invites when it insists upon its own “property rights” at the expense of common-sense public needs.

As the Washington Post reported yesterday (June 17, 2008), talks between the AP and bloggers will soon take place to negotiate an acceptable working solution. It would be great to have greater clarity to help avoid legal misunderstandings. But if the negotiations are an occasion for further bullying to expand private copyright control and diminish fair use rights, we should consider it a declaration of war against the common good, and respond accordingly.

Other times a commons just quietly deteriorates, until one day we realize it is no longer there for us. That’s usually the case with biodiversity—the biological commons that sustains our lives in untold ways. The vast richness of life on Earth is diminishing as many species disappear every year.

Yet some people are not willing to allow this to happen quietly. They are fighting the wholesale elimination of unique genetic treasures in the rainforests of the Amazon, the savannas of Africa, and even the farmyards of Maine.

John Bunker is one of those people, and his campaign to save rare and delicious apples is the subject of an engaging article by the Atlantic Monthly’s gifted food writer Corby Kummer.

Bunker enlists people in Maine to help him find and preserve endangered varieties of apples by sending him fruit from abandoned apple trees. In the 19th Century, many towns boasted of their own unique, local apples. He hopes to rediscover some of the more than10,000 varieties that were grown across America 120 years ago.

That bounty now has been reduced to the couple dozen varieties at best that we find in our grocery stores today. And it’s important to note that these apples did not succeed because they were the best—in many cases like the criminally bland Red Delicious they were specially bred to survive long distance shipping or to look, rather than taste, good.

Bunker rhapsodizes about the Black Oxford, a tasty purple apple with cream-colored flesh that was the first almost-lost variety he came across years ago when a farmer brought in a bushel to sell at a food co-op where he worked. It’s one of many that Bunker now grows and sells through a company he founded. In the course of writing the article, Corby Kummer fell for the Roxbury Russet, and ordered one for his backyard in the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, which is next-door to Roxbury where the Russet originated.

It contains stories about how the Haverhill, Massachusetts school system paid for losses sustained by its food service provider; how Roanoke, Virginia, plans to privatize its civic center; and how school systems all over are outsourcing custodians, crossing guards and food service personnel in order to cut wages and benefits. In the New Orleans school district, privateers are exploiting the Katrina disaster to introduce a $10 million voucher plan and dozens of private charter schools.

Highway privatization remains one of the biggest, most ominous trends on the privatization front. J.P. Morgan has raised $2.5 billion in capital in an attempt to secure long-term investments in public highways, which will then become toll roads. You can expect maintenance to decline and new tolls or higher tolls. (For more on this topic, read this essay by U.S PIRG’s Phineas Baxandall.)

Privatization is an increasingly popular strategy now that state and federal agencies are so strapped for money they can’t properly maintain public infrastructure. Many states, such as Indiana, have succumbed to the lure of “free” private investment as an alternative to public taxation. Politicians and bureaucrats are able to balance budgets and meet pressing needs – while pushing the financial sacrifices onto future generations, who will pay far more than if the infrastructure had remained in public hands.

Another wonderful group doing work in this area is Good Jobs First. GJF is a citizen lobby that promotes accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families. It fights big-box retailing, sprawl, wasteful job subsidies, and a raft of tax dodges and financial subterfuges used by companies to subsidize themselves at taxpayer expense.

Excellent updates on the fight against privatization can be found on Good Jobs First’s blog, Clawback The term “clawback,” as the site explains, refers to “a step taken by a government to recoup subsidies paid to a company that does not fulfill its job creation promises. Here we also deal with clawing back in a broader sense: making economic development serve the common good rather than narrow private interests.” Good Jobs First is an aggressive, extremely well-informed critic of government subsidies to companies who promise economic development and jobs – and then fail to deliver.

A recent sample from Clawback: the New York Yankees are asking New York City for an additional $350 million in public financing for their new stadium. The team has already gotten $800 million in subsidies, and the new stadium is being built on land once used as parkland and playgrounds. But now that construction costs are soaring, as they so often do, the Yankees want more taxpayer money. They also want Mayor Bloomberg to lobby the IRS to allow tax-free financing of the project. Clawback points out that “the team reportedly said it would finish the stadium even if it didn’t get the financing” — yet the Mayor is still offering to help them deal with the IRS.

Since so many privatization schemes flourish in the shadows, and through contrived complexities that mask what is actually going on, it’s good to know that that these two groups are prowling the latest enclosures of the commons.

Predictions of melting polar ice caps inundating seacoast cities and blistering heat turning the Great Plains to desert boggles the mind, often leaving me dumbfounded and defeated rather than charged up about saving the earth.

But the sobering news that most of us will be itching and scratching more in the future got me off the sofa and talking to my neighbors. National Geographic Adventure (May 2008) reports a Duke University study showing that poison ivy now appears more frequently in meadows and woods thanks to increasing levels of CO2. The same for poison oak and poison sumac.

To make matter worse, the stuff in poison ivy that makes us itch—urushiol—is also becoming more potent thanks to increased carbon, according to Duke biology professor Jim Clark. “We’re talking about the same compound as before—just more of it.”

This reminds me of a cardinal rule for writing science fiction that I learned years ago in a college class. The success of your story depends far less on how you describe the 400-foot spotted monster from outer space demolishing an office building than how you evoke the horrified look on the face of a little girl in blond pigtails in a freshly-pressed Sunday dress with a Raggedy Ann doll under her arm watching it happen.

To grasp something completely outside our experience, we first must touch base with what’s familiar. I really can’t imagine New York City under forty feet of water, but I already dread covering up from head to toe to take a hike in the country. And that drives me to do something about it.

We need to take this into account when discussing climate change and other critical issues affecting the global commons. Shocking scenarios of future calamity motivate people less than straightforward discussion of how a given problem will affect their everyday lives.

The idea is based on an urban design philosophy known as “shared space.” When drivers, pedestrians and bicyclists are forced to develop their own natural ways of interacting with each other, goes the thinking, they work out better social behaviors than the rule-driven behaviors dictated by professional traffic engineers. This does not mean an abandonment of design considerations, but rather a commitment to the larger public space designs instead of overly prescriptive traffic control devices such as traffic lights, signs and road markings.

The Dutch town of Drachten adopted this “unsafe is safe” approach in 2007 and found that casualties at one junction dropped from thirty-six over the previous four years to only two in the two years following the removal of traffic lights. Traffic jams no longer occur in the town’s main junction, which handles 22,000 cars a day. The town is “Verkeersbordvrij,” meaning “free of traffic signs.” (I am grateful to Jonathan Zittrain’s reference to Drachten’s experiment in his new book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and to Wikipedia for its account of “shared space.” )

What caught my eye was the explanation of why the elimination of strict rules can, in some circumstances, produce better outcomes. Hans Monderman, one of the pioneers of the shared-space approach, said, “When you don’t exactly know who has right of way, you tend to seek eye contact with other road users….You automatically reduce your speed, you have contact with other people and you take greater care.”

The idea is to return public spaces to people in order to encourage them to take greater personal responsibility. Monderman explained, “We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior….The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”

Who could have thought that the wisdom of Lao-tsu, in the Tao Te Ching, could be applied to traffic safety engineering?

Stop trying to control. Let go of fixed plans and concepts, and the world will govern itself.

The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.

….If you don’t trust the people, you make them untrustworthy.

Jonathan Zittrain mentions the shared-space design philosophy as a way to explain the success of Wikipedia. I would extend the principle to many other commons – water management, lobster harvesting, free software projects, scientific database commons, and much else. We naturally have greater respect for rules that we have had some role in formulating – and a willingness to punish those who misbehave — than we have for rules that have been imposed upon us by some higher authority.

All of this is not to say that the world will necessarily or naturally self-organize itself. A larger “meta-design” is often needed to enable social behaviors to emerge and sustain themselves. One way that this occurs, according to Wikipedia’s entry on “shared space,” is by having a “fine-meshed slow network” and a “larger-meshed fast network.”

The slow network, which is the subject of the shared space treatment, is characterized as the street network which make public space vital and accessible. On the slow network, motor traffic is welcomed as a guest, but has to adapt to certain social norms of behavior. The layout of the road must make this clear. The fast or supra-traffic network, which allows traffic to reach destinations quickly, and which is designed using traditional traffic engineering methodologies, is essential if the slow network is to function properly.

Surely the “shared space” philosophy in traffic engineering has some larger lessons for our reflexive faith in law at the expense of social norms. We tend to rely too much on the power of law – and minimize the importance of on-the-ground social norms. It is akin to the conventional liberal focus on constitutional test cases and regulation when sometimes the more important goal should be organizing a social movement.

On the other hand, libertarians and conservatives tend to celebrate social voluntarism and local control while failing to admit such approaches are often no substitute for strong, well-enforced laws. A number of conservative ideologues, in their attempts to thwart safety regulation, for example, argue that mandatory seat belts, motorcycle helmets and even anti-lock blocks simply encourage people to drive faster and more recklessly. By that logic, we should put sharp knives on dashboards so that people will drive safely.

I revel in the counter-intuitive success of Verkeersbordvrij because it honors the role each of us have as social agents. That said, let’s face it: law is often indispensable for maintaining certain shared ethical norms. And cultures differ. What works in Holland may not work in Colorado. But who could quarrel with experiments in empowering people to develop their own ways of resolving collective concerns, whether it is driving across town or editing an online encyclopedia?

Photo by merfam via Flickr, licensed under a CC BY license.

At one time, activists focused on the environmental causes of breast cancer and the importance of prevention. But as corporate marketers came to recognize that breast cancer awareness offers a great way to position one’s company as a champion of women, the “social meaning” of the disease changed. The “pink ribbon” branding of breast cancer has made the disease an upbeat, emotional celebration of “survivors,” women’s fitness, civic voluntarism – and selling.

Major charities like the Susan Komen Foundation and the National Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations have entered into “win-win” partnerships with large corporations to use product marketing as a vehicle for promoting awareness of breast cancer detection and treatment. In short order, breast cancer testing and treatment became a wildly successful theme for selling kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaners, cosmetics, jewelry, clothing and countless other products.

Pink ribbons became a form of socially responsible branding for Avon lipstick, Yoplait yogurt and Kellogg cereals. KitchenAid developed a pink “Cook for the Cure” mixer. BMW gave a dollar to the cause for every mile of test driving that a prospective customer did with a BMW vehicle. Estée Lauder makeup counters distributed 1.5 million pink ribbons.

Through their affiliation with this cause, corporate marketers have shrewdly positioned themselves as women-friendly, socially engaged civic boosters. What’s so problematic about that? Nothing, so far as it goes. But as King points out, the gender-oriented marketing of the “pink” campaigns has helped “reproduce associations between women and shopping, and a more general tendency to deploy consumption as a major avenue of political participation.” The advertisers make it seem that buying a pink-ribboned product is the most virtuous achievement one might do to fight breast cancer.

As the bandwagon got rolling, other businesses discovered how breast cancer awareness could help them rehabilitate their beleaguered images. For example, after a series of prominent NFL players were involved in serious crimes such as rape, domestic violence and DUI, the NFL launched a “Real Men Wear Pink” campaign. This PR effort enabled the NFL to showcase its players as community-minded volunteers who care about women and children.

It is sobering to reflect on the history of how corporate marketers and their affiliated foundations adopted breast cancer, and dramatically remade it, as a way to serve their commercial needs. King writes:

Until the 1980s, corporate philanthropy was a relatively random, eclectic, and unscientific activity based largely on the individual preferences of high-ranking executives. Since then, it has been transformed into a highly calculated, quantified and planned approach, often called “strategic philanthropy” or “charitable investing.” Of all the tools that have emerged during this time, cause-related marketing—when a company allies itself with a specific cause, and contributes money, time or expertise in return for the right to make publicity or commercial value—is among the most popular and publicly visible. The effect of this transformation has been to place philanthropy at the center of business activity and to transform it into a revenue-producing mechanism.

Pink-ribbon marketing reaps huge amounts of customer goodwill and visibility by “breaking through the clutter” of conventional advertising. “Race for the Cure” foot races allow companies to celebrate cancer survivors and their friends and family with torrents of feel-good, Oprah-like publicity – a regimented display of optimism that King calls a “tyranny of cheerfulness.”

With such a relentless focus on the catharsis of “surviving,” however, there is little room to discuss how poverty, unequal access to health care and racial inequalities contribute to the prevalence of breast cancer. The priorities of marketing and sales leave little room for anger, dissent and substantive discussion.

King points out, for example, that the pink-ribbon crowd is not agitating for a larger federal budget for breast cancer prevention. It does not pressure corporations to identify and stop chemical causes of breast cancer. (Breast Cancer Action, the San Francisco-based activist group, accuses “pink” sponsors like Avon, Revlon, and Estée Lauder of using known or suspected cancer-causing chemicals, such as parabens and phthalates in their products.)

When marketers set the priorities for public awareness, there is little interest in racial or economic injustice. King notes that the pink campaigns do not call attention to the unequal access to cancer treatment – or health care more generally – suffered by poor people and people of color. Such messages would presumably detract from the goal of selling product to a more affluent consumer demographic.

The dirty secret is that the actual amounts of charitable money raised from pink-ribbon marketing campaigns are quite modest relative to the publicity that corporate marketers receive. Some corporate sponsors spend more money on breast cancer-themed advertisements than they donate to research or treatment. The result, says King, is that the pink-ribbon campaigns “exploit the public’s goodwill by making big promises that are not being fulfilled.”

There remain a few advocacy groups, such as Breast Cancer Action, that continue to focus on prevention and social equity, rather than on treatment alone. BCA has re-named the annual marketing campaigns in October “Breast Cancer Industry Month” as a way to emphasize the costs of treatment. It has also launched a counter-campaign, “Think Before You Pink,” to urge women to “do something besides shop.” BCA urges consumers to buy only from companies that provide specific, explicit information about how their donations will be spent. They also urge that donations be given to organizations that address the causes of breast cancer, and prevention.

The danger of the whole “win-win” rhetoric used by the pink-ribbon marketers, is coming to believe that there are no losers. In fact, as Samantha King points out in this brave book, the corporate takeover of breast cancer activism has marginalized all sorts of important issues about breast cancer that deserve our full attention.