The obvious solution is private investment. Or at least, that’s the only solution that the Times explores (notwithstanding a misleading headline on the online version of the story, “Cities Debate Privatizing Public Infrastructure”).

Anderson supplies no critical analysis of why governments and politicians are failing to make needed infrastructure investments, or how government might pursue public-spirited alternatives to private equity. Instead, we hear Norman Mineta, a former U.S. transportation secretary and now an adviser to Credit Suisse, blandly explain, “Budget gaps are starting to increase the viability of public-private partnerships.”

The Times story amounts to a hot tip to the investor class: “Vulnerable public assets await your predatory attention. Big ROI is assured!”

Photo, “Bay Bridge Silhouette,” by Thomas Hawk, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.

Republicans and investors have long railed against “big government” while enjoying government’s “liquidity backstopping” (Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) and government borrowing to finance reckless foreign wars. Now that such bleeding of government has led to crumbling infrastructure, Wall Street, in a fine thank you to its benefactor, wants to go in for the kill. Groups like Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and the Carlyle Group have amassed some $250 billion to take public infrastructure private.

Standing ready to help them are politicians who have abandoned their commitment to government except as a tool for military aggression and a way station to lucrative private employment. Such politicians are only too ready to enter into “partnerships” that traduce the public interest. The Anderson article gives such politicians plenty of reason to feel complacent. It offers sales pitches from the executives of investment banks and ideological pap from the libertarian-minded Reason Foundation. The privatization of public roads and bridges is cast as a brilliant, natural innovation. Anderson ignores the compelling economic and public-interest reasons for managing and financing public infrastructure through government.

As it happens, Phineas Baxandall, a senior tax and budget analyst at U.S. PIRG, offered an extensive analysis of these very issues in an essay here on OntheCommons.org a few months ago. His piece was based on a report on the subject that he had previously written for U.S. PIRG. Baxandall makes a number of points that Anderson ignores entirely:

Governments can borrow upfront sums at substantially lower cost than can private companies. A private entity will have higher capital borrowing costs and must divert some revenues to shareholder profits. So even at its most basic financial level, privatization is not advantageous to the public.

Perhaps even more than these fiscal problems, long-term road contracts pose a variety of serious threats to the public interest. These include fragmentation and a loss of public control over transportation policy, and an inability to prescribe future needs in contracts signed decades earlier… For example, some privatization contracts explicitly limit the state’s ability to improve or expand nearby roads. Private investors fearing that improved free roads would compete with their paying traffic, have obtained non-compete clauses in California and Colorado, and to a lesser extent, in Indiana.

Instead of examining such issues, Anderson merely notes the political backlash that some politicians have suffered. After Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels granted a 75-year lease on a state road for $3.8 billion, drivers began to sport bumper stickers that read, “Keep the toll road, lease Mitch.” Without further facts, the article makes it seem as if Indiana drivers are a bunch of ignorant yahoos who stupidly oppose taking Wall Street’s money.

Indeed, Anderson makes it seem slightly insane not to privatize infrastructure. She writes: “And then there is the odd romance between Americans and their roads: they do not want anyone other than the government owning them.”

This is followed by a self-serving quote from the head of infrastructure investment banking at Credit Suisse, who breathlessly warns, “There’s a huge opportunity that the U.S. public sector is in danger of losing. It thinks there is a boatload of capital and when it is politically convenient it will be able to take advantage of it. But the capital is going into infrastructure assets available today around the world and not waiting for projects the U.S. the public sector [sic] may sponsor in the future.”

Behind all the genteel business-speak, allow me to offer a plain-speak translation of what the New York Times business section declared today:

“Hurry, hurry, hurry! Step right up and sell off your public infrastructure treasures financed by generations of previous taxpayers! Give them to Wall Street – whom you just bailed out at discount prices – and let them earn fantastic, guaranteed rates of return for decades to come while cutting amenities and ignoring evolving public needs. You poor schlumpy taxpayers can continue to shoulder the high-risk, long-term investments. And if any of those public assets begin to look attractive – say, the Internet, wifi spectrum or federally financed drug research — why, we’ll be sure to swoop down and be the first take them away from you. After all, we have more money and better access to your elected leaders better than you do!”

The New York Times is a great institution, but can we please shed the “liberal” moniker that is so often attached to it? A precious commons is threatened by enclosure, and all we hear is cheering.

Before my very eyes citizens are rushing in to fill a vacuum left by news media consolidation and the debilitating loss of expert, professional reporting staff. Some laid off or pushed out journalists of note, still committed to their calling and their communities, are shaping digital, online public political discussion that incorporates new voices.

The democratic process, which depends on information gathering, analysis and dissemination, is a commons in peril. Hopeful, optimistic citizen advocates for local causes are turned cynical by the stronghold of money on political races, policy makers and the press. Even jaded operatives are waking up to the taint of money in national campaigns and efforts to pass legislation.

What is a commons? I think about it differently at different times—there is no ironclad definition. However I always say that the commons is one of these things: a natural resource that is freely inherited (such as water, biodiversity, or DNA) or a cultural resource (such as scientific knowledge or language) or social conventions and structures created by people, (such the stock market or a transit system). A commons may exist within or outside of a marketplace but it is best cared for by a collective rather than left to free market forces or government neglect and ineffective management. A commons may not be noticed until it is take away—as has happened with our precious clean air. A commons is something that really ought to belong to everybody, not just the rich, the privileged or whomever got there first.

But it looks like rescue is on the way for the commons of democratic discourse and practice—from small efforts to the global network of the iCommons My colleague David Bollier just presented this speech at the iCommons conference on the emergence of the commons sector.

The emerging political information commons here in the States is perhaps partly a re-birthing. Lessons can be learned from some of the old timers of media access. Decades ago I worked for a media organization—one of many student and community video access facilities proliferated throughout the country in the early 70’s. The advent of portable, consumer grade recording equipment (if you could call a hundred pounds of reel-to-reel videotape deck and gear portable) unleashed a wave of citizen news reporting, documentation, community broadcasting, screenings and video distribution that seems to be forgotten today.

The organization was University Community Video, now called Intermedia Arts. I catalogued a closet full of tapes from the early days for our state historical society that included: coverage of Vietnam War protests; eyewitness accounts of Native American legal battles; testimony by Black Americans displaced from housing by urban renewal; shows about women on welfare, rural poverty, and teenage pregnancy; early reporting on the AIDS epidemic; political satire; experimental dance and music; and profiles of unusual local personalities and businesses. A generation marched and alternative media makers were there to cover it—because nobody else did.

Our sister effort was low power community radio. Our cousins were neighborhood and under represented constituency newspapers and journals.

The current citizen journalism powered by the proliferation of inexpensive, easy ways to produce blogs, vlogs, text messages and news aggregators seems like déjà vu. The technologies and constituencies of this new brand of citizen journalism are crossing over and melding just as the old ones did. Yes, the old standard was analog and limited to broadcast over the airwaves and the new technology is digital and travels the globe almost at the speed of light, but the spirit is the same.

Today I see what is happening with commons sensitive eyes. I see implicit commons sector principles and organizing tactics in many of the new brand of public, participatory arts and media groups. Flat, non-hierarchical, decentralized management, born of necessity AND intention, make for porous organizations that let cross disciplinary magic happen. The next evolution of collaborative cross-fertilization, a messy process artists and cultural workers are uniquely comfortable with, is commons consciousness across isolated issue divides. And new communication technologies give these fertile parings new wings—for cheap.

I am compelled to deliver a word of caution for the online commons to remember to connect with well grounded groups that originate in diverse communities. I implore you to teach and adhere to important tenets of the commons: hold out for equity of access and benefit for all from a commons resource, protect it’s integrity, replenish it, and pass it on whole.

I worry about the possibility that practitioners of citizen reporting and arts activists are giving lip service only to nonpartisanship. Moderate the enthusiasm just a bit to insist on principles of accuracy and even-handedness. A commons approach eschews partisanship and ideology. The idea is not to build a new party or a new government. A commons viewpoint is neither left or right, progressive or conservative, Democratic, Republican, Libertarian or Green. It is not anti-Capitalist, although at first glance it may seem so. Commons thinking transcends these divisions. Commons is an old worldview of mutual responsibility and collective care that we all need to learn again.

With that said, hooray for The Unconvention. Hooray for interesting, engaging political actions powered by citizens like the imaginative “Your Yard, Our Message” lawn sign contest, eclectic personal messages on YouTube as part of “I Approve This Message,” (here is mine ) and courageous acts like “Kulture Klub Art Shanties” that claim space and give a political voice to youth experiencing homelessness.

Long live the commons. Long live democracy. Citizen journalist Kathleen Maloney signing off for now.

But in a surprising instance of man-bites-dog, the people of Montana have fought the privatization of the phrase “the last best place” – and won. With help from Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer and Senator Max Baucus, the U.S. Senate is expected to pass legislation this year that would prohibit the Commerce Department from granting a trademark for that particular phrase. This means that the people of Montana, the State of Montana and small businesses throughout the state will be able to refer to their state as “the last best place.”

Photo by Stuck in Customs, via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.

The controversy had its beginnings in 1988 when a professor of writing at the University of Montana, William Kittridge, and Annick Smith, published an anthology of Montana writers called “The Last Best Place.” The phrase had such an immediate resonance with people in the state that everyone from real estate brokers to motels to the state tourist office began using the phrase to describe Montana. It became a way of expressing one’s identification with and affection for this vast state of enormous natural beauty and its one million inhabitants.

Enter Las Vegas businessman David E. Lipson. One of his businesses, according to one reporter, tried to obtain a trademark on the phrase. He wanted to use it to market a variety of his businesses, including The Last Best Beef. The trademark application was so broad, says a Washington trademark lawyer cited by the New York Times (August 17, 2008) that it would have given Lipson a “de facto monopoly” on use of the term. In 2004, Montana Senator Conrad Burns tried to slip an amendment into a budget bill to prevent the registration of the phrase as a trademark. But Lipson challenged the bill in court. He won at the district court level and then lost on appeal.

Now, to put the matter to rest and prevent any future challenges, Senator Baucus has introduced a stronger, more ironclad version of the legislation that has now passed in the relevant Senate and House Committees, and is expected to become law.

Perhaps there is a lesson in all this. Why shouldn’t other popular expressions be granted some sort of immunity from corporate privatization? Why should Nike, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola or Kodak be able to march in and legally “steal” for itself a phrase or image that morally belongs to the people, or some distinct collective, who gave it social currency (and thus cash value) in the first place?

Among the world’s burning issues, the deficiencies of trademark law in protecting socially created value may not be at the top of the list. On the other hand, protecting the symbols of identity and community pride is no small matter, either. Just as the citizens of Montana.

Still image from YouTube video by Stephanie Lenz.

With the high-handed arrogance to which copyright holders have become accustomed, Universal Music sent a cease-and-desist letter to a Pennsylvania mother who had uploaded a 29-second video of her toddler dancing to a garbled Prince song playing in the background. In a rare turn of events, the mother, Stephanie Lenz, sued Universal for sending her a meritless “takedown notice.” She said the notice harmed her fair use and free speech rights, and she wants damages in return.

“I was really surprised and angry when I learned my video was removed, Lenz told the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which helped her bring her lawsuit. “Universal should not be using legal threats to try to prevent people from sharing home videos of their kids with family and friends.” EFF staff attorney Corynne McSherry said that “Universal’s takedown notice doesn’t even pass the laugh test. Copyright holders should be held accountable when they undermine non-infringing, fair uses like this video.”

Universal ultimately declined to argue that the video wasn’t fair use. But the company did argue that its mere assertion of a copyright violation should be sufficient justification for sending a takedown notice. Universal did not want to have to make a “fact-intensive inquiry” before sending out a notice, presumably because that would be too costly and time-consuming. And besides, Universal implied, it knows what is a copyright infringement. (Or in this case, Prince himself, who by one news report was directly involved in instigating the takedown notice in the first place.)

In other words, Universal Music wants to place the burden on individuals to vindicate their fair use rights when confronted with large corporations with armies of lawyers making unilateral assertions. Talk about ‘let’s go crazy’!

Federal judge Jeremy Fogel implicitly rejected this scenario and insisted that companies are perfectly capable of making fair-use determinations before they send out takedown notices. The judge’s ruling is a cold slap in the face for corporate copyright holders, who routinely threaten individuals with groundless cease-and-desist letters and act as if fair use is a legal triviality. By refusing to dismiss the case – and by squarely affirming the importance of citizens’ fair use rights – Judge Fogel delivers a welcome message that copyrights are not sweeping and absolute. The public’s fair use rights matter. Further evidence that fair use may be getting its groove back.

The film, from Pixar/Disney (!), is the story of a sad, cute robot/trash compactor, the only apparent creature left on an abandoned Earth. WALL-E has been programmed by his creator, the Buy n Large Corporation, to clean up the monumental, crumbling mess of consumer crap strewn about by the human race. A century earlier, in the 21st Century, as Earth became uninhabitable, humanity decamped to a vast space colony that now aimlessly roams a distant galaxy. In the apocalyptic gloom that is now Earth, Wall-E dutifully stacks neat cubes of compacted trash into towering skyscrapers. (WALL-E stands for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter—Earth Class.)

Earthlings live in a manmade space environment that resembles a mall, tropical resort and freeway rolled into one. People spend their lives reclining in hovering Barcaloungers looking at translucent TV/computer screens propped up in front of them. They constantly sip Big Gulp sodas, gossip about celebrities, buy things and behave like sheep whenever the hear the voices of disembodied computers (think “HAL” in 2001) and the CEO of Buy n Large, the mega-corporation that used to govern Earth and now runs the floating space colony. (The CEO – the only live-action character in the film – is played to perfection by Fred Willard, who once specialized as the sleazy talk-show sidekick on “Fernwood 2Nite.”) Everyone is an obese, inert blob who can barely move.

I cannot recall a movie that so deftly lampoons and laments in one seamless narrative the sad, corrupt state of modern market culture. To be sure, the film’s message is delivered in the guise of a humorous cartoon – the preferred vehicle for messages that are otherwise too hot to handle. No film with WALL-E’s devastating themes could ever have gotten past the Hollywood gatekeepers unless it were disguised as some sort of kiddie fare – “good fun.” A frankly adult version of the film’s themes would be seen as far too depressing, political and controversial. And indeed, conservatives have predictably criticized the film.

What gives WALL-E its poignant charm – despite its heartbreakingly bleak premises – is the earnest resourcefulness and integrity of WALL-E and his almost-pathetic infatuation with Eve, a sleek, zippy, aerodynamic cylinder-robot also owned by the Buy n Large Corporation.

One day Eve arrives on Earth to investigate whether it has any viable lifeforms and therefore whether the “ghost ship” of humanity can return to Earth. It turns out that Wall-E had recently discovered a small green sprout of a plant, which Eve seizes. When Eve suddenly zooms off with the plant to notify the Buy n Large Corporation that Earth can now be re-colonized, WALL-E desperately tries to follow. (Eve stands for “Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator.)

WALL-E is in love. She is the first “living” creature that he has seen in decades. The rest of the film revolves around WALL-E’s chase and courtship of Eve, and their adventures as “rogue robots” trying to save humanity from its narcoleptic existence.

The two robots are barely human, but, in this sci-fi universe, they are the most caring and humane creatures around. People have become slug-like blobs with no independent will, zest or love. By contrast, WALL-E takes immense childlike pleasure in the castoff emphemera of consumer culture that he finds while cleaning up the planet. He carefully stores and cherishes battered Rubrik’s cubes, elf dolls and cigarette lighters before trash-compacting everything else. He repeatedly watches a 1940s Hollywood musical film on an ancient videotape, which instills in him a longing to fall in love. WALL-E acts as a brave, sad counterpoint to the utter devastation of the Earth and the affectless humans who have become consumer-zombies.

This film doesn’t preach to make any points. It doesn’t need to. Kids immediately understand what’s going on, and adults do not feel as if it’s “just a kid’s movie.” It is a tribute to both the artistry of the film and its critique of consumer/corporate culture that WALL-E has grossed $267 million in the two months since its release. (There’s big money to be made in depicting alienation with modern consumerism!) My only complaint is that the film should probably have a PG, not a G, rating; I found it plenty disturbing.

The one thing the film does not tackle is how exactly humanity re-colonizes and revives the Earth. That’s when the film ends. Clearly that is a tale for another day. But one thing is clear: it will require another order of imagination entirely, something that goes beyond anything the Buy-N-Large Corporation has to offer, to save humans from their nightmarish exile in a Total Market Existence. They will need to find new ways to cooperate to save the small, green plant that WALL-E has improbably salvaged, and which is the uncredited centerpiece of the film: life.

David Bollier at iSummit 2008. Photo by Tomislav Medak ,via Flickr, licensed under a Creative Commons BY license.

The question that I want to address today is: “How might free culture begin to relate to other social movements?” I will start with several quick examples of what I call “digital citizenship.” I think you will quickly connect the dots.

First, there’s the story of how bloggers did a much better, more accurate job in covering the run-up to the Iraq War than The New York Times and Washington Post. The mainstream media gave us tragically misleading news about weapons of mass destruction at best, and at worst, government propaganda.

Then there is the story of Virginia Governor George Allen. While running for the U.S. Senate in 2004, Allen called a college student of Indian heritage who was videotaping one of his speeches, a “macaca” – an ethnic slur. The video, when posted on YouTube, was a key factor in Allen’s loss – and in the Democrats’ re-capture of majority control of the U.S. Senate.

Then there is the memorable story of students at Swarthmore College who exposed evidence of “hackable” Diebold electronic voting machines. When Diebold tried to suppress the evidence by invoking copyright law, the students and other activists published the documents on the Web, triggering many states to ban Diebold voting machines.

Finally, there is the story of a group of activists, lawyers and journalists who created a public wiki to document the lethal side effects of Zyprexa, a best-selling anti-psychotic drug. Prosecutors eventually sought a $1 billion fine against the drug maker, Eli Lilly, for suppressing evidence of the drug’s risks.

I apologize for not having more international examples, but they might also include the huge “flash mobs” in South Korea who protested their president’s meat import policies and Egyptians who used the Internet to protest soaring food prices.

What do these wildly different episodes suggest? They are evidence of a new type of Internet-enabled citizenship. Today, thanks to the Internet and digital technologies, citizens can increasingly play a direct role in politics and self-governance. We are acquiring new abilities to instigate action based on our own priorities, our own vision, our own voices.

I call this new and empowered form of citizenship “history-making citizenship.”

Citizens do not need to be on the periphery any more. We don’t need to plead with politicians or the news media to express our feelings. We have the power to express our passions ourselves, on a global stage, and to initiate political action directly.
What’s significant about history-making citizenship is its challenge to the centralized bureaucracies of government and corporations. We commoners have some under-appreciated advantages over these dinosaurs, who are still trying to figure out how to operate on open platforms.

In a great many instances, we have better, more reliable and more timely knowledge than big institutions. We have access to a larger pool of talent – more eyes, more ears, more creative minds, and in many more locations – than the centralized institutions that claim the right to govern us.

One of the most powerful vehicles driving this transformation is the commons, a new paradigm of value-creation. A commons arises whenever a given community decides that it wishes to manage a resource in a collective manner, with a special regard for equitable access, fairness and sustainability.
We are now witnessing the rise of all sorts of new genres of commons:

• free software;
• collaborative websites and archives;
• social networking communities;
• the tens of millions of blogs in the blogosphere;
• a large constellation of wikis;
• the music remix and video mashup communities;
• and many others.

The Commons Sector is all about socially created value. Socially created value is becoming a macroeconomic and cultural force in its own right – as Yochai Benkler has so insightfully explained over the years.

The rise of the commons is evidence of something I call ““The Great Value Shift.” The market is not necessarily the only or the best way to create wealth these days. In many instances, the commons is a more accessible, more efficient, more productive alternative to the market. That is one reason that we are seeing such an explosion of new commons.

This leads me to my first point: I say it’s time for us to take stock of the larger political ramifications of the many projects that constitute the Commons Sector. Why? Because I believe that the commons sector represents an emergent new kind of political culture – one that has the capacity to transform the current order of things, an order that is structurally hostile to many of our core values.

The new Commons Sector is not an ideological movement, however, nor a conventional kind of politics. It is not about posturing or messaging or symbolism. It is not about tactical maneuvering or power grabs. It is not about ideology. The Commons Sector is about building something far more basic and enduring. It is about changing how people do things – practically, and at the grassroots – and thereby changing the infrastructure and context for political action.

This is an indirect and long-term strategy – but ultimately a more effective one. It brings to mind the ancient Chinese game “Go,” in which the better player encircles an opponent before the first player even realizes there is a threat.

Project by project, working at the grassroots around the world, we of the Commons Sector are confronting the pathologies of existing markets and corrupt government structures by building our own working alternatives. We are building new forms of power and institutions that can fight closed oligopolies that serve the few, the connected and the wealthy. This is how the commons is serving as a new vehicle for political and cultural transformation.

R. Buckminster Fuller once said: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” That’s what the commons sector is all about: building a new reality.
That has been the Creative Commons strategy from Day One: Invent a new culture, a free culture, a culture that can protect itself from private market capture and government control. Invent a culture that can build new types of markets and pioneer new types of self-governance.

That, in effect, is what has come to pass over the previous ten years. The commons sector has become a competing form of governance.

As I put it in the subtitle of my forthcoming book, Viral Spiral, the commoners are “building a digital republic of their own.” My book, due out in January, tells this history. It is the history of the struggle to create free software and the Creative Commons licenses, and the growth of what I call “viral spirals” such as open educational resources, open-access publishing, open science and open business models.

The commons is a “competing” form of governance because it establishes a stable, alternative power base. It competes, in a sense, with government-made law and with seller-dominated markets.

A few years ago, in a brilliant essay, Internet scholar David R. Johnson declared the online commons a new kind of social/biological metabolism for creating “law.” It has its own internal systems for managing its affairs and for interacting with its environment. It can repair itself and define its own persistent identity.

What’s really important is that the commons, as a new kind of “organism” in our culture, can increasingly compete with — and even out-perform — conventional institutions of government, business and media. As a new paradigm of self-organizing behavior and governance, the Commons Sector represents a great leap forward in citizenship.

In the United States in the 18th Century, citizens had the right to affirm the decisions of the landed elite. In 19th Century America, citizenship was all about joining large, centralized political parties. In the 20th Century, citizenship was mostly about becoming an “educated voter” as a way to try to achieve good government.

The Commons Sector takes citizenship to an entirely new level. It honors open access, transparency, the freedom to participate and social equity in ways that governments do not or cannot. This is what I mean when I say that free culture represents a new kind of democratic polity, a new form of governance. The thousands of commons that we are all creating collectively represent a new kind of digital republic – an emerging free culture nation without borders.

Many political elites are uneasy about the commons. They are not so sure they like all this transparency and open participation. They are wary about the idea of direct access to knowledge. And decentralized, self-generated action? Why, it can’t be controlled by a bureaucracy or party. It’s “out of control.” It’s anarchy! Even many of our liberal friends don’t trust decentralized citizenship, perhaps because it threatens their roles as self-appointed proxies for the masses.

Then there is the distressing fact that free culture and open networks don’t fit into neat ideological pigeonholes. This, however, is the deep secret of our power: We don’t define ourselves by what we are against – but by our own affirmative vision of the future. We are more intent on inventing something new than in fighting yesterday’s ideological battles.

We therefore are not imprisoned by identity politics and stale ideologies. We are not constrained by the organizational structures of the past. We are investing ourselves in a more dynamic, improvised method of building the future. This, I believe, is the foundation for a new political vision that deserves to “go wide.”

My argument so far goes like this: We are seeing the rise of a new kind of citizenship that is beginning to show serious political power and sophistication. This power stems partly from the fact that the new commons sector is an economic force of production in its own right. It commands greater moral credibility and cultural authenticity than many other institutions. And it represents an insurgent sort of democratic power that cannot be easily consolidated or co-opted.

The creation of this digital republic is the achievement of a generation. It started with free software; gained new momentum with the CC licenses; took off with the arrival of Web 2.0; and is now exploding with the innovations that we see here at iCommons.

Now it’s time for free culture to take its own political potential more seriously. We commoners need to find new ways to engage with mainstream political culture and lend support to other commoners – especially those commoners working outside of the universe of information and culture.

As Editor of OntheCommons.org, I see the dynamics of enclosure replicated in dozens of areas. Market enclosures are consuming our atmosphere and agricultural seeds and the human genome, two-thirds of which is patented. It may soon turn the Arctic into a major oil drilling field and eliminate the biodiversity essential to human life. Enclosures are also consuming our civic spaces and media. And so on.

I think the next, natural step in the evolution of the free culture movement is to explore how we might begin to make common cause with these other commoners to challenge other sorts of market enclosures – enclosures of nature, of public infrastructures, of local communities. Enclosures that the North is imposing on the South.

We in free culture have learned a great deal over the years about how markets can be closed, anticompetitive and proprietary — and how this can result in profound assaults against freedom, social equity and democracy. But we’ve also learned to devise creative solutions – new mechanisms of law, technology and social norms that can protect the commons. And we have found each other!

Given the enormous challenges facing our planet – and the people in developing nations – and the nearly universal yearning for more responsive, accountable institutions of government and business. it only makes sense that the digital citizens of free culture turn their gaze to the many mainstream political challenges of our time.

As most of you know, Larry Lessig is trying to bring some of the tools and insights of the commons to a new project called Change Congress. The group seeks to tackle the “systemic corruption” of the democratic process in the U.S. Congress. Larry points us to an inescapable fact: There is a wider political arena that needs our attention.

Fortunately, there are also millions of other commoners out there who want more humane and effective models of development, who want governments to respect basic human rights and democratic freedoms, who have more bracing visions of progress than that offered by the neoliberal model of privatization and crony capitalism.

In making common cause with these other commoners, there is a one significant challenge that we will face – the difference between market enclosures of nature and enclosures of culture. The difference is that creative works are not depletable. A song or video or book can’t be used up. They can be reproduced for next to nothing. And therefore, there is no “tragedy of the commons” – just a “comedy of the commons.”

In the world of natural resources, the dynamic is precisely the opposite. Natural resources tend to be depletable. The more that we use the sky as a waste dump or use up finite supplies of oil, the less there are of those resources.

This fundamental difference in the nature of the shared resource means that this “other branch of the commons family” has a very different kind of politics than we do. One is trying to unleash abundance. The other is trying to allocate scarcity fairly.
So there is a huge split between these two branches of the family. But in either case, commoners are dealing with twin errors of neoliberal economics and government policy. The errors are treating creativity and culture as scarce, and treating natural resources as essentially infinite.

Despite our differences with other commoners, we are all fighting market enclosures. We are all fighting expansions of private property rights that make it impossible to provide for the collective good. We are all trying to declare our collective wealth as inalienable – and to fight the forced conversion of commons into markets. We are all trying to invent new mechanisms to protect the commons.

I believe that it’s time to open up some new conversations with those commoners who are adjacent to our work. We in free culture have several important things to offer.

First, we offer the narrative of the commons – a narrative that helps us reclaim that which has been taken from us through market enclosure. We also offer a sophistication about the Internet and digital technologies – a talent that gives us a certain “home field advantage” as more of life goes online.

Third, we have a moral credibility and competence that is rooted in the subversive ethic that culture should be open, participatory and democratic. For all of these reasons, the commons can increasingly “compete” with government and business as a serious “third sector” of society.

The Commons Sector represents a sleeping volcano of potential political power. It is able to challenge governments and businesses that are closed, stagnant, unresponsive and resistant to new ideas. It can also transform the existing generation of citizen organizations, many of which have become stodgy, compromised and bereft of vision and grassroots energy.

I realize that the outreach I am proposing is beyond the scope and competence of iCommons and free culture as they now exist. Indeed, some skeptics may outright oppose wading into the grubby thickets of conventional politics.

These are fair concerns. But I am convinced that free culture has always retained its vitality by looking outward and by starting new “viral spirals” with other commoners who want to make the world a better place.

We the people of the iCommons network are a very unusual group. We have great transnational reach, political sophistication and tech expertise. We pride ourselves on our democratic values and idealism – but also on our pragmatic commitment to things that work.

Imagine if our talents could go beyond the familiar circle of free culture issues and reach a world desperate for new ideas, political tools and leadership. Imagine if we could strengthen our own free culture advocacy by developing partnerships with other commoners fighting market enclosures.

It is presumptuous of me to say how exactly this next stage in free culture might unfold. Indeed, there is not likely to be a single path. And in any case, it is up to the commoners themselves to decide. But I do think that it is time to explore the possibilities and to begin some exciting and necessary new conversations.

The slides that accompany Bollier’s remarks can be viewed here.

Even the most ardent free marketer would not go so far as to say that Bill Gates or T. Boone Pickens has the right to own the oxygen we breathe or the words we use. Although some forms of water privatization and genetic patenting have become issues, popular opinion still demands the fundamentals of life should be shielded somewhat from the realm of buying and selling. (That’s why prostitution and the selling of organs for transplant are illegal most places.)

With one notable exception: food. As essential to our lives as air or water, food nonetheless has been widely accepted as a private commodity. It is grown, processed, packaged and sold for a profit, usually by large corporations. Few look upon it as a commons, of which everyone rightly deserves a share.

But for more than 35 years, one woman has courageously carried the message that food is more than simply another consumer product.

She is Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and founder of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, who overturned the conventional wisdom that hunger and starvation are caused by a shortage of food. She has patiently but forcefully made the case that people go hungry because of inequality and greed in the distribution of food.

Lappé’s influence has been immense—in promoting vegetarian and whole grains diets, in broadening the scope of democracy, in opening up thinking about international food production and marketing systems. Yet she’s not convinced everyone.

A lot of news coverage on the recent food shortages around the world did not discuss agriculture, trade and social policies that keeps food out of the hands of people, but rather blamed the crisis on “not enough food to feed empty stomachs.”

That phrase came from a reporter for National Public Radio, who in a 4-part series championed pesticides, artificial fertilizer and genetically-modified seeds as the solution to food shortages and the impoverishment of small farmers around the world.

“NPR misses the real story,” Lappé writes in a blog on the Huffington Post. “On every continent one can find empowered rural communities developing GM-free, agro-ecological farming systems. They’re succeeding. The largest overview study, looking at farmers transitioning to sustainable practices in 57 countries, involving almost 13 million small farmers on almost 100 million acres, found after four years that average yields were up 79 percent.

“All over the world,” she continues, “poor farming communities are discovering their own power to work with each other and with nature to build healthier, more secure, and more democratic lives.”

Although Lappé doesn’t use the c-word, that sounds like a good working definition for an international food commons.

For more information see the Small Planet Institute