Protocols for Transformation: Ecologies of the Commons and the Futures of Solidarity
Jose Ramos
In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN came up with a language to create the internet, HTTP, or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol. The innovation allowed one computer on the internet to talk to, or link with, another one, such that over time, as websites proliferated, they could be connected into what we know today as the world wide web. We tend to look at the web as the fundamental innovation, but it was this hyper text transfer protocol that allowed this web to emerge in the first place.
Today we are facing a multitude of crises and challenges and similarly, when we think about the diversity of issues we are facing, we understand that these are not segregated issues but rather connected at the systemic and even epistemological levels (related to how we understand knowledge, truth and reality). For example we know that the challenge of addressing climate change is technical but also related to political will, how the media portrays or makes invisible the climate emergency and to what extent political systems are controlled by special interests. Increasingly we also understand the various issues we face through the language and ideas of the “commons”.
Commons
Commons are that which we mutually depend on for our survival and wellbeing, such that we must collectively nurture or act in defense of them. Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for showing how a community could govern a common resource outside of the private-state dualism.[1] Her work laid the foundation for considering a variety of other commons, such as digital commons, urban commons and global commons. These varieties of commons are well documented, for example in Helfrich and Bollier’s works.[2]
At the same time, we are seeing a transformation in what is understood as a commons. Commons begin as implicit. It is only when a commons is threatened, being lost, or articulated as a shared value that it becomes explicit. When we think about our climate emergency, only a few decades ago we took for granted a stable and safe climate. The value of this was implicit. But now we can see that a safe climate is a commons, that which we mutually depend on for our survival and wellbeing, such that we must collectively nurture or act in defense of it.
In the city I lived in for 20 years, Melbourne (in Australia), buying a house used to be affordable. Today the flood of speculative capital and investment has made it utterly unaffordable. Sadly, people today can expect to pay 50–70% of their income on a mortgage. As in many cities with this problem, housing in Melbourne has shifted from something we took for granted to a commons — because we mutually depend on affordable housing for our collective survival and wellbeing. There are cities that knew this and took this into their own hands, places like Vienna and Berlin, where housing is a domain managed for the public good.[3]
The Public Sphere and the Commons
The public sphere is a way of talking about how society generates a shared reality. As I wrote in a previous paper, the public sphere is a type of commons, in that the ability to engage in mutually intelligible conversations with fellow citizens, to address common issues of concern, is something we mutually depend on for survival and wellbeing.[4] Without it, co-thinking and co-learning, let alone responding to fast developing problems, is lost and subsequently a society’s wellbeing is degraded. Analogous to the German experience with the Nazi takeover, in our era of fake news, conspiracy theories, alternative facts, filter bubbles and self referentiality, the public sphere has shifted from an implicit commons which had been taken for granted and has been harder to see, to an explicit commons that we have now identified needs to be cared for and nurtured for our mutual survival.
Our older public sphere followed Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the medium is the message.[5] An industrial mode of production did not just apply to the production of things, but also of media. It was a nationally curated public sphere, largely through TV. This industrial mode produced mass culture, with a centre-periphery of normativity. This means that even while this industrial mode generated a shared framework, the normativity of this framework was not co-created across diverse sectors of society, but rather was a reinscription of existing social power dynamics.
Enter the internet and platform capitalism. The internet quickly became a mode of decentralised expression. We might say that, at first, the internet expanded the public sphere, as new groups and causes joined in a shared conversation about the nature of reality. However as platform capitalism exerted itself, the social externality of this type of capitalism was the destruction of the public sphere itself. Algorithms that keep people locked into similar content (filter bubbles), algorithms that recommend ever more radical content (youtube), algorithms that incentivise adrenalin fueled responses, outrage and polarization (facebook), and algorithms which promote path dependencies that create oversized influencers (twitter). Thus the social externality of platform capitalism is the loss of this industrial public sphere — where people increasingly inhabit mutually unintelligible worlds.
Epistemological Crises
Today we are living through crises of meaning and the loss of the industrial mode of the public sphere. This also coincides with a deeper civilizational crisis, as our political economies and human propensity for technical innovation prove to be on a crash course with our biosphere and living systems — overshoot. So even while climate scientists and the climate movement mobilise change, conspiracy theories proliferate calling it all a hoax.
This represents a deep epistemological crisis, as what is involved in both the questioning of long standing assumptions about how to run our world (questioning industrial capitalism, patriarchy, etc.) and a centrifugal rupture from the monolith of industrial media into diverse new agglomerations and assemblages of meme hosting / spawning communities.
This move from normativity to post normativity is reflected and accelerated by the internet and platform capitalism. Many new identities, affiliations and strange attractors proliferate. For the variety of implict and explicit commons and commoning communities (from campaigns to protect oceans, to affordable housing initiatives, to campaigns to end modern day slavery) this is an opportunity, to create new communities and drive change at transnational scales. At the same time, it also creates ample opportunity for the more pernicious elements to also proliferate, hate and discrimination based affiliations (e.g. ISIS, white power groups, anti-vaxxers). This crisis and breakdown also generates polarization between groups that appear as rivals, and clashes occur. These conflicts and clashes are harvested by platform capitalism as profits, as people commit time engaging in these often pointless conflicts, as the companies sell advertising.
The following diagram tries to describe the transition we are moving through. The left part of the diagram describes the industrial-capitalist mode, driving this crisis in multiple ways, resource and ecological overshoot and other social externalities. The centre section is the current crisis, where there is a fundamental loss of faith in the prevailing epistemic foundations and erosion / destruction of the public sphere (what Richard Slaughter called a “crisis of meaning” in his T-Cycle).[6] This loss of faith gives rise to both fantasy versions of reality (conspiracy theories, hyper nostalgia) but also emergent visions of the future grounded in social and ecological realities. Finally, there is an imagined space of an epistemic commons, which reflects the desire for a mutual intelligibility of knowledges and practices grounded in shared human survival and flourishing. The remainder of this article attempts to develop what this epistemic commons means, and its operationalisation through a what is termed here a protocol commons.
A Meta-language of the Commons
We are in a sort of chasm, between the older industrial public sphere, and the seemingly distant horizon of something new, imagined idealistically here as an epistemic commons. I see this emergent epistemic commons as one engaged in an effort to rebuild the capacity for shared survival. But this must happen in the face of the centrifugal dynamics of platform capital. It is also a new type of public sphere because it is not based on the industrial, centre-periphery mode. It is based on a decentralized mode in which a multiplicity of affiliations thrive and intermesh. It has its own polarities. On one end is the idea of the commons that asserts collective interest and action. However on the other it asserts the fundamental principle of diversity upon which all dynamism and resilience depends. This is related to the variety of existential struggles, commons of many varieties, implicit and explicit. Thus this new public sphere represents the survival logic of this new space of multifaceted commons, expressing different themes, scales, ontologies, logics. This new hypothetical commons public sphere emerges as ecosystems… they are indicative of a greater complexity of relationship than the older industrial public sphere. It is operationalized through a multitude of commons and commoners reweaving a language of shared survival and wellbeing.
That commons move from implicit to explicit means that they are incredibly diverse. They exist where crises manifest and where people exert a collective expression of shared need and effort. However, as mentioned, this also means a greater scope of complexity. New commons ontologies, the urban commons, digital commons, resource commons, soils, food systems, even “affect” have been identified as commons. The commons is not a singular phenomenon, there are many different types of commons and commoning activity. Bollier and Helfrich’s work makes this abundantly clear.
Thus, in the face of still existent and dominant industrial capitalism, for multifaceted commons to grow, we need to find synergies between many different types of commoning activity and scales of activity. Of course we need cooperative, distributive and regenerative forms at the scale of the enterprise. But we need as well urban commons that support a garden garden bed of commoning to thrive — partner cities that grow the commons intentionally. The work of Christian Iaione is significant in this regard, perhaps the most coherent work so far on articulating a commons based ecosystem.[7] And we need transnational forms of solidarity, such as city to city mutualization and cosmolocal production. Thus, we need a way for one form of commoning activity to talk to the other, to coordinate and find forms of reciprocation. Does this mean they “speak the exact same language”? No! Those working in food systems and those in the urban commons already speak different conceptual languages. However, like HTTP we can imagine a meta-language, a protocol that allows ecologies of commons based activities to grow and mutually support each other. Like the bee and the flower, there can be fundamental ontological difference even while reciprocation and value exchange is realised.
The challenge is both an epistemological one and as well related to our maturity as human beings. Our worldviews come from our sense of place, language, experience and embodiment. It is too often too easy to see what we do in isolation from the multiplicity of other activities in the world, we are so deeply embedded in our own struggles, challenges and activities. And then there is the ego. We want to see our creations, our priorities, as primary.
The Problem of Exclusive Identity
As a Mexican child growing up in California in the 1970 and 80s, I experienced racism first hand. This included outward displays such as taunts and teasing from white children and adults, but also covert racism that influenced people’s attitude toward me, and which I would often simply “feel”. There was also a kind of internalized oppression related to a shame of our indigeneity — that Mexican’s are fundamentally a mix between the Spanish and indigenous people — Mestizo.
However what my parents experienced was an order of magnitude much much greater. They moved to the US in the 1950s, when both active institutional racism still prevailed (no Mexicans allowed signs on some retail stores in the US). They also participated in the civil rights movement, which was led by Afro-Americans, but in which Mexicans, Asians, Native American Indians and Jews also played a part, as well as White activists in solidarity. The discriminatory oppression they faced forced them and others like them to dig deep into their identity and fight for the rights of their identity. Rather than deny their identity, like others in the movement my parents embraced being Mexican, and taught me to be proud of who we are.
African Americans experienced trauma even greater still, with well known historical reasons that do not require explanation. To shift from a state of trauma and abuse to one in which they could be agents of change and dismantlers of their oppression took centuries of self education, analysis, and organization. In this respect identity is a commons — it is something they required for their survival and wellbeing. It was the primary system boundary established to help organize itself as a collective, with terms like “Uncle Tom” used to navigate and police the system boundary. But this is far more than some system abstraction. Abuse and trauma create fear and the drive to protect, driving groups into themselves. It is no wonder that during the civil rights movement, some Black activists, for a time, advocated a complete separation from white society. Martin Luther King’s vision of multi-racial harmony prevailed however.
But collective trauma is not unique to just the Mexican and African American experiences. There is an intersectionality to appreciate. The trauma that women experienced for centuries and still experience drove/drive women to struggle for equal rights through many waves. LBGTQ as well have formed a meta-identity after many years of discrimination. And lest we forget one of the most fundamental types of intersectional trauma, poverty and class, which can cut across any of these groups.
Thus as a Mexican growing up in California, I did have some disadvantages. But…. I had parents who were professionals (my dad a community college professor and my mom a preschool teacher); and most importantly I grew up with a tremendous amount of love and affection. Growing up without love and affection may be the worst trauma of all. Thus, if all I focus on is my trauma, and I retreat into this, I lose the ability to appreciate that disadvantage is multifaceted. Or put in another way, if the commons I care about (the equal rights and dignity of Mexicans) becomes exclusive, and I cannot see the value of other commons and even worse, I cannot see how they may be interconnected, then the broader tapestry of commons is lost, and in many ways we all lose.
Trauma can be an impetus to create an exclusive identity which puts us at the center, to the exclusion of others (Mexican’s first!). Or… it can be the impetus to see how many other forms of trauma exist, intersect, and a way to open our hearts to many people, struggles and commons. But it is not reasonable to expect someone who has been traumatized, for examples Black victims of police violence, to magically give up their campaigns (Black Lives Matter) for change. The specificity of each struggle and the possibility of ecologies of many commons are not mutually exclusive — they coexist as two aspects of a more encompassing system.
This is similar to how Boaventura De Sousa Santos and others discuss knowledge democracy, an ecology of knowledges across the themes of dismantling racism (anti/post colonial), sexism (post-patriarchy) and capitalism (post class).[8] He argues they should not be seen as exclusive struggles, but part of an interconnected project of liberatory politics and praxis. As well, it does not require a great stretch of the imagination to see how different issues, like the climate emergency, slavery (both historical and modern) and the unsustainability of the industrial food system is driven by capitalism. Slavery in a way enfolds both capitalism and racism. But more broadly many of the struggles we are engaged with, and the commons we wish to protect and nurture are composites of many underlying factors. Seeing knowledge as an ecology and a democracy helps us to weave greater coherence into our understanding and action.
Finally, a note on whiteness. While I speak as an outsider, my observation is that so called white people are also a kind of traumatised category of people. They have been fodder for imperial projects, endless wars, the creative destruction of capitalism and industrialisation, now de-industrialization. These forces helped generate social atomization and hyper-individualism (I am completely on my own), and a neurotic divorce from the social fabric. The construction of whiteness also entailed a white-washing, a loss of older ethinic / cultural identities that were sources of identity, pride and nourishment (Irish, German, Dutch, Polish, etc.). The ideology of white supremacy was also deforming to those whites that internalized it, who were encouraged to inhabit a backward, pretentious, unscientific and structurally violent view of themselves and others, and an unrealistic view of their position in the world. Thus, even while white privilege exists in many places, when some so called whites are called out and accused of privilege many get angry, as it is not their experience.
If intersectionality is an opening to empathy for our different types of disadvantage, an ecology of the commons points us toward an understanding of how the many commons we care for and need for our survival and wellbeing are interrelated and co-constituting. We need both empathy and understanding for the myriad struggles and how these and we are interrelated and interwoven, a “protocol” that allows communication, understanding, coordination between myriad struggles and projects.
But to put it in terms of Lakoff and Johnson’s terms, “protocol” is only a metaphor.[9] The comparison with HTTP is analogy. The ontologies of commons struggles, identities and movements cannot be reduced to hyperlinks between websites. The word simply points us toward a possibility: we can weave the needs of the many together into a tapestry of change, a force that honours diverse needs, yet strengthening each other, finding synergies and co-constituting the worlds we want to live in.
If we want to have the ability to create synergies between ontologically distinct types of commoning activity, or more to the point, if our mutual survival and wellbeing is dependent on our ability to weave synergies, then what facilitates this is a commons, that we must nurture and protect, manage and govern together. A share meta-language, or protocol, or any other strategy that allows us to do this is a commons we must create together.
Three Scenarios for the Futures of Solidarity
To conclude, I can see three scenarios playing out:
The first is the current trajectory. This might be called “Divide and Conquer”. In this future platform capitalism wins. Everyone lives in a Plato’s cave of false apparitions, afraid of all the other categories. Platform capitalism reinforces self referentiality and each group is stuck in their own identities and fantasmagoric enemies are conjured from the dark imagination. Conspiracies abound that reinforce distrust. Whites and the right recoil against identity politics, and many identity struggles focus on their own aims to the exclusion of each other. Each collective and identity get lost in the labyrinth of their own perceived and felt trauma as these self referential narratives prevail. Solidarity is fundamentally lost and capitalism wins.
The second scenario is slightly better. This might be called “The Next Wave”. As in previous movements, socialism / civil rights / postcolonial / women’s rights / LGBTQ, we get a next wave. It adds a piece of the puzzle, but it leaves or sidelines others — it is a hierarchy of priority. Today and tomorrow this is most probably the climate movement. In this wave the climate emergency supersedes all others. Humanity’s relationship with its ecos / home becomes a fundamental reorganizing dynamic. The climate emergency does not necessarily validate myriads struggles, as it is seen as the “apex” issue that, if not addressed, means that all the other ones matter not. Identity politics is seen as an unuseful distraction in a broader context. This scenario loses dynamism but gains a strategic focus on shared survival. The movement becomes technical, draw down carbon in whatever way. Capitalism is accommodated IF it toes the climate emergency line. But history and social justice (the neocolonial dimension of the climate emergency) is pushed away.
The third scenario is my preferred one. This can be called “Ecologies of the Commons”. The climate emergency is still an apex struggle, but it is supported in a broader ecosystem of emancipation and transformation. Transformative knowledges awaken. Change is not just seen as a technical problem, but related to our narratives of what it means to be human, and transformations in how we treat each other (challenging constructions of race, hierarchy, patriarchy, and class, to name a few). We are able to find synergies between many movements, collectives, commoning projects and rich ecologies of mutual support and change are born and thrive. In this world, we do not expect people to think and act in a uniform way, or to echo our own views of the world — there is an acceptance, even celebration, of the rich ontological and epistemological complexity that exists. However we have the tools, the protocols, for synergies and opportunities for mutualization, and we find them and use them. This allows the commons movements and projects to strengthen each other and thrive.
We live in Epic Times and are in the midst of great transformations. We face many challenges, but can choose to inhabit our precious world relationally, finding synergies and new power across the diverse possibilities of our shared existences.
[1] Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press.
[2] Bollier, D., & Helfrich, S. (Eds.). (2014). The wealth of the commons: A world beyond market and state . Levellers Press; Bollier, D., & Helfrich, S. (Eds.). (2015). Patterns of commoning . Commons Strategy Group and Off the Common Press.
[3] Gorenflo, N. (2017). Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons. Shareable.
[4] Ramos, J. M. (2020). Four Futures of Reality. Journal of Futures Studies, 24(4), 5–24.
[5] McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the message. New York, 123, 126–128.
[6] Naismith, L. (2004). The transformative cycle. AFI Monograph series. Swinburne University of Tech. https://foresightinternational.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/AFI_Monograph_06.pdf
[7] Iaione, C. (2016). The CO‐city: Sharing, collaborating, cooperating, and commoning in the city. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 75(2), 415–455.
[8] From the The First Global Assembly for Knowledge Democracy, Cartagena, Colombia.
[9] Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
