| title | created | tags | |
|---|---|---|---|
Hedgerows in the Sky (abstract) |
2023-08-03 |
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- Title: Hedgerows in the Sky
- Subtitle: Concerning knowledge enclosures and how they may be truly leveled
Today in 2023, the food sovereignty and tech sovereignty movements are united in the call for more cooperative production methods and a commitment to common-pool resources. There is an increasing degree of interchange and direct collaboration between their communities, and clear parallels can be drawn between their respective practices. One can compare collectivized farm management to cooperative data trusts; free fridges and other mutual aid food programs to the communal administration of decentralized social media networks; sliding scale food coops or CSA solidarity shares to software projects sponsored through Liberapay, OpenCollective, donate buttons or some combination of crowdfunding mechanisms.
Turn back the clock by ten or twenty years, however, and those correspondences were not as conspicuous. While notions of collective autonomy can be insinuated from the local food and free-culture movements of that era, and indeed many practitioners were already formulating those concepts within their respective disciplines, neither food sovereignty nor tech sovereignty had yet gained much popular recognition. Accordingly, there was very little dialogue between the two movements, with few opportunities for their divergent fields to collaborate, share resources or swap notes. The small farming and local food movements of that era fixated on what was near-at-hand, low-tech, organic, provincial and professedly slow. Meanwhile, the free-culture and open source movements set their gaze on global streams of non-rivalrous information, liberated by their abstractness and cutting-edge technology to travel across all borders, effortlessly and instantaneously.
This article will examine the convergent evolution of these two movements by surveying the relevant technological milestones and sociopolitical developments of the intervening years. For a more subjective view, I offer the story of my own encounters with each of these movements, while also situating them within the longer history of agriculture, information technology and the Commons. Finally, I'll reflect on the latest initiatives that have emerged through their union and what synergies remain to be explored.
Today in 2023, the food sovereignty and tech sovereignty movements are united in the call for more cooperative production methods and a commitment to common-pool resources. There is an increasing degree of interchange and direct collaboration between their communities, and clear parallels can be drawn between their respective practices. One can compare collectivized farm management to cooperative data trusts; mutual aid food programs like free fridges to the communal administration of decentralized social media networks; sliding scale food coops or CSA solidarity shares to software projects sponsored through Liberapay, OpenCollective, donate buttons or some combination of crowdfunding mechanisms.
Turn back the clock by ten or twenty years, however, and those similarities were not so apparent. In the first decade of the new millennium, farm-to-table restaurants and self-proclaimed "locavores" were ascendant, and organic foods were a relatively new concept to most consumers. Meanwhile, there was a growing awareness that ever-expanding intellectual property laws and Digital Rights Management (DRM) were stifling innovation, creativity and freedom, not fostering those virtues as legislators, Silicon Valley and media conglomerates would have the public believe. In the few short years that brought us Twitter, the iPhone, TED Talks, WikiLeaks and a global financial crisis, the free-culture movement's claim that "information wants to be free" began to resonate with a much wider audience, beyond the cloister of open source hackers who had been shouting it for over a decade at that point.
While notions of collective autonomy can be insinuated from the local food and free-culture movements of that time, and indeed many practitioners were already formulating those concepts within their respective disciplines, neither food sovereignty nor tech sovereignty had yet gained much popular recognition. Accordingly, there was very little dialogue between the two movements, with few opportunities for their divergent fields to collaborate, share resources or exchange insights. The small farming and local food movements of that era fixated on what was near-at-hand, low-tech, organic, provincial and professedly slow. Meanwhile, the free-culture and open source movements set their gaze on global streams of non-rivalrous information, liberated by their abstractness and cutting-edge technology to travel across all borders, effortlessly and instantaneously.
This article will examine the convergent evolution of these two movements by surveying the relevant technological milestones and sociopolitical developments of the intervening years. For a more subjective view, I offer the story of my own encounters with each of these movements, while also situating them within the longer history of agriculture, information technology and the Commons. Finally, I'll reflect on the latest initiatives that have emerged through their union and what synergies remain to be explored.
Today in 2023, it doesn't take a huge conceptual leap to connect the movements for food sovereignty and data sovereignty. The call for more cooperative production methods and a commitment to common-pool resources grows stronger every day from both camps. One can compare communal land trusts to cooperative data trusts; mutual aid food programs like free fridges to the communal administration of decentralized social media networks; sliding scale food coops or CSA solidarity shares subscriptions to software projects sponsored through Liberapay, OpenCollective or plain donate buttons.
Turn back the clock by 10 or 20 years, however, and the similarities were not quite so apparent. In that first decade of the new millennium, farm-to-table restaurants and self-proclaimed "locavores" were ascendant, and organic foods were a relatively new concept to most consumers. Meanwhile, just about anyone with an Internet connection could see how ever-expanding intellectual property laws and Digital Rights Management (DRM) were only stifling innovation, creativity and freedom, rather than encouraging them. In the few short years that brought us Twitter, the iPhone, TED Talks, WikiLeaks and a global financial crisis, the free-culture movement's claim that "information wants to be free" began to resonate with a much wider audience, beyond the cloister of open source hackers who had been shouting it for over a decade at that point.
While notions of collective autonomy can be insinuated from the local food and free-culture movements of that time, and indeed many practitioners were already formulating those concepts within their respective disciplines, neither food sovereignty nor data sovereignty had yet gained much popular recognition. Accordingly, there was very little dialogue between the two movements, with few opportunities for their divergent fields to collaborate, share resources or exchange insights. The small farming and local food movements of that era fixated on what was near-at-hand, low-tech, organic, provincial and professedly slow. Meanwhile, the free-culture and open source movements set their gaze on global streams of non-rivalrous information, liberated by their abstractness and cutting-edge technology to travel across all borders, effortlessly and instantaneously.
This article will examine the convergent evolution of these two movements by surveying the relevant technological milestones and sociopolitical developments of the intervening years. For a more subjective view, I offer the story of my own encounters with each of these movements, while also situating them within the longer history of agriculture, information technology and the Commons. Finally, I'll reflect on the latest initiatives that have emerged through their union and what synergies remain to be explored.