Skip to content

Latest commit

 

History

History
206 lines (196 loc) · 9.97 KB

outline-of-narrative.md

File metadata and controls

206 lines (196 loc) · 9.97 KB

Outline of the Main Narrative

Three Part Essay Series

I'm realizing this material really can't all fit into one essay, so I'm settling on making this 3 separate essays for now, although I first considered taking the 4 main headings from my original outline and making each of those a separate essay. It makes better sense though to combine those middle two headings (my experiences with FOSS and local food, respectively), reverse their order so I can bring agriculture more into focus before its relevance gets lost, then condense them so my own story takes up far less space than it would have. That way I should be able to address the beginnings of the Food Sovereignty movement that was happening concurrently with my own journey, all within the same essay. Then the third and final essay can tie everything back together, covering some of the more recent theory on the commons as well as the current developments of the food and tech sovereignty movements and how they are discovering new synergies for restoring the commons in the future.

I'm including a short abstract for each part below, followed by its outline.

Part 1: Concerning knowledge enclosures and how they may be truly leveled

The connections between free and open source software (FOSS) and sustainable farming movements are examined by looking at the practical and metaphorical use of historical techniques of commoning1 that each has alternatively employed or discarded within their respective movements. While the free software community has been far more explicit in embracing the commons since its inception, it has narrowed the permissable scope of the "commonable" to what is strictly abstract and ephemeral: namely, information. A historiography of land enclosure is then recounted, showing how this critical counterpart to the commons has been ignored or forgotten in its more recent depictions. Viewed as a proxy for the physical and contingent aspects of the commons, and how the commons can be lost if collective vigilance is not paid, the history of political resistance to enclosure can be instructive for how the commons might be restored today.

  • Introduction
  • The Gathering for Open Agricultural Technology
    • GOAT 2022: access to nature
    • Stealing the commons from off the goose
    • Usufruct vs real property
  • And Geese Will Still a Common Lack...
    • Enclosure as alienation of nature
    • "The cloud" as digital enclosure
  • From Rhinebeck to Durham
    • The Free Culture Movement
    • Lessig & Benkler on the commons
    • Boyle & Bollier on enclosure
  • Free as the Air to Common Use
    • "Information wants to be free"
      • Overemphasis on immaterial public goods
      • Deemphasis on material common-pool resources
      • TODO:
        • Fred Turner & Stewart Brand
        • public goods vs the commons
        • Brandeis quote
  • From Uttar Pradesh to Seattle
    • Vandana Shiva on doctrine of discovery & biopiracy
    • 1999 WTO Protests in Seattle
  • From Davos to the Lacandon Jungle
    • John Perry Barlow v. Subcommandante Marcos
    • EFF v. Indymedia
    • Organic Foods v. ???
  • Tierra y Libertad
    • The ideological spectrum of commons studies, ca. 1990 - 2010
    • Next 2 installments:
      • How did U.S. farmers and conservationists lose sight the commons?
      • How do we begin leveling today's hedgerows?
    • Social ties and the commons

Part 2: The Market is No Place for the Commons

The notion of the commons was conspicuously absent from the discourse of the slow food movement and sustainable agriculture in the U.S. during the Clinton-Bush years. Even as more antiquated and provincial modes of producing and consuming food came into vogue, the "locavore" and small family farming movements adhered more closely to a characteristically American narrative of the homesteader or the "rock-star" chef, an individualistic and isolationist stance that is sharply at odds with the historical (or the contemporary majority world's) model of smallholder farming and traditional foodways. It was left to more radical voices emerging from the Occupy and hacktivist movements in the early- to mid-2010's to breathe new life into a vision for the commons in America. Meanwhile, the rest of the world never gave up the fight, and the resultant food sovereignty movement and peasant food webs are finally getting the attention of some of us here in the Northern Hemisphere.

  • Ejidos digitales
    • GOAT 2022's "Data Policy" session and data rights like water rights
    • Medieval commons and their holdovers
    • Ejidos, campesinos, and usufruct
  • The Market
    • 2014: Pop-up classes & giving Greenmarket tours to The New School's Food Studies program
    • 2005: Answering a Craigslist ad as a college sophomore to work in the local food movement
    • Who does this serve? (farmers? foodies? non-profit BoDs?)
  • From Luddite to Leetspeak
    • Great Recession, Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street/Sandy
    • SOPA/PIPA: Clay Shirky, Aaron Swartz, and Lawrence Lessig
    • Revolution OS, documentary on GNU/Linux
    • Build your own computer! plus making memes in GIMP & hacking BB Sheets-to-Go
  • Meanwhile, Food Sovereignty...

Part 3: Towards the unified commons of food, land, and technology

The commons never went away; many ways of practicing, thinking and writing about the commons were always there, even in the U.S. and Europe, if you knew where to look: from the Fourierists and Owenites of the 19th century and Georgists of the Progressive Era, to the Marxian economists and historians of the Cold War Era and the proponents of degrowth and municipalism who are still active today. No critique of these movements' lasting impacts or full potentiality would be complete, however, without a deep understanding of how enclosure has been carried out on a mass scale in the form of Western Colonialism. The ramifications touch upon food, land use, technology and the information economy and show how the commons must be reconceived as encompassing all forms of resource allocation if its restoration is to be achieved in our lifetimes.

  • The Limits of a Liberal Theory of the Commons
    • Maya Cohen's article, data stewardship & the right to exclude
    • Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Markets
    • The Commons (CPR) v. Open-access Regimes v. Public Goods
    • Elinor Ostrom v. Garrett Hardin
  • Late 19th & 20th c. re-examination of the commons
    • Henry George's Progress & Poverty
    • Marxian interpretations
      • Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital
      • Sylvia Federici's Caliban & the Witch
      • Peter Linebaugh's Stop, Thief!, plus his work on transatlantic revolutions & Magna Carta
      • John Bellamy Foster & Kohei Saito on metabolic rift
    • Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and décroissance (degrowth)
  • Appropriation of agricultural knowledge & technology (along w/ land & labor)
    • Leah Penniman on seed saving
    • Judith Carney's Black Rice
    • Bollier/Pollan on USDA Organics
    • Vandana Shiva's Biopiracy
    • Indigenous Data Sovereignty
  • Re-examining free and open source software
    • BDFLs & other toxic cultures: Stallman, Torvalds, ESR, etc.
    • Post-Open Source, novel licensing terms, and protest-ware
    • Permacomputing & Computing within Limits
  • What Is to Be Done?
    • GOAT 2024
    • Runrig

Original Outline

This is the old outline I started with, thinking it could all fit into a single essay. 😅

  • Intro
    • Main thesis
  • My FOSS narrative: from now BACKWARD to early 2000's
    • Stealing the commons from off the goose
    • GOAT 2018 - 2022
    • Rediscovering the commons, understanding enclosure
      • Lessig & Benkler
      • Boyle & Bollier
      • Linebaugh & Federici
    • Finding FOSS
      • Linux, Clay Shirky
      • Occupy & SOPA/PIPA
  • My Ag narrative: from early 2000's FORWARD to now
    • Zucotti Park
    • Smart phones & social media
    • Locavores, slow food and organics
      • Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Mark Bittman, Barabra Kingsolver
      • Marion Nestle, Nevin Cohen
      • John Gorzynski, Zaid & Haifah Kurdieh
      • Food, Inc., Super Size Me, Food Matters, A Place at the Table, King Corn
    • Chef culture & foodies
      • Peter Hoffman, Alice Waters, Dan Barber, Eleven Madison, order gas, Marion Batali, Momofuku, Martha Stewart, Anthony Bourdain
      • Florence Fabricant, Pete Wells, Lucy's Blog, "My Mom Couldn't Cook"
  • Deeper history of the commons & enclosure
    • Medieval commons and their holdovers
      • Gerard Winstanley & the Diggers
      • Georgism?
    • 20th c. re-examination of the commons
      • Elinor Ostrom v. Garrett Hardin
      • Marxian interpretations (metabolic rift, primitive accumulation, etc)
      • Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen and décroissance (degrowth)
      • Colonialism as enclosure
    • Appropriation of agricultural knowledge & technology (along w/ land & labor)
      • Leah Penniman on seed saving
      • Judith Carney's Black Rice
      • Bollier/Pollan on USDA Organics
      • Vandana Shiva & Biopiracy
  • Reuniting agricultural and informational commons
    • The Limits of a Liberal Theory of the Commons
      • "Session: Data Policy" and data rights like water rights
      • Maya Cohen's article, data stewardship & the right to exclude
      • The Commons (CPR) v. Open-access Regimes v. Public Goods
      • The post-Cold War "end of history" and other forms of near-sightedness
    • New Developments, Old Syntheses & Parallel Movements

Footnotes

  1. I.e., the traditional forms of communal land tenure once prevalent in England and Europe from at least the 12th through 18th centuries. ↩