From the abstract:
“Digital commons such as Wikipedia, open-source software, and hospitality exchanges are frequently seen as forms of resistance to capitalist modes of production and consumption, as elements of alternative economies. In this article, however, we argue that the digital commons cannot by themselves constitute genuine forms of resistance for they are vulnerable to what we call ‘the illusion of the digital commons’, which leads to a form of ‘false consciousness’.”

This is both an interesting and annoying article. It’s interesting as it details how „sharing“ can be put into the service of profit-driven centralization. It’s annoying because it uses a small number of cases to make sweeping claims that feel more than a little disingenuous.

For example, while Wikipedia and Open Source Software are mentioned in the first line of the abstract, they play no role in the subsequent analysis. That focuses entirely on three “hospitality exchanges”: Airbnb, Couchsurfing and BeWelcome.

I’m not sure why Airbnb is included in a critique of the digital commons. Since its beginning in 2006, it has clearly been a profit-driven service for short-term rental. For years now, its aggressive business-practices have been attracting scrutiny from municipal governments around the world. Airbnb would better be compared to Uber and other online market-places for third party services. Such a comparison could serve as critique of the “sharing economy” as expanding commodification and precarization. That would not be a very original critique by now, and, more importantly, it’s not the aim of the paper which claims to be a critique of the digital commons.

More interesting is the case of Couchsurfing. Started 2003 as a non-profit, peer-to-peer exchange platform financed through donations, it was converted into a for-profit company in 2011 and attracted at least two rounds of venture-capital funding. Unlike Airbnb, which lists straight-forward rental prices and takes a 6-12% (or more) cut as service fee, also the commercial version of Couchsurfing lists no direct prices. So guest pay no money, host receive no money and the platform cannot take a cut. The commercial model seems to focus on user tracking and data generation. Thus it could very easily be classified within the framework of “surveillance capitalism”.

When Couchsurfing changed to a for-profit mode, quite a few users protested what they saw as a transformation from community to commodity, but beyond leaving the service, there was little they could do as they did not control the infrastructure on which they were relying.

Ostrom, in her famous Design Principles for Local and Global Commons (1992), points, among others, to the need for “Collective-Choice Arrangements” by which she means that “most individuals affected by operational rules can participate in modifying operational rules.” In the case of Couchsurfing, these are clearly missing. The inability to participate in making the rules by those affected by the rules, is one of the crucial problems of many “sharing platforms” and it’s usually design feature to centralize control (and, eventually, profit). It leaves users of the platform entirely dependent on the owners of the platform, who can change their policies at any moment (as Couchsurfing did).

The contrast to BeWelcome is interesting. On the surface, both offers similar services which are free to users. BW, however, is non-profit organization, it’s platform is open source software and users have a say in changing the mode of operation. The platform is run by volunteers and collects donations to cover the costs of providing the service. Thus, the sale of personal data is prohibited. For those interested in the active development of the community, there is a membership process that allows to participate in a General Assembly which elects the board of directors. Thus there are, in Ostrom’s terms, “collective-choice arrangements.” Strangely enough, they are not mentioned in the paper at all.

Thus, the paper fails to provide any criteria to differentiate between the capitalist “sharing economy” with its well documented problems of commodification and precarization and a-capitalist “commons” as integral institutions that relate financial and social aspects in different ways and allow for participatory decision-making. Instead, they choose to paint everything with the same brush as “as arrangements of ‘false consciousness’.” This leads to the totally unsubstantiated and rather absurd claim that “digital commoners, in their resistance to large organizations, tend to engage in the lone wolf endeavors of what Sloterdijk calls ‘embittered loners’. That is to say, technologically mediated ‘commoning’ leads to cynicism that alienates commoners from the very practice of commoning.” (p.624) Wow, one wonders what ax the authors had to grind there.

In terms of an analysis of the digital commons, the paper can serve to highlight – if this wasn’t clear already – that technological arrangement are part of social arrangements and that control over infrastructures is a potent source of power.

Reference

McGinnis, Michael D. und Elinor Ostrom (1992): „Design Principles for Local and Global Commons“, Linking Local and Global Commons (Harvard Center for International Affairs, Cambridge, MA, April 23-25) https://hdl.handle.net/10535/5460.

PS: The article is published behind a paywall and access to it costs $36.00. This says a lot about the possibly ‘false consciousness’ of some academics.

Claire Bishop (2006) lists three recurring concerns shared by most participatory art projects since the 1960.

The first concerns the desire to create an active subject, one who will be empowered by the experience of physical or symbolic participation. The hope is that the newly-emancipated subjects of participation will find themselves able to determine their own social and political reality. An aesthetic of participation therefore derives legitimacy from a (desired) causal relationship between the experience of a work of art and individual/collective agency. The second argument concerns authorship. The gesture of ceding some or all authorial control is conventionally regarded as more egalitarian and democratic than the creation of a work by a single artist, while shared production is also seen to entail the aesthetic benefits of greater risk and unpredictability. … The third issue involves a perceived crisis in community and collective responsibility. This concern has become more acute since the fall of Communism, although it takes its lead from a tradition of Marxist thought that indicts the alienating and isolating effects of capitalism. One of the main impetuses behind participatory art has therefore been a restoration of the social bond through a collective elaboration of meaning … These three concerns – activation; authorship; community – are the most frequently cited motivations for almost all artistic attempts to encourage participation in art since the 1960s.” [12]

I think all three concerns are also present, to varying degrees, the art projects that we are focusing on.  So, here one could make the case for inclusion.

However, later (2012:2-3) she defines participatory art, when and if “people constitute  the central artistic medium and material, in the manner of theatre and  performance. … Theatre and performance are crucial to many of these case studies, since  participatory engagement tends to be expressed most forcefully in the live  encounter between embodied actors in particular contexts.”

In some ways, one could argue that also in the commons-related projects we are looking at, people are the main medium (or at least, a central one), as they all, in different ways, are about forging new relations between people, mediated by objects and technology.

Bishop goes on to develop a sustained critique of participation as artistic practice in which she draws heavily on Jacques Rancière and his notion of politics as articulation of dissent and the negotiation of diverging trajectories.  Rancière translated this perspective into a theory of aesthetics in which he focuses on an art work’s capacities to generate diverging experiences (ways of  reading and understanding) on the side of the audience.  Thus, in Rancière’s words art works are then most interesting when they are “capable of speaking twice: from  their readability and from their unreadability” (cited, Bishop 2012: 28). Their readability produces the shared frame of reference necessary of a debate, and their unreadability produces the dissent over its meaning and whatever conclusions one should draw from it. In Bishop’s terms, an this is an art work’s capacity to provoke.

Now, most participatory works, according to Bishop, are oriented towards consensus, community building, to creating, sustaining, transforming some kind of social bond and thus, they exchange politics (dissensus) for ethics (consensus). As such, they can be seen as part of the post-democractic turn that voids politics and introduces all kinds of social control techniques to normalize and make productive people’s behavior, by enticing them to play out more or less prescribed roles that focus on the immediate and experiential, at the expense of the long-term and structural.

This leads to the second main point of her critique, which is the lack of artistic criteria for the valuation of these projects, through a rejection of aesthetics (usually understood as visual aesthetics) in favor of some kind of real life effect.

In this latter point, I think she is correct and it calls for rethinking aesthetics, not so much along the lines of Rancière, who still operates, in my view, with a relatively traditional notion of the public, but along lines suggested, for example, by Olga Gurinova’s notion of organization aesthetics.

The first point of criticism, however, is related to her rather unquestioningly taking the performance as the format for participatory art. None of the projects that interest us here could be called a “performance” in the conventional sense used by Bishop, mainly because they do not are not bound by a clear beginning and end, and they do not prescribe all the roles of the people who participate. Rather the free appropriation of the resources, their use outside to framework of the project, by whomever and for whatever reason, is often one of their main features.  Their frame of reference is less the theater and more the practice of open source. Also, through their practice, many of the projects do generate a fair amount of dissensus and conflict (mainly around copyright and  authors’ moral right) and are thus capable of raising questions beyond the immediate and experiential.

It is there where very significant differences between participatory art and resource generating projects are most visible, and thus, despite some shared concerns, the two groups of works should not be conflated.

References:

Departing from an organizational phenomenon, namely online ‘art platforms,’ Olga Goriunova – with the help of a variety of contemporary thinkers – reflects about a number of exemplary projects. In my understanding, her main objective is to discuss the selected projects in the framework of aesthetics (mainly), while, at the same time, trying not to narrow them down to conventional paradigms in order to keep their “aesthetic complexity” alive. Within this endeavour, it is of particular relevance that the platforms themselves as well as the production they are focussing on, are intrinsically related to both the materiality as well the ecology of networked media technology. Both the organizational structure and the techno-cultural objects it brings together would not exist without such technology. Furthermore, the platform and the type of practice that is being organized through it, mutually depend on each other. In this sense, an art platform does not just organize an existing field, but plays an important role in the emergence of the respective practice while remaining itself variable. The concept Goriunova is suggesting for her investigation, she calls “organizational aesthetics.”

An online art platform could be described as a form of organization for which an online component, such as a website, database or content management system is central; this core element – which needs to be complemented by various other forces – has been created and is maintained, sometimes by an individual, but very often also by a group of people who collaborate with their users/participants in manifold ways. It is dedicated to a specific, usually emerging field of practice, and thus not only organizes and distributes content, but, at the same time, gives rise to such novel production. Born out of pure enthusiasm, the economic situation of such platforms usually is precarious – despite their cultural relevance, which may be one reason for their temporary nature. Another certainly is the timeliness of the phenomena they are operating with. Goriunova’s own descriptions of an art platform include e.g. that art platforms “appear as experiments in the aesthetics of organization,” that art platforms bring together “human-technical creativity, repetition, aesthetic amplification, folklore, and humour to generate a cultural organizational mechanism…;“ or, art platforms are “self-unfolding mechanisms through which cultural life may advance to produce fascinating aesthetic objects and processes; they occupy a special place within ‘organizational aesthetics’ on the Internet.”

The examples she is discussing in the book are udaff.com, a Russian platform for experimental literature, Gazira Babeli, a Second Life artificial character; being an artist herself, she acts out and experiments with the combination of art historical references and the specifics of digital media and has been created by an anonymous group of users; other examples are micromusic.net, a platform for 8-bit music, and Dorkbot, a network of “people doing strange things with electricity,” an open format of combined online and offline events for knowledge exchange, internationally networked but with local branches. Central to the book and close to the author’s heart is the repository for software art, Runme.org, in the creation of which she has actively been involved. There is a good case to believe that the experiences Goriunova has made in the course of such active involvement have instigated the present investigation and inspired her thinking about the projects’ aesthetic relevance. Depending on the specific genre the platforms organize – be it music, literature or software – the discussion includes a trajectory of the particular field while, at the same time, pointing out the novel and yet undefined character of the emerging techno-cultural objects. All the projects introduced in the book stem from around the year 2000 and were mainly active for about a decade. Although most of the projects are no longer active, and at best exist as online archives, the related theory of ‘organizational aesthetics’ developed by Goriunova provides an important inspiration for the discussion of the ‘aesthetics of the commons.’

In Goriunova’s critical analysis of online art platforms two questions seem to be central: what is the mode of operation of the art platform?, and what is the larger context in which the platforms themselves are operating? That these two questions are intrinsically related becomes already clear with the discussion of the first conceptual figure introduced: the ‘network.’ Combining various approaches from actor-network theory to Deleuzian philosophy, Goriunova introduces the network as a useful figure of thought with regards to organizational aesthetics: while alluding to a certain (topological) coherence, it simultaneously includes dynamic properties such as heterogeneity, elusiveness and emergence. Conceptualizing the art platform just as network, however, does not do justice to the complexity of the phenomenon. A more sweeping inspiration comes from Deleuze/Guattari’s notion of the machine: “The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” (Deleuze/Guattari). Although it has no form, no being itself, it is the immanent condition of the new; its being is becoming. This quality of becoming and enabling allows to get closer to the phenomenon of art platforms without falling into essentialist ascriptions. Other important concepts for the discussion of art platforms are self-organization and creativity, folklore production and free participation, but eventually, it is up to the reader to pull together the different strands and create their own interpretation of what organizational aesthetics might be, or rather be used for.

One of the core challenges of the book is expressed in the following sentence: “The processes by which something becomes art, … inevitably connect to the question of organization in one manner or another.” How both art and organization are linked, is the question discussed by Goriunova, by putting an emphasis on the digital networked condition. That there is no definite answer, there cannot be one, is due to the fact that art only exists when both – and thus their relationship – undergo a constant renewal. Organizational aesthetics aim at drawing attention to such entanglement – something that already enjoyed great popularity at the beginning of the 20^th century and now can gain new relevance due to changing media conditions.

– Read Cornelia Sollfrank’s full text: Nothing New Needs to be Created – Kenneth Goldsmith’s Claim to Uncreativity. in: Melanie Bühler, Goethe Institut Washington (Eds.), No Internet – No Art. A Lunch Byte Anthology, Onomatopee, Eindhoven (2015), pp.40-50.

Usually, commons are regarded as complex, comprehensive institutions. De Angelis & Stavrides (2010), for example, differentiate between commons (resources) commoners (people, community) and commoning (ongoing social practices).

For a dictionary entry, I defined commons simply as “resources managed by a community for joint use. ” (Stalder 2017)

Or Hess (2008) defines commons as „a resource shared by a group where the resource is vulnerable to enclosure, overuse and social dilemmas. Unlike a public good, it requires management and protection in order to sustain it.”

Elinor Ostrom never came up with a definition or a model, but developed eight design principles which define some of the basic issues involved in commoning (1. clearly defined boundaries are in place; 2. rules for resource use are well adapted to local needs and conditions; 3. resource users can usually participate in modifying the rules; 4. resource users’ rights to devise their own rules are respected by external authorities; 5. a system for self-monitoring users’ behavior is in place; 6. a graduated system of sanctions has been established; 7. community members have access to low-cost conflict-resolution mechanisms; 8. and nested enterprises with appropriation, provision, monitoring and sanctioning, conflict resolution, and other governance activities are arranged in a nested structure with multiple layers of activities.)

On a more expansive view, commons are conceptualized as something “beyond market and state” (Bollier & Helfrich, 2012). Often, in  a more popular discourse, commons are seens as something like holistic communities, untouched by the hostile dynamics of neo-liberal global capital. Here is a tendency and danger to romanticize the notion.

Prime examples of the knowledge/cultural commons are usually Wikipedia, open source/free software and other large scale community-based projects seen, which tend to employ “free licenses” (creative commons, GPL, or similar) as the legal framework to govern the resource.

Very few of the projects we are looking at in this research project really fit this conventional notion of the commons.

When I speak of the commons here, I want to put into focus a relationship between a group of persons (or sometimes a single person) and a set of cultural objects and/or institutions. That relationship is not characterized by the framework of (public or private) property, but rather by the framework of responsibility, care, custodianship or something similar. That is, a group / a person takes on the responsibility to create and manage a resource, because he/she/they care about it in a specific way. That is, they have an understanding of the potential of the resource and want to use it for a particular purpose and the process. In this process,  they are making this resource available to other people either to contribute within the framework they established or to use it outside of this for whatever purpose they see fit.

So, they key concept it not exclusivity (who can anything digital be exclusive, other than it being secret) but affection of some kind. What this affection can mobilize, and the kinds of actions/infrastructures/institutions are being brought forward to realize this affection, is what interest here and what is brought together under the umbrella term of the commons.

Of course, in a world based on competition, narrow self-interested rationality and property, trying to establish social relationship and artistic practices based on a different principle is likely to lead to conflicts of some kind, most obviously in the field of “intellectual property”, but also in other fields where market logics and differential reputation dominate.

Yet, I  make no assumption about how the relationships between the practices of the commons and the wider social context, dominated by private property, market exchanges and public institutions, looks like. They may be in conflict with one another, or one might feed into the other.  This is to be investigated.

References:

De Angelis, Massimo und Stavros Stavrides (2010): „On the Commons: A Public Interview“, e-flux Journal 17, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/on-the-commons-a-public-interview-with-massimo-de-angelis-and-stavros-stavrides

Bollier, David and Silke Helfrich (eds) (2012): The wealth of the commons: a world beyond market and state, Amherst, Mass: Levellers Press.

Hess, Charlotte (2008): „Mapping the New Commons“, SSRN Electronic Journal, https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=1356835

Ostrom, Elinor (1990): Governing the Commons, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Stalder, Felix (2017). Informational Commons. in: Ritzer, George (ed). Encyclopedia of Social Theory. (second edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.