archiving to digital archiving, I bring along a cluster of topics, including the public-private dialectic and the paradox of bureaucracy and mystery. In the analysis of the IA and the Wayback Machine, I trace several themes of archiving as an inventive practice of knowing, connecting them to the discourses of gifting that circulate through the IA and that identify founder Brewster Kahle as a heroic benefactor. I demonstrate how the inventions of the gifting logos emerge in the context of data loss and how this urgency rhetorically deploys the familiar ideal of archival preservation, in which productive knowledge forecloses the limits and gradual disappearance of the commons.
Chapter 4 examines the gifting logos’s political implications for the digital commons. It extends the preceding two chapters’ analyses of expertise by explaining how a loosely affiliated group sought recognition and authority by making itself and the moment of its emergence known to potential supporters, giving them a policy agenda. In other words, the chapter approaches the gifting logos as the gift of a political construct for the common good. It focuses specifically on the campaign discourses of the Swedish Pirate Party, an organization that in 2006 grew out of an internationally known file-sharing community called The Pirate Bay. The first half of the chapter contextualizes and situates the Pirate Party with reference to the theoretical and historical motifs of populism. In so doing, the chapter introduces both what I call “digital populism” and the parliamentary climate of Sweden at a time when confidence in traditional parties had waned. Against this foil, I ask: With what rhetorical strategies does the Pirate Party articulate itself, its politics, and its prescription for a prosperous polity? What is the character of the political construct that the Pirate Party gives to the commons? I analyze the Pirate Party’s enactment and use of populist rhetoric, in particular antagonism toward the state and corporate institutions, an articulation of “the people” and its inherent potential, and a model of political representation and access. Throughout the chapter I demonstrate how the open access ideals that sustained the Pirate Party, which have garnered international support since the 1990s, were especially resonant in Sweden, where networked access is rhetorically associable with a legal and cultural custom known as Allemansrätten, the right of commons access. I suggest that by linking access to digitized cultural content with access to natural resources and territories, the Pirate Party made a compelling case for its concept of good governance.
In the aggregate of the digital commons, rhetorical influence, knowledge, and invention concur. In order to theorize this concurrence, my intent is to closely examine how productive expertising functions. I direct attention to a networked multitude of cultural inventions in a space managed by its inhabitants. I also demonstrate how, especially for scholars of networked and digital rhetoric, the commons might serve as a useful complement to rhetorical theory’s more familiar concepts, such as “public” and “audience.” And though this book is addressed primarily to scholars of digital rhetoric, my hope is that others will find it valuable as well. For scholars of epistemic rhetoric, my hope is that the book will indicate new venues for studying the inventive aspects of expertise and its mediation of lived experiences. I believe the concept of the commons, informed by interdisciplinary literatures, will help to transcend the insularity of projects devoted to peer production, exchanges between specialists and laypersons, knowledge communities, and so on. For scholars of rhetoric and public address generally, I hope that the book will offer a resourceful perspective on human networks, situatedness, and the constitutive functions of material and continuous circulation, indeed on the very notion of address. From chapter 4 especially, I hope that the political implications of digital culture and networks emerge, along with insights about representation, access, and advocacy. Finally, I hope that my engagement with both logos and the gift will offer readers a theoretical and critical resource to energize invention.
1
The Commons Aggregate and the Gift
A commons, generally speaking, is a living arrangement wherein humans interact via social, technical, and material networks to manage vital resources. It is a “paradigm [that] consists of working, evolving models of self-provisioning and stewardship that combine the economic and the social, the collective and the personal.”1 According to historian Peter Linebaugh, “commons” is a widely misapplied term: “From the quaint village commons to the cosmic commons of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the medieval subsistence economy to the general intellect, no term has been simultaneously so ignored and so contentious.”2 Natural commons refers to relatively unbounded resources such as water and aquatic ecologies; forests, jungles, and the animals that inhabit them; air and space; plants, seeds, and grain and their genetic makeup; wind that may be used for the harnessing of energy; and so on. By analogy, the cultural commons are customs, traditions, inventions, and the “vast store of unowned ideas [. . .] that we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich.”3 As David Bollier underscores, however, “commons are not just things or resources. [. . .] A commons is a resource + a community = a set of social protocols.”4 This composite definition is especially instructive for my project, which uses theories of the natural and cultural commons to build a critically viable concept for studying the digital commons. Thinking with Bollier and others, I define a commons as a rhetorical aggregate comprised of three components: the commoners, the sites and networks of encounter, and the cultural resources with which the encounters are coordinated. With the phrase “rhetorical aggregate” I invoke a coordinated dynamic roughly akin to Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation. As in the rhetorical situation, attention is directed toward rhetors’ responses to a contextual urgency. Rhetoric in an aggregate may be defined as the exertion of influence through the production and application of symbols. What the commons contributes conceptually is a sense of a continuous lived experience of cultural invention in a situated space.
THE NATURAL COMMONS
The context and management of the natural commons are best explained by telling the story of the English land enclosures.5 Since well before the Norman invasion, English commoners lived off the bounty of land that they did not own. They sustained themselves by grazing livestock, hunting and fishing, collecting firewood, and harvesting fruits and grains. As custodians of a natural, inhabited network, they were dependent on generally accessible goods, which they used according to specific privileges. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, modern commodification gradually turned common land into private property, segmenting the land for the emerging gentry class. An especially noteworthy moment occurred in 1532, when Henry VIII dissolved a number of monasteries, displacing the commoners who lived on the monasteries’ land. Throughout the seventeenth century formal law took over common law, and between 1725 and 1825 four thousand enclosure acts appropriated six million acres of land; many of those who had been commoners of the land became the laborers of burgeoning industry.6 In 1845 the General Inclosure Act affirmed the privatization of England’s land and natural resources, necessitating a redefinition not only of ownership but of social hierarchies and ways of life. Those who had kept themselves and their families alive by applying the knowledge they had of how to use the resources around them had to acquire other kinds of knowledge; they learned skills that were different from those that their communities had transmitted generationally for centuries. In short, the expertise of the commons networks was at least in part replaced by the expertise required by the new networks of industry.
Contrary to the often Edenic picture of village life is the dismal prognosis presented by Garett Hardin in 1968. His essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” inspired by an 1832 pamphlet written by amateur mathematician William Forster Lloyd, argued that nothing trumps human greed. Hardin summarily rejected the idea of sustainable governance beyond private ownership. The tragedy, according to Hardin’s dystopia, is that rational choice is selfish. In his widely cited pasture example Hardin writes,
Picture a pasture open to all. [sic] A rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. [sic] Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush. [sic] Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.7
Hardin’s
