is irrationally self-destructive in the long run. The commons is unsustainable as a way of life because individuals cannot be trusted to tend to the interests of others as well as their own. The common good has no sincere proponents. And despite the endless refutations with which Hardin’s polemic has been met, it continues to prompt discussion, perhaps because Hardin-type individuals and their grubby hands are ubiquitous. If you tell someone that you are writing a book about the commons, what most will respond is, “Oh, as in the tragedy of the commons?” The phrase accompanies the idea.8
Of the scholars who have critiqued Hardin and attempted to disarm the notion of a looming tragedy, the most prominent is the Nobel prize–winning economist Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom, whose legacy is “the Bloomington School” of commons scholarship, identified a set of design principles that distinguish the successful management of common pool resources. Having studied commons in fisheries and pastures in various places in the world, Ostrom’s response to Hardin and other proponents of privatization is that a custodial model is empirically viable. In Governing the Commons, she calls this model “Game 5,” wherein participants develop a contract of resource usage that is enforced by an appointed arbiter.9 Those who depend on the resources reach an agreement based on the information available to them. As Ostrom notes, lamenting the widespread support for a coercive government or corporate authority:
Unfortunately, many analysts—in academia, special interest groups, governments, and the press—still presume that common-pool problems are all dilemmas in which the participants themselves cannot avoid producing suboptimal results, and in some cases disastrous results. [. . .] Instead of presuming that some individuals are incompetent, evil, or irrational, and others are omniscient, I presume that individuals have very similar limited capabilities to reason and figure out the structure of complex environments.10
Ostrom’s work demonstrates that the notion of unmanaged commons, as Hardin might call them, is misleading, even oxymoronic.11 The pasture is never entirely open. Common pool resources are governed by rules and norms that are enforced by variously elected community leaders. They are “stinted.”12 The authority of leaders is assured by consent, which naturally entails conflict and continuous negotiation.13 The networks of the commons are maintained by the participants’ adherence to explicit and implicit codes; this adherence assures the endurance of the networks. Codes are in effect even when the networked interactions and the products thereof seem chaotic. When this is not the case, the commons falters and requires repair.
Because the Norman Conquest was a long time ago, and the Alanya inshore fisheries of Ostrom’s research are remote, it is helpful to bring the natural commons closer to home, connecting it to my project here and now. Specifically, before proceeding to the next section on the cultural commons I highlight a few ways in which the natural commons directly informs my analysis of digital rhetorical networks and processes. First, it is significant that the boundaries of ownership and access in the natural commons are negotiated continuously rather than through a one-time purchase, and that this negotiation happens through the symbols and practices of the commons rather than through the markers of official authority. As Linebaugh explains, undeterred English commoners persisted with their customs for centuries after the enclosure movement. Indeed, the example of so-called perambulations illustrates this point: long after the privatization of English common lands had begun, the commoners would ceremoniously walk along the perimeters of their territories, walk through the invisible lines dictated by parchment maps, and walk on the grounds where their families had long lived.14 These perambulations were a rhetorical negotiation of ownership and access. They entailed potentially hostile conflict and an enactment of rights, expectations, and motives through spatial and generational networks. To fully appreciate this practice, we might envision a group of commoners walking through the damp chill of spring and coming upon a fence in the middle of a field, a limit that previously was not there. What do they do? What should they think? As Hyde notes, the annual tradition of the walkabout did not become subversively defiant until legal edicts began to inscribe the land with property regulation.15 At that time, the physical act of moving through a network (of fields) was a way of establishing belonging: what belonged to whom and who belonged where. In the networks of the natural commons (as in the networks of the digital commons, which I get to later in the chapter), proprietary rights are not managed by a single buy-and-sell transaction, despite the best laid plans of mice and kings. Rather, the relationship between commoners and ownership is constituted through living habits.16
Second, it is significant for my study of the commons that the distinction in the natural commons between labor time and not-labor time is indeterminate, as commoners are continuously engaged in some form of production. One may think of it this way: in a village, commoners work continuously to make the things that sustain life, such as shelter, tools, and food. There is no “on the clock” or “off the clock” in terms of labor, nor are there clearly distinguishable places of labor and leisure. The products that are made in the evening hours (such as knitted socks or sharpened knives) are not worth less than the products that are made between nine in the morning and five in the afternoon. All production is part of the livelihood of the commons. By contrast, laborers in an industrial setting may only be said to be working per se when they are at work in the factory, plant, or office. In this context, not-labor is the activity that happens in the not-workplace, which is to say at home or in establishments of social pleasure. Moreover, the indistinction of labor and not-labor in the natural commons must be correlated with governance. As Bollier explains with reference to historical industrialization, “One of the lesser-noticed aspects of enclosures was the separation of production and governance. In a commons, both were part of the same process, and all commoners could participate in both. After enclosures, markets took charge of production and the state took charge of governance.”17 I underscore this point about productive labor, time, and access to governance in the natural commons to explain that when we think of the continuous labor of village commoners from centuries ago, we might also think of today’s digital commoners, whose productivity is similarly continuous. The latter are engaged in digitally organized labor not just from nine to five but most of the time. This labor takes place not only at the office but in domestic and social venues: on the couch or at the coffee shop. Thus far, the analogy make sense. What is perhaps more complicated, and receives more attention in chapters 2 and 4, is the issue of managerial control. Bollier argues that productive commoners of the pre-enclosure time were involved actively in the governance of the commons. In later chapters I explore the extent to which this may apply to the decision-making procedures and power negotiations of the digital commons.
Third, the natural commons are relevant to my study of the digital commons insofar as they thrive on a rhetorical tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the mundane and the mysterious. Put differently, the commons are conditioned by a dialectic of what is readily known and what is potentially knowable. This is so in the past and present, and in the natural as well as the digital. Regarding the familiar, perhaps it goes without saying that the commons are common. They are routinized and dependent on predictability. In the natural commons, village life contains few surprises and plenty of well-worn habits. In the digital commons, routines are both mathematical, which is to say algorithmic, and human; most of us execute the chores of everyday life through communication technologies. At the same time, however, the natural commons are liminal, shaped by a boundary separating cultivated space from wilderness.18 In the uncharted, unmapped territory of the forest, ocean, and outer space, there is no telling what mysteries may dwell, exceeding or resisting human control. We the commoners watch these knowable phenomena from our windows, looking into the deep woods, the dark sky, or the World Wide Web. The commons and their unboundedness thus stimulate the imagination and beckon rhetorical invention. In the digital commons the mystery hides somewhere deep in the machine. In the inaccessible paths of the electronic networks, certain functions exceed the knowledge of most digital commoners. We who know precious little about the networked machines and their impenetrable languages are as mystified by them as the village commoners were by the idea of wood nymphs and krakens.
This
