rhetorical actions of digital commoners, as endoxa is instantiated in particular appeals to rhetorical commonplaces (see previous discussion). Virno writes, “The unity which the multitude has behind itself is constituted by the ‘common places’ of the mind, by the linguistic-cognitive faculties common to the species, by the general intellect.”39 Thus he connects the multitude with the commons. Using the notion of a general intellect, Virno identifies a central resource with which the multitude may rhetorically constitute itself (or, its “selves”); this creates the possibility for a rhetorical invention of the multitude in common practice. The informal knowledge and mindset of the multitude are the digital substances of networked life. Moreover, Virno indicates how the rhetoric of the general intellect animates the multitude. The general intellect is, in a word, the stuff of the commons.40
Resources, or “Stuff”
The resources of the digital commons are like resources of the natural commons and the cultural commons in the sense that they sustain life, connecting commoners to one another. The resources are a heterogenous stratum layered on top of digital networks, which I address later in the chapter. As we think of land, air, and fish in the natural commons and ideas, artifacts, and traditions in the cultural commons, so may we think of resources in the digital commons as digitized “stuff.” The stuff, the material and symbolic artifacts of everyday life, is generated by digital commoners. Indeed, this productivity and its buildup of content and imprints are effects of the digital commons. The stuff is infrastructural and immersive, as webs are to the spiders who make them. As I demonstrate in chapter 2, the Creative Commons suite of licenses is designed to structure and tag creators’ stuff, such as music, text, photography, and software code. The licenses are the infrastructure of commons stuff. Similarly, chapter 3 explains how the archiving of digital stuff preserves a historical treasure for future generations, foreclosing the loss of culture. In chapter 4, the main campaign promise of the Pirate Party is common access to digital stuff. To be sure, the word “stuff ” is rather colloquial and lacking in academic authority. Nevertheless, it is suitable for an analysis of the digital commons. Its polysemy makes it user-friendly. Stuff could refer to personal property (as in “My basement is full of stuff ”) or a performance (as in “I like to strut my stuff”). Stuff can be stacked on shelves, but it can also be immaterial. As Boyle puts it, focusing on an internetworked context, “If you can make it somehow into the public consciousness, then you can be paid for allowing the world to copy, distribute, and perform your stuff.”41 Similarly putting the emphasis on material impact, Brian Ott explains, “It matters, in every sense of that word, that digital data and information is made up of bytes rather than atoms, that it is comprised of binary code, that traditional modes of communication (sound and image) can, regardless of medium (radio, television, newspaper, book, music, etc.), be converted to digital form.”42 Digital form, in a word, is stuff; the form is binary, distinguishable in two states of either off or on, 1 or 0.43
Employing Virno’s concept of the multitude’s general intellect and the notion of digitized stuff as the resources of the digital commons, Boyle’s aforementioned concern about a second enclosure becomes salient. It is a matter not only of privatizing knowledge, mindsets, and languages, but also of technically restricting the networks of the digital commons as lands might be restricted by fences. In the digital context, the cultural commons are bound not only by copyright laws but by the technologies that enforce them. As prominent scholars of intellectual property have argued, the same technologies that enable cultural creativity and innovation are used by the legal interests of copyright holders to enforce monopolies, threatening the vibrancy of the digital and cultural commons. According to “free culture” advocate Lawrence Lessig, “Technology, tied to law, now promises almost perfect control over content and its distribution. And it is this perfect control that threatens to undermine the potential for innovation that the Internet promises.”44 Lessig argues that the content industry, what we might think of as pop culture media, has abused its political influence to legally erase the divide between regulated commercial use of copyrighted material and private noncommercial use.45 This is relevant for my study of the digital commons in the same way that any appropriation, regulation, or enclosure would constrain other kinds of commons. At stake is the prospect of producing life-sustaining things and circulating them, or making them part of the commons network, the multitude’s connectivity.
Networks
The infrastructure of the digital commons is a network of networks, what Manuel Castells defines as a “set of interconnected nodes [. . .] powered by microelectronics-based information and communication technologies.”46 Although this infrastructure may be partially identified with the global network of shared protocols known as the internet, it also, more particularly, connects situated content and practices. (For example, I later characterize the Creative Commons licenses as a commons infrastructure for the copyright negotiations of the World Wide Web.) In theory and practice, the purpose of a network is to sustain itself by carrying out a program that systematizes norms and codes. Because this is so, networks have an important function in any commons (digital or natural). In the natural commons of Ostrom’s fisheries, a central objective is the longevity of the fish colonies. Networks coordinate the resources (the fish) and the participants. In the digital commons, the network’s purpose may be more nebulous. Castells writes, “The culture of the global network society is a culture of protocols of communication enabling communication between different cultures on the basis, not necessarily of shared values, but of sharing the value of communication. This is to say: the new culture is not made of content but of process.”47 The question, then, is how the process may be understood. My intention is to demonstrate that the networked process of the digital commons may be understood as a productive epistemic habit. This habit, in which making stuff and knowing stuff are integrated, is identified by the networked participants as expertise. Furthermore, in this logic (or logos) of expertise, gifting is essential. As Castell notes, “The culture of the network society is a culture of protocols of communication between all cultures in the world, developed on the basis of a common belief in the power of networking and of the synergy obtained by giving to others and receiving from others.”48 Network theory supports attention to the rhetorical processes of expertise as knowing, making, and gifting.
One of the most important aspect of the networked structure of the digital commons is that the electronic network itself is built for accreting exchanges between peripheral nodes. It is built for production among peer participants.49 Thus, the digital commons, like the natural and cultural commons, depend on the ingenuity and rhetorical invention of the commoners. This aspect of digital networks is elucidated well by Yochai Benkler, whose widely cited analysis of the information economy traces “the emergence of nonmarket individual and cooperative production.”50 Benkler claims that after 150 years of an industrial paradigm, two features now distinguish the advanced economies of the twenty-first century: a shift toward the production and manipulation of information and an extensive communication network with high computational capabilities.51 As he assesses the long-term prospects of this cooperative production, Benkler argues that the network society “provides a platform for new mechanisms for widely dispersed agents to adopt radically decentralized cooperation strategies other than by using proprietary and contractual claims to elicit prices or impose managerial commands.”52 For my purposes, Benkler is informative in his attention to the habits with which “individuals pool their time, experience, wisdom, and creativity to form new information, knowledge, and cultural goods”—in other words, the networked habits of knowing and making.53 Moreover, while Benkler’s interest in economic mechanisms differs from my interest in rhetorical practice, his discussion of nonmarket agents opens rich possibilities for studying goods and the management of value beyond the industrial paradigm. He indicates ways of exploring how people make things and how things acquire value through logics that may, without the concept of the network society, be elusive.
A few words of clarification are appropriate at this juncture. First, the network
