{"id":221,"date":"2005-11-17T02:41:02","date_gmt":"2005-11-17T07:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=221"},"modified":"2005-11-17T02:46:40","modified_gmt":"2005-11-17T07:46:40","slug":"why-commons-language-gives-me-hives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=221","title":{"rendered":"Why &#8220;Commons&#8221; language gives me hives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A bit of blogging for the record here. Doc Searls <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linuxjournal.com\/article\/8673\">wrote<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&#8220;The Commons&#8221; and &#8220;the public domain&#8221; might be legitimate concepts<br \/>\nwith deep and relevant histories, but they&#8217;re too arcane to most of<br \/>\nus. Eric Raymond has told me more than once that the Commons Thing<br \/>\nkinda rubs him the wrong way. [&#8230;] (Maybe he&#8217;ll come in here and<br \/>\ncorrect me or enlarge on his point.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This is what I emailed him in response:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>My problem with the language of &#8220;the commons&#8221; is that to me it it<br \/>\nsounds, at best, like idealistic blather. At worst, and far more<br \/>\nusually, it sounds like an attempt to conceal all kinds of individual<br \/>\ndecisions about cooperation under a vague collectivist metaphor so the<br \/>\nindividuals who made those decisions can be propagandized and jerked<br \/>\naround.<\/p>\n<p>The moment you start talking about &#8220;the commons&#8221;, you almost<br \/>\nautomatically start attributing needs and wants and rights to &#8220;the<br \/>\ncommons&#8221; that aren&#8217;t simply the needs and wants and rights of the<br \/>\npeople who made the decisions that define that commons.  And that&#8217;s<br \/>\ndangerous &mdash; before you know it, you have power-seekers telling you<br \/>\nthat your needs and wants and rights are <em>overidden<\/em> by those of<br \/>\n&#8220;the commons&#8221;, even if (or especially if) that commons was partly<br \/>\nyour creation in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>This is the same reason I never talk about &#8220;society&#8221; &mdash; because<br \/>\n&#8220;society&#8221; does not, properly speaking, exist as a moral or ethical<br \/>\nagent.  Talking about &#8220;society&#8221; as though it has needs or wants or<br \/>\nrights of its own is simply a form of ventriloquism used by some<br \/>\nindividual to seek power over others &mdash; oh, no, I&#8217;m not pursuing my<br \/>\npersonal agenda, I&#8217;m acting for the good of &#8220;society&#8221;, and please<br \/>\navert your eyes from anything I gain by so doing.<\/p>\n<p>Our public life is already corrupted enough by this kind of<br \/>\nventriloquism.  I&#8217;ve tried to shape the language of open-source<br \/>\nadvocates so as to at least not make the problem worse.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Doc agreed with these points in an email reply, but pointed out<br \/>\nthat the open-source community has allies (Larry Lessig, in particular)<br \/>\nwho are emotionally attached to &#8220;commons&#8221; language.  This is true;<br \/>\nit&#8217;s a bug, not a feature.<\/p>\n<p>But this is almost a detail. I fully agree with the central point<br \/>\nof Doc&#8217;s essay.  (I chastised him gently for burying it amidst too<br \/>\nmuch clutter.)  There is a war of metaphors going on right now: the<br \/>\nInternet as place versus the Internet as pipes.  Is it an agora<br \/>\n(that handy Greek word that hovers somewhere between &#8220;marketplace&#8221; and<br \/>\n&#8220;public square&#8221;) or a &#8220;content-delivery system&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p>How people think about this matters.  As Doc points out, if the<br \/>\nnet-as-pipes metaphor prevails, then issues like free-speech rights<br \/>\nand open access become subordinated to property rights over the<br \/>\npipes. If the net-as-agora metaphor prevails, free speech trumps<br \/>\nproperty rights &mdash; even when the &#8220;agora&#8221; space is privately owned,<br \/>\nour mental framework about it is that it&#8217;s a place where public<br \/>\nexpression is subject to <em>minimum<\/em> control.<\/p>\n<p>Doc and Larry point out that the big corporations pushing for<br \/>\nsemi-infinite copyright extensions have been winning battles because they<br \/>\nhave presented a compelling narrative in which copyright is <em>property<\/em>,<br \/>\nand Americans (by and large) think property is good.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s our problem: we need to come up with a compelling narrative<br \/>\nof the Internet-as-agora <em>without<\/em> challenging the<br \/>\nproperty-is-good assumption.  The FSF has been trying to disassociate<br \/>\ncopyrights\/patents\/trademarks from property for years (RMS regularly<br \/>\nlectures people on why the term &#8220;intellectual property&#8221; is bad) but it<br \/>\nhas failed.  We need better tactics than that.  We need a propertarian<br \/>\ncase for the Internet as agora.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A bit of blogging for the record here. Doc Searls wrote: &#8220;The Commons&#8221; and &#8220;the public domain&#8221; might be legitimate concepts with deep and relevant histories, but they&#8217;re too arcane to most of us. Eric Raymond has told me more than once that the Commons Thing kinda rubs him the wrong way. [&#8230;] (Maybe he&#8217;ll&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=221\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why &#8220;Commons&#8221; language gives me hives<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-technology","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=221"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=221"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=221"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=221"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}