For me, two recent readings have brought animism into sharper focus for me.

The first is a piece in The Guardian by British nature writer Robert Macfarlane (November 2, 2019) that points to “new animism” on the rise. He starts by mentioning a number of “rights of nature” laws that have been enacted around the world. Ecuador and Bolivia are the the most famous cases, but did you realize that the City of Toledo, Ohio – on the banks of Lake Erie – approved a referendum in 2019 that gives “legal personhood” to that troubled lake? Lake Erie now joins the Ganges and Yamuna rivers in India and the Whanganui River in New Zealand in enjoying legal standing in their respective nation-states.

Macfarlane explains the significance of the Lake Erie Ecosystem Bill of Rights:

Embedded in the bill is a bold ontological claim – that Lake Erie is a living being, not a bundle of ecosystem services. The bill is, really, a work of what might be called “new animism” (the word comes from the Latin anima, meaning spirit, breath, life). By reassigning both liveliness and vulnerability to the lake, it displaces Erie from its instrumentalised roles as sump and source. As such, the bill forms part of a broader set of comparable recent legal moves in jurisdictions around the world – all seeking to recognise interdependence and animacy in the living world, and often advanced by indigenous groups – which have together come to be known as the “natural rights” or “rights of nature” movement.

Macfarlane goes on to say that a “’radical re-storying’ is presently under way across culture, theory, politics and literature, as well as law” that can be seen in “the creative protests of Extinction Rebellion; in the “new animist” scholarship of Isabelle Stengers, David Abram and Eduardo Kohn” and the work of Robin Wall Kimmerer. I would add the ecophilosophy of Andreas Weber (“Biology of Wonder” “Matter and Desire”) and Stephan Harding (“Animate Earth”). 

All these efforts, says Macfarlane, “seek to recognise something we had turned away from: that is to say, the presence and proximity of nonhuman interlocutors,” in the words of Amitav Ghosh.

I have also been quite taken by Eduardo Kohn’s 2013 book How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Kohn boldly asks the modern mind to show humility in how it thinks about and represents “nature.” It asks that we try to see the more-than-human world as a vast living system of “biosemiotics” – embodied, living organisms that are constantly creating meaning as they interact with each other.

Kohn warns that we moderns are “colonized by certain ways of thinking about relationality…. Without realizing it we attribute to nonhumans properties that are our own, and then, to compound this, we narcissistically ask them [nonhumans] to provide us with corrective reflections of ourselves.”

So in our modern world of separation, we assume that “nature” is all about individuals striving to survive a dog-eat-dog market competition, ignoring the deep symbiosis and cooperation that is a major part of all biological life. We also assume that the natural world is inert, unfeeling, and without meaning – a mute backdrop for the drama of humankind. 

Kohn spent four years doing ethnographic fieldwork among the Runa of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador, an experience that forced him to rethink the meaning of “real.” He brilliantly argues that our planet is alive, literally, and therefore we humans, as biological beings, are deeply implicated in “a complex web of relations that [he calls] an ‘ecology of selves.’”  

Whether an organism presents as a threat to others, a sometime-cooperator, or a distant support through the landscape, living creatures must always invent a "self." The whole process of generating and sustaining living selves creates “meaning” embodied in the shape, behavior, and expression of an organism. Or as Kohn puts it, “All life is semiotic and all semiosis is alive.”  Life and meaning cannot exist without each other.

Hence the explanation for the book’s title. Kohn argues that forests think as its constituent living organisms interpenetrate each other in highly complicated ways, giving rise to an ecosystem of selves, whether plants or animals or microorganisms.

That’s what is so difficult for we moderns to understand -- the aliveness and relationality that pervades our planet! It’s not just humans who are alive and having thoughts. All sorts of living organisms are creating selves and meaning, independent of human observation and activity. “The rain forest, writes Kohn, is “an emergent and expanding multilayered, cacophonous web of mutually constitutive, living, and growing thoughts.”

The question is, Can we tune into that frequency, the “vast ecology of selves” that are inscrutable to modern epistemologies and ways of knowing? Can we moderns allow ourselves to enter into the logic of how forests think? Can we learn to see the relations between plants and soil, for example, or between human and jaguar, as forms of living representation and meaning, even if they lie beyond linguistics?

We are so accustomed to seeing ourselves as separate and apart from “nature” – as the apex predator that can reshape “nature” however we wish – that we have trouble situating ourselves within the flows and constraints of a living planet. We presume to be masters of “nature” – a presumption ratified by language itself. Western cultures have a strong preference for using generic, abstract nouns whereas indigenous cultures tend to use precise verbs that name relationships and interactions with living systems. Indigenous languages reflect the idea that “there exist other kinds of thinking selves beyond the human.”

I resonate to the new animism because, like the commons, it is about honoring relationality as a core reality of life. That’s an idea that Silke and I tried to feature in our new book Free, Fair and Alive.  We wanted to reconceptualize the commons as a living social system of relationships, not merely as an economic vehicle for “managing resources.”

Commoning is all about the peer construction of relationships, including with the large ecosystems in which we live. Fortunately, the new rights of nature laws, scholarly literature on animism, and the proliferation of countless commons are fueling the great OntoShift that is needed. Aliveness and the relationality it requires are getting their due recognition.

What happened next to this empty square block is quite remarkable, as Marszalek notes:

“….a rag-tag bunch of malcontents occupied the mud lot and began planting trees and shrubs and named their new area People’s Park. University officials had no opportunity to negotiate, as the Republican mayor of Berkeley, Ed Meese, the District Attorney of Alameda County, and the Governor of California, Ronald Reagan went ballistic. How outrageous to imagine a forsaken lot transformed into a site of communality and pride by a bunch of dope fiends and commies!

Governor Reagan, just elected to office, saw the garden as a direct affront to his Law and Order campaign promise. The mayor of Berkeley needed no excuse to unleash his racist police force. On May 15, 1969, DA Meese likewise sent in Sheriff deputies to viciously attack the park defenders.

A police riot ensued. Deputies with buckshot-loaded rifles shot indiscriminately into the crowds. In the battle that lasted into the night, one bystander on a roof nearby was killed, another blinded and over 100 wounded.

Several days later, after martial law was declared and several thousand National Guardsmen entered the city, another bit of assaulted landscape, not two miles from People’s Park, beckoned the imaginations of the outraged residents. It was hardly surprising that they tried to build their vision of communalism on this abandoned land. It was in the air, once the tear gas cleared.

The Hearst Strip was occupied and provocatively proclaimed People’s Park Annex, though the annex was a larger piece of real estate than the University’s mud lot. Shovels, pick-axes and rakes appeared. Wheelbarrows and makeshift carts transformed the barrenness. Rubble became little walls encircling plantings. Saplings took positions and promised a forest.

But more than gardening took place. What was an ugly sliver of dirt became a commons for partying, music and potlucks. But not without overcoming, several times, the devastation caused by assaults of the guardians of law and order.

On one occasion late at night, young tree trunks were snapped and broken and plants trampled by the armed Midnight Raiders (the police). And at another time, in broad daylight, the cops trundled armfuls of plants into paddy wagons. They arrested the bushes and flowers!

After each attack the people came back and replanted. The neighbors near the park and their allies were galvanized for the long haul. And they partied some more. The park over time became a place to drop off stuff for reuse. Car seats became garden furniture. Steel tubing was transformed into playground swings, a large jungle gym and other imaginative, playful structures.

A stone and mortar water fountain was installed after a permit was obtained from the water utility and when a period of drought ensued and the utility cut off the water, a well was dug to irrigate the plants and trees.

After ten years of various haggles over use of the land, a supportive state legislator was elected, and using a cleverly worded proposal written by park neighbors, managed to pass a law that forced the sale of BART land to the city.

In honor of the First People, the park was officially recognized in 1979 as Ohlone Park, the first and only park created by citizen initiative in Berkeley. The park stands today as a successful land occupation. A rarity anywhere.

The park today is mostly grass but also includes pedestrian and bicycle paths, a basketball court, and a baseball field. There is also a dog park, the first off-leash dog park in the US.

It is worth noting that the Berkeley commoners’ achievement, while unusual, is not unique. In the 1980s, New York City residents created dozens of community gardens on vacant lots throughout the city.  As the gardens began to make neighborhoods more attractive, raising property values in adjacent areas, then-Mayor Giuliani decided that the City should sell the formerly neglected lots to real estate developers. The commons must be enclosed!

In effect, the residents who had brought life, greenery, and social care to the neighborhood were now dismissed as mere squatters. The value they had generated would be captured by private real estate developers, with the City's active complicity. While many of the gardens were ultimately preserved -- thanks to community outrage, the Trust for Public Lands, and donations from folks like Bette Midler -- many were sold off, despite the city's budget surplus at the time.

Musing on the history of Ohlone Park in the 1960s and 1970s, Marszalek writes that “an argument could be made that the notion of the commons eclipses the communes of the counterculture. If the hippies and fellow travelers had explicitly recognized that their various collectives had an historic commonality, maybe a stronger political force of solidarity would have taken shape. A force, that is, to sustain a concerted fight to keep rents low and funding high for countercultural subversions.”

As always, history holds a lot of inspiration and guidance for contemporary struggles.

To which Dunwell indignantly replied:  “As if!  As if climate change was some purely arbitrary and isolated event that for some unknown reason menaces the basic necessity for our existence on the planet of our financial services!”

He continued:   

“I am continually taken back to the story of the enclosure of the commons, which perfectly illustrates the problem of the market and the environment. There is no denying that you can make more money by putting a fence round a piece of land and grazing sheep, when the market for wool is thriving, than you can by letting a group of men who have helped you conquer that territory pursue a subsistence living on it, with their families.

“This ‘fact of life’ justified the conversion of half the land in England, over three or four centuries, from common land to private property, and instilled in the minds of everyone the ‘necessity’ of an economy based on productivity for the market.  The massive increase in productivity and wealth produced by the industrial revolution simply emphasised what had already been effected by enclosure, i.e., the marketisation of land and labour. The resulting woes of social injustice and environmental ruin now confront a global economic culture in an entirely new way; it is no longer just a matter of inequality and differing values, but of survival.  If we cannot reclaim land and labour from the market it will devour us.

“But the neoliberals now in power complain that not enough people realise that climate change has an impact on their core institutions! In Opposition we complain that the neoliberals are in denial of the impact of an unregulated economy on all the natural and social systems in the world. It looks inevitable that the breakdown of these systems themselves will be more likely to settle the argument than any rational debate, in the course of the next decade. So what do we do in the meantime?

“We get together in groups that have already shown signs of resilience through their awareness of the danger of the growth economy. We plan for food and energy security on local bases regardless of existing policies – or lack of them. We sustain ourselves with the love and comradeship we have experienced in the Transition and XR movements. We do not wait for politics to change; we just concentrate on reconnecting with our human instinct of collaboration. We are about to say goodbye to a lot of luxuries we can manage without, and re-discover the principles of the biosphere.” 

I feel strangely comforted by the series of giant paintings that Michael exhibited in 2016.  Here is one that I especially like:  

While popular commercial grocery stores like Trader Joe’s make impressive sales of about $2,500 per square foot of retail space, the Park Slope Food Co-op rakes in an astonishing $10,000 per square foot," Schwartz reports. 

But such things are not being driven by market forces; they arise and flourish through group cooperation. Everyone needs to have some skin in the game and abide by the Co-op's rules. One of the most important rules is the requirement that everyone work two hours and forty-five minutes every four weeks. This rule is strictly enforced. If you miss your shift, you have to make it up by working two compensatory shifts. Fall behind too much in your work obligations, and your Co-op privileges may be revoked.

In other words, the Co-op is not just a financial collective that you buy into. It is a personal commitment that you have to take seriously.  You have to commit your personal time and energies to the everyday operation of the Co-op by unloading delivery trucks, cutting up cheese into chunks, cleaning floors and toilets, working the cash register, and taking care of kids in the free child-care room, and so on.

It’s the unpaid, decommodified labor of thousands of members that enables the Co-op to function so well:  “The place runs on sweat equity: your blood for bread, your labor for lox,” as The New Yorker puts it. The system works because people are not "customers" who have simply bought an equity stake in a company. They are “member-workers” or “shoppers” who personally manage the place (with the help of 70 paid employees).

The Co-op represents what Silke Helfrich and I call “relationalized property” – a “resource” that is not just a hunk of capital designed to produce profit, but a social collective whose personal and social lives are intertwined with the asset.  The Co-op is as much a cultural experience as an economic bargain. People shop in a crowded, no-nonsense space filled with every kind of New Yorker imaginable. They understand the messy complications of peer governance and provisioning.

Schwartz writes: “In the age of one-click delivery, it can seem antediluvian to trudge home with brutally heavy sacks dangling from your shoulders. Still, there’s a comfort to bumping up against other humans around food. That’s what grocery shopping used to be, before supermarkets: a social, neighborly time, much like the meal to follow.” The Co-op experience remains so appealing that many people who have moved to Connecticut or upstate New York continue to come to Brooklyn once a month to shop. 

To be sure, many Co-op members find the political debates about food off-putting:  Should plastic bags for produce be eliminated? Should foods with certain additives be barred from the shelves? Should the Co-op support a move by some paid “coordinators” (employees) to form a union? 

The New York Times has gleefully covered such issues, treating the Co-op “like a rogue nation-state,” writes Schwartz. There are complaints that Co-op membership is “a user-friendly way of experiencing the pitfalls of communism….There can be a mania for fetishistic rule-following in the name of fairness, with citizen’s arrest-style confrontations that feel more kindergarten bully than protector of the peace.”

Annoying as some of these controversies may be, the Co-op has attracted and kept so many dedicated members precisely because it doesn't have the gleaning, sterile aisles and incessant marketing of conventional supermarkets. It is willing to engage with the messy and endearing propensities of real human beings. Schwartz writes that the Co-op’s “small-scale errors and outcries and inefficiencies make the place feel organic, in the non-U.S.D.A.-regulated sense of the word: funky around the edges, humanly fermented, alive.”  

Which is why it is still a thriving, beloved place after all these years.

Once we realized the ways that we had to escape the gravitational pull of many existing terms and concepts, we set about inventing a new language that could express the realities of cooperating and sharing. In short, a relational framework for the commons. Video producer Nils Agilar captured a glimpse of our process in a wonderful promotional video that he produced. It shows a brainstorming session in which Silke and I came up with a new term to describe what really goes on in a knowledge commons.

For half of my book tour, I traveled with Silke -- to London and a number of other cities in England, and to Amsterdam and Brussels. We encountered Ph.D. students in Amsterdam who hope to build a new international network of graduate students who study the commons. In a separate workshop, I learned how many civic groups in Amsterdam are keen to develop new forms of commons-based finance.

At a Brussels event hosted by Oikos think tank and the Heinrich Boell Foundation, we learned how the commons perspective is gradually working its way into politics. Lotte Stoops, a politician in the Brussels Parliament, is attempting to bring the commons into political and policy discussions there.

In Bristol, England, I met up with some activists with the Transition movement and permaculture world who find great inspiration in the commons. Some Marxist-minded respondents to my talk at The Cube Theater argued that commoners need to pay more attention to class struggle. (Here is a video of my talk and the Q&A in Bristol.)

I had a great evening in London hosted by the Gaia Foundation, which brought together a sizeable contingent of area commoners. Another event, hosted by the Institute for Global Prosperity at University College London, dove into some conversations about art and commoning with the help of the Furtherfield Collective.

Returning to the US, HowlRound Theatre Commons at Emerson College in Boston hosted my presentation and an evening’s dialogue about the role of the commons in the work of artists and cultural workers. By happenstance, I also met up with an Italian student who is an expert on water commons – which gave me a quick tutorial on some latest developments in European and US water commons.

My visit to Boston also brought me into conversation with members of the Leland Street Co-operative Garden in Jamaica Plain ("Tended by All, Harvested by All"), for a potluck dinner in the waning light of a chilly autumn evening. That was an inspiring visit!  People in the neighborhood had personally reclaimed a space that had been used for years as an illegal dumping ground. With some loving care and hard work, the neighborhood turned it into a lovely oasis in the noisy city. 

I participated in other memorable events, including the spirited “Race, Grace, and the Renewal of the Commons” literary festival in Virginia; an activists' luncheon at Ralph Nader’s headquarters hosted by several progressive advocacy groups; conversations with students at Middlebury College and Hampshire College; and an evening with the good folks of Vermont Family Forests in Bristol, Vermont.

I wish to thank the many generous hosts of my talks over the course of my book tour. I also want to salute a number of publications and media outlets that gave some wonderful exposure to Free, Fair and Alive. Shareable magazine named the book as the first of “eleven books we’re reading this fall.” It also did a later Q&A with me about the commons. 

The group blog Boing Boing published a nice essay by Silke and me, “Learning to See the Commons,” which served as a nice bookend to another Boing Boing piece about Garrett Hardin and the rise of ecofascism. 

Francesca Rheannon, the velvet-voiced radio show host, interviewed me on “Writer’s Voice," And the new "Commonscast” podcast featured an interview with Silke and me. 

As if all this were not enough, you can learn more about the book itself on its website, where we will soon be posting a new, complete chapter every few weeks. This is possible only because Free, Fair and Alive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. A big thanks to New Society Publishers for having the calm confidence in moving forward with a CC license for a commercial book.

A German version of the book was published by transcript Verlag in April, and is expected to go into a second printing in January 2020. A Spanish translation is underway with the help of Guerrilla Media Collective, which also gave us a big boost in outreach and marketing. We have also entered into long planning conversations for possible editions in several other languages.  

Long planning sessions are needed because, while there are no foreign rights to buy (because of the CC license), a simple translation is not enough. There are too many novel terms in our book that will require native commoners to come up with creative equivalents. Any translation will also require the insertion of country-specific examples and cultural references so that the text will really resonate with readers. In a sense, each edition in another language will be an adaptation as well as a translation: a “transladaptation.”

It was a long time on the road, but it was a fantastic set of conversations! My hope now is that the book will take on a life of its own.

From this "origin story," Standing proceeds to explain why commons for education, healthcare, land, knowledge and other realms are so essential today. He surveys natural, social, civil, cultural, and knowledge commons (his categories) to explain how land ownership became consolidated among a wealthy few; how public forests were plundered for their timber; and how public parks and public spaces have been starved for funds or privatized. We learn how “state-led gentrification” has squeezed out affordable housing and eroded neighborhoods and the sense of community while creating more homeless. We learn about the decline of the National Health Service through “privatization drip by drip.” 

The great contribution of Standing’s book is to show how enclosure is a pervasive phenomenon in contemporary politics – yet barely remarked upon by the political classes. In this, Standing shrewdly sees the strategic value merely in talking about commons. It resurrects issues that free marketeers – Tories, corporations, investors, Thatcherites – would prefer to ignore. Plunder of the Commons acts as a corrective by drawing a straight line from the royal seizures of common lands 800 years ago, to the cruel austerity policies of Thatcher/Reagan that continue to this day. In the 1200s, roughly 50 percent of British land was managed as commons; today, about 5 percent is recognized as common land. A predictable set of political abuses and wealth inequalities have followed.   

It reveals the essential similarity of medieval kings and modern capitalists: both demand thefts of the commons. Economic growth and “progress” have always depended upon the coercive seizures of the people's wealth – something that free-market economics has striven to disguise and ex-nominate (make invisible through words). That’s why talking about the commons amounts to a political act.

I confess that my understanding of the commons differs a bit from Standing’s. He sees many “public goods” and government services as commons. I like to call such things “state-trustee commons” or simply “government services” in that there is no bottom-up governance going on, as in classic commons. The state is in charge, ostensibly acting on behalf of commoners. Some people regard the commons as a shared or shareable resource; I regard the commons, strictly speaking, as a living social system directed and controlled by commoners themselves, and not the state.

That said, even within the discourse that accepts the “public” and “private” binary – which I regard as misleading – talking about commons as common assets opens up a new space. It asserts a moral and human entitlement to things that are essential to life. 

Plunder of the Commons lays out an ambitious agenda for reclaiming our commons by proposing two “Articles of a Charter of the Commons.” “Private riches owe much to the existence and plunder of the commons, for which commoners should be compensated,” Standing writes. One way to deal with this issue is to establish a Commons Fund whose endowment would come from levies on common assets used by businesses.The trust fund would then generate dividends that would be distributed to commoners – an idea that has been proven with the Alaska Permanent Fund and popularized by Peter Barnes’ many books, including Capitalism 3.0.

Standing’s Plunder of the Commons is wide-ranging and erudite, but rich with stories and a pleasure to read. He is politically astute without being doctrinaire, and sophisticated without being academic. His book has the great virtue of arriving just in time as well. The fate of many commons is fast-becoming a matter of national debate in British politics, and this book is well-crafted to steer that discussion in the right direction.

On my blog, over the years, I’ve written about a wide range of artistic initiatives that in direct or indirect ways draw nourishment from the commons. The initiatives show the rich possibilities that emerge when commoning and art converge. In their project Tele-Trust, for example, which examines how we come to trust each other online, Dutch artists Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat compared smartphones to modern “digital data veils,” or burqas. Nice insight!

In 2016, the “Seeing Wetiko” online arts exhibition probed the idea of wetiko, an indigenous term used to describe “a psycho-spiritual disease of the soul which deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others is logical and moral.”  

Many segments of the fashion world, reacting to the scourge of “fast fashion” and labor exploitation, are discovering that it is constructive to regard clothing design and production as a potential commons of creators and designers at a global scale. Folks at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, Netherlands, are developing this vision.

Many ordinary citizens and artists in Rome went so far as to occupy the historic Teatro Valle in 2012 when the city government took steps to sell it to private investors -- evidence that people thirst for a living, nonmarket culture that they can participate in. In my region, jazz fans have repurposed the CSA farming model as a way to finance experimental jazz performances that would otherwise be impossible to stage. 

A number of arts organizations today explicitly identify their missions with the commons. The Casco Art Institute in Utrecht, Netherlands, bills itself as “Working for the Commons” and functions as a commons itself, to the extent of everyone collectively clean their offices and preparing lunch. The Arts Collaboratory, is a translocal group of 25 organizations in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and the Netherlands, uses art practices to advance social change, and to work with communities beyond the field of art. 

Furtherfield, a London collective, is a hub of artistic experimentation that combines art and technology, especially via its gallery and commons in the middle of London’s Finsbury Park. Here in the US, the Boston-based group HowlRound, a self-described “Theatre Commons,” brings together all sorts of noncommercial performers, playwrights and theater people to develop performances that speak community needs.

“Art is one of the most delicate and surprising ways to inquire into the world around us, and with it we can imagine other possible worlds to live in,” writes the Casco Art Institute. “The artists of our time take unconventional pathways to (unlearn) and relate, and create forms and images to let us see and sense, question and think.”    

Mindful of the political polarization and cultural disquiet among Europeans, the director of the European Cultural Foundation, Andre Wilkens, recently declared in The Guardian, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Europe needs another cultural revolution. But who would lead it?”

Wilkens recalled how, in 1989, “public spaces, town centres, marketplaces, theatres, stadiums, railway stations, were occupied by the forces of hope. Graffiti and leaflets appeared everywhere. Satire and humour were deployed to powerful effect.” But today, he continued, “our public and civic spaces are shrinking, more restricted, more segregated and more commercial, usually covered in advertising. And when governments turn autocratic, public spaces are especially vulnerable to surveillance abuse and manipulation.

“So what’s happened to artists in the last 30 years? Did they keep up the pressure or sink into complacency? Did we all sink into complacency?

“I believe artists and cultural figures can and must again be the drivers of change. They can imagine a better Europe beyond simplistic talk of growth rates. They can help save Europe from nostalgia for 20th-century nationalism. Because the most pressing challenges of our times, like climate destruction, are global.

“The European public sphere is still weak. But where it exists, art and culture have been its forerunners.”

Artists and cultural workers need to take this call to action seriously -- not just in Europe, but everywhere. We have nothing to lose but our archaic perceptions and prejudices, which in the name of "common sense" imprison us in a claustrophobic cell of cynicism and despair. I say, let's see what the artists-as-commoners can generate! We have everything to gain through shifts of perception, new fields of possibility, and the heightened solidarity that great artistic works can engender.

In blockchain circles, there is much enthusiasm for DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations. These are free-standing, self-organized groups of people who use blockchain tools to structure their members’ interactions and behave as “ownerless” organizations or institutions. The idea behind DAOs is to “allow people to exchange economic value, to pool resources and form joint-ventures, without control from the center, in ways that were impossible before blockchains; and to agree on how risks and rewards should be distributed and to enjoy the benefits (or otherwise) of the shared activity in the future,” as Ruth Catlow of the Furtherfield Collective writes in a crisp foreword.

This is indeed an exciting prospect, but DAOs are generally envisioned as a new breed of “trustless” market organization. They function on the same epistemic plane as capitalism, with everyone treated as isolated individuals looking to maximize their personal (monetary) interests. 

DisCOs, by contrast, start from a different set of premises about humanity. They regard we humans as a cooperative species whose members need and want to engage with others, personally. Earned trust among people and open collaboration can then achieve some remarkable things. That’s the essential goal of DisCOs, which consist of a set of organizational tools and practices for people who want to work together in a cooperative, commons-oriented, and feminist economics form.

The question that this report seeks to answer is how these social impulses and practices can be structured and facilitated by tech platforms, and made stable and durable.Toward this end, the report identifies seven principles that characterize distributed cooperatives:

1. Geared toward positive outcomes in key areas (such as social and environmental priorities)

2. Multi-constituent

3. Active creators of commons

4. Transnational

5. Centered on care work

6. Re-imagining the origin and flow of value

7. Primed for federation

While DisCOs can obviously have profound effects for the people affiliated with them, they have larger implications. They are capable of “injecting democracy into our economic systems (and politics and society in turn),” writes Catlow. “Funded by direct member investment, rather than investment from third-party shareholders, co-operative members ‘decide on the values of the enterprise, which don’t necessarily need to be about the maximization of profits’."

The report also talks about “open-value cooperativism,” the idea that coops can move beyond market valuation as the central goal and “expand our economics and accounting to include care for living systems.” This is a theme that feminist economists has developed in much of their literature about “care work.”    

Another advantage of DisCOs is their distributed nature. Because they are not centrally controlled, but autonomous and distributed, DisCOs can “maximize radical and emancipatory cooperation across national borders (on- and off-chain) while operating within the laws locally (at least until we can change them).”

An unexpected pleasure of this report is its many dazzling, artful illustrations, photos, and embedded illustrations. They point to the wide range of influences on the authors, from philosopher Donna Haraway and network analysts like Paul Baran and Dmytri Kleiner, to Internet cats and pop music lyrics.

This is a report by, of, and for digital natives. It is aswim in contemporary culture but informed by serious thinkers and history. Especially in their account of the Guerrilla Media Collective as a DisCO, the authors lay claim to an aesthetic of “punk elegance.” To which I can only say, “Rave on!”

Check out this report – an hour’s read. It’s serious in its explanations and polemics, accessible and fun in its presentation, and a timely vision of how people might design tech platforms and social norms for a world of commoning.

Another song, “By Moonlight,” is a mournful reflection by songwriter Steve Lake about an actual conversation he had with a Syrian refugee whom he had met. The man had fled from military conflict in his town and found his way to safety and welcome in Bristol, England.

You can give a listen to "Goblin" and "By Moonlight" here, and the entire album here. Check out the liner notes and artwork for the album here.

I also liked “The Mansions of England,” which tells the story of press gangs that spirited men to serve on slave-trading ships. One stanza goes:

Pressed into service I was punished and whipped and was beaten.

But the fate was much worse for those wretches that we were transporting.

I loathed all the captains, the merchants, the fine men and ladies

Who lived off the work and the backs of the slaves and slave wages.

Out in the meadows, the valleys the moors and the fenland,

Where lay the fine gardens, the grounds and grand houses of England

Planted with trees and with flowers imported from far lands.

They stand in the landscape that once had been held for the commons.

In the liner notes for the album, Renton writes:

“One strand of British history has been constant over the last centuries. The theft through privatization and commodification of life, initially by landowners and the church, later by business. The enclosures drove self-sustaining farmers into towns to work in factories, some dissidents were ‘transported’ to Australia and people were enslaved. Today, theft moves in additional ways, through the enclosure of ideas and knowledge by corporate power, and the distorted narratives of a media owned by a handful of the super-rich.”

Renton provides an etymology of the word “Tory” that I had not known: “Tory derives from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe; modern Irish tóral; modern Scottish Gaelic Tòraidh: outlaw, robber or brigand.

The message of The Wicca Men is to “Take Back the Commons” and “bring an end to the unrelenting privatisation of public property; the NHS [National Health Service], education, council housing and the green swards of Albion that once belonged to ‘the commoners.’” Here's a link to the group's website, where you can order the album.