Sustainability and Wikimedia Commons

John Cummings and I in the Conservatory, the Barbican, in the run up to Wikimania 2014

My friend and colleague, John Cummings, has just added this blog on Wikimedia Commons:

Understanding Sustainable Agriculture Through Wikipedia

As John says:

“The Priority Products and Materials: Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production report by the United Nations Environment Programme found that ‘Impacts from agriculture are expected to increase substantially due to population growth increasing consumption of animal products. Unlike fossil fuels, it is difficult to look for alternatives: people have to eat. A substantial reduction of impacts would only be possible with a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products.’”

Port Elizabeth Weather Fine

As I pored over the World Banks’s somewhat self congratulatory World Development Report 1996, entitled From Plan to Market,I started to feel overwhelmed by the stench of hypocrisy. It was as if the very page gave off noxious fumes and before I succumbed to their mind-numbing effect, I reached to my book shelf for an antidote. It was as if Arthur Koestler’s “Library Angel” was present in my room.as I soon discovered I was clutching Steve Biko‘s I Write What I Like. The page opened at the passage where he describes how African society is community-based and [hu]man centred: “most things were owned by the group, for instance there was no such things as individual land ownership.” He describes how the commons is central to the African way of life before discussing some of the consequences of this.

He contrasts the problem-solving approach of the westerner with the situation-experiencing approach of the African. He then quotes Kenneth Kaunda’s characterising of western scientific approach as based on a sharp distinction between the natural and the supernatural, the rational and the non-rational with the supernatural and non-rational being dismissed as superstition. Kaunda then compares this to African people who he regards as pre-scientific in that they experience a situation rather than face a problem.

Biko then explains that although he had a firm commitment to scientific experimentation, yet he was also firmly committed to the more holistic approach embedded in the African personality, its humanistic approach to dealing with issues and a view of spirituality rooted daily life and a respect for the ancestors.

I think Biko’s conception is useful as long as we don’t essentialise the notion of Western and African. For several hundred years –  since the rise of capitalism basically – European culture has been dominated by this fractured dualistic consciousness which has proved – but only in certain respects- to be very successful. This blindness to the bigger picture and a process focuses on the hyper-development of the individual has fostered an expansive predatory culture which now has taken over the whole world. Nevertheless despite the domination of this view, European culture has produced a steady stream of countervailing voices, even if these have generally been squeezed out to the margins.

One of those voices has been that of James Lovelock, whose Gaia hypothesis offered an understanding of the world as an all encompassing organism incorporating both living and non-living material. While Lynn Margulis has stepped back from an animist interpretation of this, seeing Gaia more as “an emergent property of interaction among organisms” than an organism. However Stephan Harding is ready to embrace animism, and wants to encourage people to see stones and rocks as being sentinent, and suggests that such a psychological shift is necessary if the mass of people are to change their behaviour in a fashion to stop the climate system from collapsing. He calls for a science where qualities are just as important as qualities, where his students can combine reason with feeling, sensation and intuition.

From there different perspectives, both Biko and Harding wish to retain the evidenced-based approach of science but recast it the context of a holistic or monist (i.e. based around looking at the whole system) way of working. This is an important aspect of commoning, in that we need to consider not just the community as a collection of people, but as an interacting whole which includes the environment. This is the antithesis of Garrett Hardin which uses economic reductionism to reduce human beings to isolated individuals indifferent to the degradation of their surroundings.

“State of the Commons”

“State of the Commons” provides a summary of how the use of Creative Commons licenses has expanded over the last few years. Just as activists in the Free Open Source Movement had developed legal license to ensure that their work was not subject to enclosure in the field of writing software, so this initiative was taken into broader cultural domains with the establishment of Creative Commons in 2001.

However, this development did not go without challenge. Writing in 2005 Dave Berry has questioned whether simply creating a legal technique to (re-)introduce a commons on the cultural level is to misunderstand the political relations of capitalist society. In his article A commons without commonalty Berry argued that the creative Commons network creates a simulacrum of the commons “we actually have a privatised, individuated and dispersed collection of objects and resources that subsist in a technical-legal space of confusing and differential legal restrictions, ownership rights and permissions.” Berry was concerned that by focus activity on the terrain of bourgeois legality, by moving the commons from Res Communes, which features in Roman Law outside of property relations into the realm of private ownership, Res Privatae, Creative Commons was creating a commons without commonality.

However since Berry raised his criticism, the number of items licensed under teh Creative Commons has expanded rapidly. In 2006 there were 50 million licensed items on the internet. By 2010 this had gone up to 400 million and currently stands at 882 million. So was Berry wrong?

I would say yes and no. His concerns about the failure of the Creative Commons in the face of business interests wishing to strangle the free content movement have proved unfounded. The movement has gained sufficient momentum to win the day: now even the world Bank publishes its material on open licenses. But on the other hand he may yet be right. The multinational entertainment industry still retains massive amounts of power, and while it might be obliged to roll back from its agenda for a while, this does not mean it is definitively defeated. When we look at the broader challenges we face – in particular the problem of facing us as the military-industrial machine continues to expand its pollution of the environment – we still need to directly confront capitalist social relations if we are to move towards a globally sustainable world society.

So as a thing-in-itself, Creative Commons cannot resolve the problems we face, but I believe it can be a means which helps us to organise the more sustained political activism that the climate crisis requires if humanity is to flourish.

Sandford Housing Co-op

Through my work I recently came across the folk at Sandford Housing Co-op. Forty odd years ago this coop was set up by a bunch of students in Deptford. At a recent Open Day they invited John Hands, one of the instigators, to give a talk (here). This is available on their website. It is well worth listening to, particularly as regards the piece at the end which is to do with how collaboration rather than competition is necessary for ecological sustainability.

Sandford Housing Co-op was part of a BBC documentary in 1974. This is available on You Tube. Part 2 is particularly interesting as they decide whether a house or the membership panel of the whole co-op should have the final say on who is allowed to become a member.

Autopoesis and the Viable Systems Model

Autopoesis and the origins of the Viable Systems Model (VSM) are very much linked. Autopoesis was developed by two Chilean biologists Humbert Maturana and Francisco Varela and described in their joint work Autopoesis and Cognition (Maturana and Varela, 1972). Maturana had worked with some of the most prominent cyberneticians whilst in the USA, co-writing ‘What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain’ (Lettvin,et al, 1959). Maturana has reflected how his experiences in the transforming effects of the 1968 social struggles at the University of Chile. He then became involved with “second order cybernetics” working alongside Heinz von Foerster (Maturana 1980). He was working on the concept of Autopoesis with his student Francisco Varela when Stafford Beer was arrived in Chile to work on the Project Cybersyn. Beer was developing his concept of the Viable Systems Model, of which he gave a an incomplete outline in the first edition of The Brain of the Firm (Stafford Beer 1972).

Soon Stafford Beer, Maturana, Varela and von Foerster were all participating in the Group of 14, a Chilean cybernetics study group (Medina E., 2011). By 1980 the English translation of Autopoesis came out with an introduction by Stafford Beer. He also published an extended second edition of Brain of the Firm (Stafford Beer 1980) where he acknowledges his intellectual debt to Maturana and Varela.

This illustrates the importance of intellectual commoning: at the broader level of the social struggles of the Chilean students in 1968 – part of a broader global questioning of the role and function of higher education. Then it can also be seen in teh fruitful work of the Group of 14 study group. Rather than seeing intellectual enquiry simply as being the work of an idealised individual, shorn of their interactions with their colleagues, it is rather the collaborative working environment of an intellectual commons which enables all to participate in making substantial steps forward

 

Bibliography:

Lettvin, J.Y; Maturana, H.R.; McCulloch, W.S.; Pitts, W.H., ‘What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain’, Proceedings of the IRE, Vol. 47, No. 11, November 1959

Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1972), De Maquinas y Seres Vivos, Santiago: Editorial Universitaria S.A.

Maturana, H. R. & Varela, F. J. (1980), Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Vol. 42 of Series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company,

Median E. (2011) Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press

Stafford Beer A. (1972) Brain of the Firm (First edition) London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press

Stafford Beer A. (1981) Brain of the Firm (Second edition) London: John Wiley

Information is not a commodity

After last Monday’s lecture on autopoesis, I did some online research and found a video of Heinz von Foerster discussing the subject. He brings up several ideas including an understanding that “information is not a commodity” and that “communication is the interactive computation of a reality.”

 

 

Commoning in a hybrid community

Reflecting on some of the discussion about blogging in our class, and reading through the module guide made me aware that we need to actually work together to understand what “working together” is all about. i.e. we need to shirk for it to work. As we only have a limited amount of time together as a face-to-face group, our contact through the WordPress site means that we will actually be developing a hybrid community (Mitchell 1998). How we function in this respect will have a big impact on our learning and consequently our grades. We can turn to Brown et al. (2006) for guidance in turning our community into a goal directed virtual team. While some of what Brown discusses is notrelevant to our circumstances (eg hiring), other aspects are important.

A key aspect is that we all need to introduce ourselves, which is pretty much what chibwehenry has already done. So I shall follow suit.

In 2013 I completed a BA in Social Enterprise at UEL and in February I started an MSC in ICT and Development of which this module is a part. I think this may lead me to adopting a somewhat different approach to other people doing this module. I also currently work Wikimedia UK, the UK based charity that supports Wikipedia. I have been involved with WIkipedia for over ten years. I am particularly excited about taking this module because it will deepen my knowledge of certain key practices that projects like Wikipedia exemplify. One of these is “Commons-based peer production” a term coined by Yochai Benkler (Benkler 2002) to describe activity which fell outside the framework of transaction costs theory which was developed by Chicago School Economist Ronald Coase back in the thirties (Coase 1937).

However, I have also been influenced by Ivan Illich’s ‘vernacular values‘ (Illich 1980):

“We need a simple adjective to name those acts of competence, lust, or concern that we want to defend from measurement or manipulation by Chicago Boys and Socialist Commissars.”

I have gone into great depth about this in an article Wikipedia – A Vernacular Encyclopedia, which draws on the experience of Alexander Bogdanov and Proletkult following the Bolshevik coup on October 1917. I see Bogdanov’s “Techtology” as a precursor of cybernetics and I am interested in how these theoretical approaches can enrich our understanding of Sustainability and the Commons in the twenty first century.

References

Benkler Y. (2002) Coase’s Penguin or Linux and The nature of the firm 112 YALE L.J. 369 (2002), PDF.

Brown M.K., Huettner B., and James-Tanny C. (2006) Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools Pleno Texas, Wordware Publishing

Coase R. (1937) ‘The nature of the firm’ Economica, 9 (1937), pp. 386–405

Illich I. (1980) ‘Vernacular Values’ published in CoEvolution Quarterly
Mitchell, W. J. (1999).’The city of bits hypothesis’ High Technology And Low-income Communities: Prospects for the Positive Use of Advanced Information Technology”, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press