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[ESC]DOC TAYROC'S [UNSOLICITED] ECONOMICS HOT THOUGHT
Marx and the Death of the Author: To Protect the Digital Commons
In the name of celebrating Cyberspace's birthday (belatedly, so sue me, I'm a busy man) as well as version 4.0, let's talk about why I became an early supporter and why it's important to maintain spaces like this.
A book that has been living 'rent free' in my mind ever since I read it is Guy Standing's Plunder of the Commons (available here). In this book, Standing examines the ancient notion of 'the commons' in Britain, through the enclosures of the 'early modern' era (the era wherein the bourgeois took over Britain) and into the modern day. He uses the once literal commons as a metaphor for the encroachment of 'capitalist logic' into every aspect of life, with the capitalist apologists constantly warning of 'the tragedy of the commons', with no proof such a tragedy ever actually occurred. I'm no Standing, although he is a colleague of mine. But I have borrowed considerably from his work, especially his usage of the concept of the commons. So let me briefly talk about it here, and why this is an appropriate essay for this anniversary of our beloved platform.
First, a travel back to olde England. By olde England, I mean 17th century Britain, a place we return to often in this blog since it's the emergence not only of modern Britain, but also modern capitalism. It's the informal bourgeois revolution in which the nascent bourgeois class overtakes the established aristocracy as the centre of power in the British isles. Like in most places this transformation occurred, a considerable amount of theft and violence was necessary. The violence came in the form of the Civil War(s) and the witch hunts (I've been reading Malcolm Gaskill's books about the British witch hunts during the civil wars. It's unsurprising that the immense economic shift was met with violent scapegoat hunting, and of course grifters willing to take advantage, like Matthew Hopkins). Amongst the many things occurring during the rather chaotic 17th century in Britain was the expansion of the 'enclosure' system. That is, the introduction of fences and wee stone walls to close off land where for centuries land had not, in fact, been closed off.
Before the 17th century, the key drivers of the English/British economy had been the aristocrats. They had a certain amount of land to their name, usually how they got the 'fancy' part of their name, and they had peasants to work the land. Everything outside of the control of the lords, ladies, barons, dukes, and marquis, and there was quite a bit of land that was outside of this, was left as 'the commons', and left for the poor and small free farmers to use to graze cattle on and to move about freely upon. 'The Commons' was recognised in English law as a right of all English subjects to use, without hindrance from any of the propertied classes. This was done, largely, because of a mixture of a lack of state capacity to enforce claims in these areas, yes, but also because it was, for want of better phrase, recognised that public spaces were necessary for the masses. Rich and poor alike, it was understood, as well as the land itself benefited from 'the commons' as a place where nature itself could thrive and everyone could benefit. Before I continue, let me make it clear, feudal England, Britain, and even Europe was still a miserable place to live, and we should not glorify this era. Statistically, you'd be one of the mud-soaked peasants dying of several diseases that we now know how to cure very easily. But, even a broken clock can be right twice a day, and this concept of the commons had quite a bit of merit.
'The Commons' could not, by law, be turned into a worked field. To the bourgeois class, this was a tragedy, as without a profit motive, what good is this unworked land? Toss in a bit of the ol' 'protestant work ethic' of the growing Puritan sect of 17th century Britain, and we get the idea of the 'tragedy of the commons'. Land is only valuable if man works it, nature can't do anything on its own, and therefore all the land in Britain should be privatised, handed over to farmers, and worked into good, profitable land. Thus came the enclosures. In the eyes of the Puritans, all men had to work within the confines of the new capitalist system, and all land had to be worked in order to make all men and all land profitable for the community. Of course, it also had to be 'good virtuous work', and so to hell with musicians, publicans, theatres, etc. Thus, as Charles I lost his head, Parliament and the Royalists fought, and the Puritans ultimately fought everyone, and Britain and Ireland descended into a bloody period of civil war, and among the losers were the benefactors of the commons. Capitalism only really works if you force everyone to partake, otherwise capital can't extract surplus value, when people can find it outside the system. This is one of the reasons capital was so vitriolic to all attempts at socialism (see my three part series on the death of Keynesianism).
This is a very brief summary of the loss of the Commons, and Standing would point out this is a much, much, longer process across Britain and Ireland, from the Plantation system in Ireland dispossessing Irish people of all their land, to the enclosures in England and Wales displacing the unmonied from the land in the countryside, to the Highland clearances in Scotland violently ending entire villages almost over night, the transition from an agrarian system to a highly capitalised, citified system with a 'surplus population' of labour in the cities from which the capitalist class could forcibly remove all assets except labour, and thus reduce everyone to waged labour that could be easily exploited. Britain's transition to capitalism was not a bit of peaceful, gradual reform, it was violent theft and displacement, and the destruction of the commons justified through the myth of the 'tragedy of the commons'. The advent of capitalism was every bit the bloody sinful revolution that capitalism pretends it is saving us from. Capitalist logic cannot fathom, nor abide, anything existing outside its system. To the capitalist, everything that cannot have surplus value extracted is a waste. The end of 'the commons' in Britain also spelled certain doom for the majority of our forests and other natural areas. Every bit of land had to be worked for profit, and everything and everyone that wasn't immediately profitable was a drain on the community, a waste. The logic of profit was the law of the land, a mentality that stick with Britain, the Commonwealth, and the US to this day. After all, it was (frankly, still is) the under pinning logic of the Empire.
The death of the Commons is necessary to understanding the hostility capitalism has to everything outside of it, as well as the violent logic of British, Dutch, and later French, Belgian, German, and American expansionism. As the indigenous peoples of the lands that these empires visited did not conform to capitalist logic, it had to be introduced, often violently in order to ensure that the bourgeois of the various empires could establish ownership in order to extract value. The violence came in multiple forms, explicit and implicit, but it was none the less ever present. If not from outright military intervention, then by the seemingly ever expanding presence of the police, a concept largely invented by capitalism. Failure to participate in the capitalist system came with threats of imprisonment, enslavement, or even execution. If outright violence was too unsavoury, imprisonment or debt, or both, was enough of an alternative. In other words, the proletariat had to be deprived of all means of production, so the only thing left to offer the system was labour, at a greatly reduced rate.
With the death of the commons also came the destruction of communities, communal living, and the hyper individualised 'self versus all' mode of capitalist thought, forced on everyone in the wider population, regardless of whether or not they believed such things as individuals. 'Loneliness epidemics' are born of such highly individualised thought. Again, this is necessary to convert a person into a labourer and a consumer. If labour organises, it gains power over capital. If a community shares resources, individuals consume less. Both these possibilities reduce capital's capacity to extract value, if a community uses the bus, that is fewer cars sold, which is less petrol sold, which is fewer tyres consumed. Sharing might be caring, but unless capital can figure out a way to charge for sharing (which it now has), sharing becomes bad for the economy. To hell with the environment, of course.
I could go on and on of the historical plunder of the original, literal commons and its wider impact on British history, as well as the histories of all the countries that Britain has, well, 'mingled' with over the course of the past five hundred years and change. But Standing does it better in his duology, The Plunder of the Commons and The Blue Commons. No, to celebrate this digital commons' first birthday, let's focus instead on the 'digital commons', which I've spent a considerable time studying, occupying, participating in, and even cultivating.
Richard Stallman is not without controversy, and I don't necessarily agree with everything about his non-computational views on things. But I do like GNU. Unix, you see, despite being associated with open source software today wasn't always. Once upon a time, it was closed source, licenced proprietary software developed by the American Telegraph and Telephone (AT&T) company to standardise computers enough to allow them to network over AT&T's extensive 'bell' network. AT&T, at that point, had a 'government sanctioned' but privately held monopoly over telecommunications in America, because nationalising it like the British had in the form of the General Post Office (GPO) was communist. Better to let unelected, private corporations dominate infrastructure instead. That'll show the 'undemocratic' commies. Anyway, AT&T owned 'Bell Laboratories', and Bell Labs, as they were affectionately known, made Unix. Unix was then made available to nerds at universities across both the US and the world. Some of these nerds wanted to keep playing with Unix, but on their personal machines. They could, of course, pay a licence fee for the privilege, or they could sail the proverbial seas, reverse engineer Unix and make a legally distinct version that could be distributed free of charge without fear of legal reprisal, that implicit violence I mentioned above.
Stallman, of course, did just that, in the form of an OS he called 'GNU is Not Unix' (GNU). Someday I'll figure out why recursive acronyms are so popular amongst open source types. GNU came with a philosophy that it would always be free, and it would always be user modifiable, so that it can be readily available for anyone with the know how to fix it up to do what they needed it to do. No more waiting for AT&T to patch a Unix flaw, instead if you knew your way around a computer you yourself could fix the flaw, and release the code with the fix for others to grab and use. For the users, by the users. Of course, GNU would be joined in this game by Linus Torvalds’s Unix, or Linus' Unix, or Linux, the open-source Unix like that I'm posting this from. If you're familiar with the community, there's no shortages of Linux, with different projects 'forking' off of each other as different communities go off to create their preferred Linuxes. What followed was the mostly tongue-in-cheek 'Unix wars', in which the only true loser was closed-source proprietary 'Bell Labs' Unix, a system that was now truly outdated in features, design, philosophy, and ownership, especially as the original AT&T itself died in the wild west of Reagan era deregulation of the American telecoms industry.
By this point, the internet as we knew it had emerged and had been built on top of all these Unix and Unix-like systems. Consumer grade computers were still dominated by OSes that were built to run local devices, with no initial eye towards networking. Neither MS-DOS nor the original macOSes were built to network, though third-party software and hardware peripherals were available to get the most dedicated early enthusiasts online to complain about Star Trek: The Next Generation, which was the 'nuTrek' of its era. Of course, there was also some movement of Linux adoption amongst the most 'hardcore' of these hackers, many of whom dreamt of gaining the attention of Angelina Jolee, Matthew Lillard, or both. I won't yuck your yum.
I don't mean to brag, but at this point my 'daily driver' was an Acer 386 running MS-DOS 5 and Windows 3.1. The height of technology. No internet connectivity, of course, and all software was bought specially as compatible with 'IBM Compatibles' such as our family i386 machine. My parents were not privy to the vast open-source world emerging on the periphery of consumer computing. My Dad got most of his information on computers from friends, colleagues, family, and the IT guys at work, as well as from computer shows on the television and radio. Resultantly, the library of software I grew up with was also mostly proprietary, built to run on MS-DOS and/or Windows 3.1 (and later Windows 95 and by the time I went to university we'd been running XP for some years, and then Vista came out...) I wouldn't start learning about open source until I was in my teen years and browsing internet forums, as you did in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when we finally got dial up internet. Eventually, wild child I was, I built a computer using second-hand parts and dual booted Windows XP and Linux Mandrake. The Linux in question I got on a CD-ROM from a local second-hand computer shop.
Those forums don't exist any more, that second hand computer shop went out of business near the time I was sitting A-levels. Tomorrow’s World and other computer television programmes are off the air, Windows XP is celebrating the 25th anniversary of its release, and Linux Mandrake is no more. If you really wanted a Red Hat for whatever reason, I'd point you to Fedora, but frankly the Debian family is where my heart and soul lives these days. Some of this we can chalk up to the inevitable tides of change. It's 2026, not 2006, and memory is an imperfect vessel. I tend to disagree with Niall Ferguson on damn near everything, but one quote he used in the opening to 2011's problematic Civilisation does hold some merit; nostalgia is the enemy of the historian. We can gaze back on 'the good old days' of Windows XP, but we can't let those rose tinted glasses help us ignore the fact that XP was a major step forward for the champions of digital surveillance as XP brought with it 'Windows activation' and within Windows XP apps came so much of the DRM software that began to alienate the user from ownership of their computer. XP was the death of MS-DOS, and with it the beginning of the end of local ownership of a computer. Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter began killing the mishmash networks of forums that the open source movement had thrived in.
Worst of all, the damned iPhone launched and all tech became centralised disposable conduits to corporate controlled walled gardens. Control, after all, meant profit.
Web 2.0, this confluence was called at the time, was meant to liberate us. In reality, it was the enclosures coming. The digital commons were to be destroyed in order to make the internet profitable, something it had yet to become. In the 1990s, an infamous email made the rounds at Microsoft wherein Bill Gates identified the greatest threat to the 'Wintel' monopoly was not, as many had assumed, Apple, who was still on life support at that time, but Linux, as the open source software movement undercut the entire profit model of Microsoft. If people continued to make and freely distribute software then Microsoft's entire reason for being, that is licencing software, would cease to exist. Years prior, in the 1970s, Gates had but heads with many programmers and computer engineers and students a like by proposing that licenced software was the only way forward, as unsurprisingly, the son of a corporate lawyer could not imagine people driven by anything other than a profit motive. Never truly leaving his father's shadow, this view on the supremacy around intellectual property and licencing fees even negatively impacted the development and roll out of a Covid-19 vaccine for people in the 'global south', as licencing the vaccines increased their price and inhibited their affordability in much of African and Asia, regions that the Gates Foundation assures us are its primary care. (The capitalist mode of 'charity' through NGOs is a topic I'll tackle another time).
Of course, the hypocrisy lies in how much open source code powers so much of the products used by Microsoft, Amazon, et al. W3 Tech, for examples, reports that over 75% of the internet 'lives' Unix and Unix-like servers. Most of these being Rocky OS servers. Microsoft themselves have created their own fork of Linux to power Azure. The modern macOS, as in every version since 10.0.0 has run on top of Darwin, itself a fork of BSD. The macOS' default shell in its terminal is the ever useful bash. Without open source software, most modern proprietary 'closed source' software simply couldn't function. The only people plundering the digital commons without routinely contributing back to it, or worse putting up arbitrary walls to enclose parts of it in artificial 'walled gardens' are the very bourgeois who tell the rest of us to watch out for 'free riders'. They should be well aware of free riders, given that is what most of them are. The actual threat of the 'free rider dilemma' is only realised by the destruction of the commons through private property. Other wise, most communities aren't drastically negatively impacted by 'lurkers', especially when the cost of reproduction is low-to-null.
But back to the (belated,sorry) celebration of Cyberspace's one year anniversary. In a recent talk I gave, I discussed how the true merit of open source software isn't in the software itself. I could talk about how the majority of the internet is hosted on Unix and Unix-like servers, how even Microsoft seems to have admitted that Linux is better at networking than windows, or how the most popular audio editor is open source, or how many pieces of open source software a person uses on a daily basis without even realising it. I could be one of those Linux nerds and convince myself and everyone around me on a daily basis that because I know my way around a bash shell my computer and, by proxy, I are superior to their meek Windows and/or Macintosh machine. Then I can wonder why people don't feel safe talking about computers around Linux nerds and/or asking them for help, as well as why I generally don't have many friends.
But that's not the point of Linux, or Open Source software in general, as Torvalds himself once said when asked whether Linux was better than BSD:
Which one is “better”? To me, Linux is much better, since to me, the important thing for an OS is how well it performs under different patterns, be they embedded, server, or desktop, or just some totally crazy person in a basement trying something new.
But some people disagree with me, and like to limit their work to specific areas, and like the fact that developers have one cohesive goal, and don’t care about anything else. Some people consider the Linux development model “too permissive,” in other words — they want the project to concentrate on X, where X is some random area that they care about...
...Are there areas where you could point to “X does Y better”? Oh, sure, that’s inevitable. But exactly because Linux tries to be “good enough” for everybody, you’ll find a lot of areas where Linux is better (often a lot better — as in “it works”), and then you’ll find a few narrow areas where one particular BSD version will be better.
This, matched with Linus' law, that any bug can be fixed with infinite eyes on it (emphasising community development) and matched with the sheer number of Linux forks, and other open source projects, you start to see that Linux is indeed a very good operating system. I run Mint as my daily driver because, unlike many Arch distros, I can throw a metaphorical spanner at the damned thing and it keeps running, mixed with my broader familiarity with all Debian forks, and Mint is the best Linux for me, but that doesn't mean it's inherently the 'best Linux', if there even is such a thing. Further, the thing that brought me to Mint was the part of the FOSS movement that I tend to 'hang out in'. Linux, and FOSS, when at their best, are a community. Like all communities there's internal drama, Torvalds himself admits he's difficult to get along with, and I certainly don't agree with him on everything nor everything every branch of Linux does, I did just mock the stereotypical pretentious Linux types after all. But I don't have to, it's a big enough pool, we can all swim in it. Further, we can all recognise each other's contributions whilst also striving to improve our own.
You could say, 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs'.
But there's trouble on the horizon, as their almost always is. GitHub is not only a Microsoft product these days, but also both a training ground for AI as well as a place where Claude has notably run rampant. Discord has a whole list of problems, and other places where many maintainers of the 'digital commons' are similarly generally under siege as AI requests and reports have made the maintenance of open source spaces increasingly difficult.
That's why spaces like Cyberspace are important. Not profit driven, not chasing the latest corporate fads, and not given to the kind of idiot knee-jerk reaction to technological trends that could only come from a business major or MBA. Rather, doing what open source and broader FOSS software does best, (free as in freedom, not free lunch, do donate if you're able!) which is building a community of passionate users who each contribute to the project in ways that best match their capacity. You might not be a coder, but your presence, in whatever form, contributes to the unique feel and build of spaces like Cyberspace.
That is why we should celebrate Cyberspace, promote it responsibly, and work as a community to keep this space the space we'd all like to occupy. It doesn't belong to any share holders looking to maximise advertising revenue, it belongs to us.
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