Hi Felix,
Thanks for sharing.
I like your point that we need to enter into conflictual relations and
provide ourselves with rules that enable and constrain us in order to
remake the world. Makes me think we need a different idea of the
commons (and with it a different desire for a different future) to that
which has driven many commons projects over the years. One that is less
bound up with the desire to overcome alienation and recreate a state of
harmony, and more capable of acknowledging and assuming the role of
conflictual relations when it comes to commons. After all, there are
many different kinds of commons, some of which have little or nothing in
common with one another.
They include liberal (Elinor Ostrom and Yochai Benkler), radical
(Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, and Fred Moten and Stefano Harney), and
latent (Anna Tsing), of course. But in case it’s helpful – and to pick
up on your references to nature and the non-human, and concern with
remaking the world – I’ve also been working recently with the notion of
the uncommons. The political ontologists Mario Blaser and Marisol de la
Cadena propose this concept in /A World of Many Worlds/'as counterpoint
to the common good and to enclosures, and, as important, to slow down
the commons (including its progressive versions.) … all three concepts
converge in that they require a common form of relation, one that (like
labor or property) connects humans and nature conceived as ontologically
distinct and detached from each other.' Referring to Isabelle Stengers’
idea of ‘interests in common which are not the same interests’, Blaser
and de la Cadena describe the creation of an uncommons as the
‘negotiated coming together of heterogeneous worlds (and their
practices) as they strive for what makes each of them be what they are,
which is also not without others.’ These relations can be difficult,
complex, conflictual, because the elements they do not have in common
can include not just those other projects and approaches that are
collaborated with but the relation itself, what is understood as the
relation with and between them, and which can take heterogeneous forms too.
Gary
--
http://www.garyhall.info
Latest:
Journal article (open access) 'Defund Culture':
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/defund-culture
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Literary Heritage' by Matthew Kirschenbaum:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/721475
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On 13/11/2022 11:59, Felix Stalder wrote:
This is a slightly edited version of a talk I gave at the “Commons to
NFTs” conference, organized by Aksioma in Ljubliana, 12.11.2022, for
the a launch for the eponymous book we edited together.
Program: https://aksioma.org/from-commons-to-nfts
Video Streams: https://www.youtube.com/user/aksioma007/streams
The book: https://aksioma.org/from-commons-to-nfts/publication
Alienation and how to (not) overcome it!
------------------------------------------------------------------
A few days ago, the large crypto-exchange FTX collapsed, after it was
discovered that its investment division had used a self-issued
currency – created out of thin air – as a collateral to borrow real
money for speculation. $ 8 billion, give and take a few hundred
millions are missing [1]. Ups. Sorry. In many ways, this should
surprise nobody. As one scrolls down “web3 is going great” there is
the overwhelming impression that “crypto”, in all its manifestations,
is nothing but a series of frauds with a few basic schemes – theft,
Ponzi, rug-pull, wash-trade – endlessly varied. And on this level of
generality, it’s probably the most accurate thing to say, but this
level of generality is usually not particularly interesting.
I want to go a bit deeper. Because there is a lot more animating the
crypto sphere than simple, rational, if often criminal, calculations.
Rather, running underneath and through these get-rich-quick-schemes
are strong currents of desire of a different future, and these desires
are surprisingly similar – at some level – to those that have been
animating many commons projects over the last 25 years.
The desire I’m talking about is a desire for freedom, or more
precisely, a desire to flee what are seen as fundamentally unfair,
oppressive social institutions. Or, even more precisely, the desire to
overcome alienation and live an authentic life. That we actually don’t
really know, or agree on, what it means to live an authentic life, is
precisely why so many different ideas and practices can be infused
with this desire.
This desire to overcome alienation is, perhaps, the most powerful and
long-running desire animating digital culture. And there are two
version of this desire that that found their way into digital culture
by way of the American counter-culture of the 1960s: A a communitarian
and a libertarian one.
But, of course, the prototypical modern desire for authenticity didn’t
originate there. So it’s worth to go back a little bit further, to the
late 18th early 19th century. Then, as s reaction to the enlightenment
and "the cult of reason", romanticism as a counter-movement emerged.
It offered a critique of reason and rationality, focusing on what
would later be called the “instrumentality of reason” which it argued
was draining the world of meaning and turning everything into mere
means (human and natural resources). What was offered instead, was
what one could call the worship of mystery, as something that was
precisely beyond the reach of that kind of instrumentality.
From the beginning, there were two version of mystery. One was, what I
would call, the mystery of transcendental power, and one was the
mystery of deep communion. Now, these mysteries have a lot of things
in common, that’s why it’s easy to flip from one into the others, but
it’s worth keeping them apart for the moment.
The mystery of transcendental power, was, of course, initially
religion and it’s institutions, most importantly, the Roman-Catholic
church. The fought the secularizing tendencies of the enlightenment,
as they claimed to represent a power beyond reason. The mode of
accessing this type of mystery has always been submission. Over time
the form of the transcendental power shape-shifted a few times and
there are now conflicting version of it. Besides religion, there is
the charismatic leader, that transcends the laws of history, and, most
importantly for our purposes, there is also the market.
Emanating from the Austrian School of Economic, particularly Hayek,
the market was seen as a mysterious higher power. The market’s
functioning, they claimed, was beyond comprehension. For mere mortals
to intervene would inevitably lead to disaster, that is, to “the road
to serfdom.” Its main feature -- a hand-- was, to complete the famous
cryptic image of Adam Smith, ‘invisible’, much like the hand of god.
At least the one that doesn’t belong to Diego Maradonna.
The mode of authentic living in this perspective is to accept and
submit to the unquestionable, absolute power (in whatever form one
believes in it) and seek most direct connection to it, either by
removing intermediaries, or accepting only traditional forms of
inter-mediation. Once this submission has taken place, one enters a
community of true believers and within this community, there is
equality in submission. At the end of times, the chosen community will
survive, or, if everyone joins this community here and now and it’s
unique form of mystery worship, paradise on earth will be realized. In
market terms, removing intermediaries is called deregulation: “Let the
market work its magic.”
The second mystery was that of communion. Of experiencing direct
relationship with someone or something else that is not mediated
through reason, language and other forms of cultural framing.
Initially, the communion was with nature, as the one force that had
been untouched by the industrial revolution and the instrumental
calculation that came with it.
There was also a strong spiritual dimension of it, but it was
fundamentally a horizontal one, aimed at experiencing the
interconnection with the non-human, as we would say today. The way of
accessing this mystery was to open up, to overcome the crippling of
the senses created by enlightenment and rationality. Like the the
mystery of authority, the mystery of communion also shifted its shape
over time and now exists in multiple forms. It can be nature, it can
be the human community without hierarchy and without rules.
Part of this desire is the belief that if all forms of oppression,
in-authenticity, alienation could be removed, things would naturally
balance themselves into a state of harmony.
You probably have guessed it, these this desire, in its two versions,
animates both the commons and the crypto movement. For the
crypto-movement, code is law and one has to submit to that in order to
become free and enter the community of believers that are all
essentially equal before this higher power. The crypto booster Max
Kaiser put it this way: “We stand naked before Satoshi”, as Inte
Gloerich recalled. Or the frequent claim that the blockchain would
store information “for eternity” (yeah, digital technology doing
anything for even a few decades). This element of submission to power,
I think, helps to explain the affinity of large parts of the
crypto-movement to the far-right.
The belief of returning to or recreating a natural state of harmony is
very strong in the commons movement. Perhaps less in its digital
aspects, but certainly where its ideas of nature overlap with the
esoteric.
While I personally tend to sympathize with the desire for communion
and cannot relate to the desire for authority, overall, the desire to
overcome alienation and (re)create authenticity is fundamentally
problematic. I think the alternative is to embrace the fall from
grace, to understand that in order to remake the world, we have to
enter into conflictuous relations, give ourselves rules that enable
and constrain ourselves and embrace the complexities that come with
the ambiguity of existence.
And indeed, the most successful commoning projects have done exactly
that and have been arguing over their rules, how to interpret and
adapt them, ever since. Nobody would describe Wikipedia as an
harmonious community, but, at least so far, it has managed to handle
its conflicts in a self-organized and productive matter. Same could be
said about most of the large software commons. In the same way, the
most interesting crypto project are not those who want abstract away
social relations into some trustless nirvana of pure, unambiguous
transactions. But rather those who use the possibilities of coding
rules for their interaction as a chance to really think about the
rules and the kind of social trust they might create. The challenge,
then, is to overcome the limits of enlightenment, or instrumental,
rationality (technocratic management) without falling into the traps
of mysticism.
Thank you very much.
[1]
https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/11/12/the-epic-collapse-of-sam-bankman-frieds-ftx-exchange-a-crypto-markets-timeline/
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