Bas Jan Ader: Untitled (Tea party)
01. GROWING NEW STORIES
Meanwhile, let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.
– Kakuzō Okakura: The Book of Tea, 1956
Since we don’t really have a language for naming commons – real commons- they tend to be invisible and taken for granted. The commons are things that no one owns and are shared by everyone, such as shareware, the human genome, urban squares, forests, wikipedia, creative commons licenses, the commons of language itself, etc. Unfortunately, due to the dismal performance of corporate capitalism and government, countless public resources are getting privatised. In response, commoning sets forth a very different vision on human fulfilment and ethics, and invites people to achieve their own bottom-up, do-it-yourself styles of emancipation.
The concept of the commons is not a dogma, it is a political critique to the status-quo-system and a new way of managing resources. […] Basically the commons is shared resources that a given community wants to manage for the collective benefit of everyone with a focus on fairness and sustainability of the resource. It is pioneering new forms of production, more open and accountable forms of governance, innovative technologies and cultures and healthy, appealing ways to live. It is a quiet revolution – organised, diversified and socially minded. (David Bollier: Think like a Commoner, 2014: 1–9)
Kurt Vonnegut: On the Shape of Stories
FURTHER READING & RESEARCH
David Boillier, Think like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons (2014)
David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Patterns of Commoning (2015)
David Bollier, The Commons, Short and Sweet (2011)
George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis (2017)
David Bohm, On Dialogue (2004)
Max Haiven, Crisis of Imagination, Crisis of Power (2014)
P2P Foundation, The Commons, Transition Primer
Antonis Rokas, Where sexes come by the thousands (2018)
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2010)
Ursula Le Guin,The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (2010)
RESOURCES
The Commoner
On the Commons
International Journal of the Commons
Digital Library Of The Commons
Tank Magazine Podcasts
Atlas of Transformation