[Commoning] On 'Open Access'

[James Quilligan]

> A brief quibble, Stefan:  Unfortunately, using the term "open access
> commons" invites confusion and misunderstanding.  The term can be  
> construed
> as either a commons with open-access rules, as you suggest, or it  
> could just
> as easily be construed by many people as an open-access (non)commons  
> as
> described by Garrett Hardin.
>
> Since we want to avoid any misunderstanding that a free-for-all regime
> without boundaries/commoning, etc., is in fact a commons (it is,  
> rather, a
> common pool resource, as Silke notes), it is best to avoid "open  
> access
> commons" altogether....or unless the digital context is quite obvious.
> That's my judgment, in any case.
>
> David

I fully agree with David on this. For his reason internal to commons  
management, and also for two other reasons having to do with the  
broader political and ideological realities in which we live.

First, "open access commons" is an accurately descriptive term in many  
contexts, certainly, but the use of the word 'open' creates an  
unintended ambiguity, leaving the commons vulnerable to further  
appropriation and control by the public sector (government), which  
also has a longstanding and decisive claim on the principle of  
'openness'. (I'm not speaking here of today's autocracies or  
monarchies, but of modern liberal governments.) Indeed, democratic  
liberalism has always hyped itself as a system of 'open public  
access'. On this basis, international law and national sovereignty --  
and private property rights -- are claimed to be open systems.  
Politically speaking, of course, these are closed systems masquerading  
as open systems. It is quite Orwellian: in our present social  
circumstances, the state's use of the term 'open' does not really mean  
open, and the state's use of the term 'public' does not really mean  
public. So it's very easy to confuse what commoners and the state each  
mean by 'open access'', which is decidedly different. This ambiguity  
is a very powerful tool of the Market State in the 'dividing and  
conquering' of the commons and its organizers, since the average  
person doesn't readily make a clear distinction between public and  
commons. This, in fact, goes right to the heart of the crisis in  
liberal democracy today. It's a big reason why people at the  
grassroots continue to support elite policy and uphold the system that  
actually represses them: most people believe that their politically  
closed system is actually open. Commoners, I trust, will take a  
principled stand and dispel this illusion.

Second, the liberal interpretation of 'openness' is also supposedly  
'corroborated' by systems theory (from thermodynamics and evolutionary  
theory to the analysis of organisms and information theory). In the  
20th century, economics mimicked physics, in which the borders of a  
closed system allow energy, but not matter, to flow through. Hayek's  
price system seemed be the perfect cybernetic model for a self- 
adjusting market system, both within and between closed societies.  
Matter (people and resources) could be controlled with societies,  
while energy (fuel, information and money) would have greater freedom  
to cross material and political boundaries. This paved the way for  
economic globalization -- in which the closed system of sovereign  
political borders and private property was maintained, while open  
flows of trade and finance across all borders were encouraged. We have  
all been negatively impacted by this insidious regime. And yes, the  
process of globalization has come to signify to us the repression of a  
closed system, rather than the manifestation of an open system which  
it purports to be. Yet we still blame corporations, bankers and  
politicians for engineering these systemic contradictions, when the  
problem also rests with us for not clearly recognizing how the state's  
use of the principle of  'open access' is used to undermine our  
interests, especially with regard to the protection of our commons.

The natural sciences have increasingly challenged this physics-based  
economic model, however. In nature, energy and matter both flow  
through the borders of open systems. Ecology and environmentalism,  
thus present an epistemological roadblock to government policy makers,  
business people, and academics who are clinging to the market price  
ideology of neo-liberalism. After decades of increasing pollution,  
natural degradation and climate change, how do governments get away  
with acknowledging that material, energy, capital, information and  
people are in open exchange with the environment, and yet generate  
political and economic policies based on price theory which totally  
contradict this ecological understanding? Easily: just change the  
focus back to the mythology of the state's open access regime. Policy  
makers simply say: "political boundaries are indeed porous and  
permeable, as natural science shows, which is all the more reason that  
someone has to manage the resource systems demarcated by these  
boundaries. Commoners themselves are too weak, confused and  
disorganized to manage these resources, nor do they understand the  
dynamics of open systems like our scientists and technicians do. No  
one can manage these commons except us in government, with the help of  
our friends in the private sector. So it's really up to us and the  
marketplace." Hence, the commons remain political or private  
enclosures, measured and shaped as though they are empirical  
realities. Government technocracy thus has a 'scientistic'  
justification for commons enclosure and social repression, derived  
erroneously from the natural sciences on the basis of 'openness'.

My point here is simply that most uses of the term 'open' by  
commoners, though they make our point technically according to the  
systemic language developed for the commons, are constantly clashing  
against the linguistic and conventions of the state as well as the  
masses. I don't believe that it's really within our scope to redefine  
the meaning of 'openness' for the global population, even though that  
would be the ideal way to make the epistemological change that is  
needed. Rather, the misuse and abuse of this language -- the baggage  
of which we have inherited -- should present a creative challenge for  
us to find a more useful, resonant and transparent terminology than  
'open access commons'.

James B. Quilligan