Education as a Commons - A Conversation with David Bollier

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

The commons is an invitation to step out of some of these frameworks that guide our thought and to try to get more elemental, more human, more connected with each other and the earth. And it's not as if the individual is erased or it doesn't matter or individual talents don't matter. It's more that they're integrated and aligned with collective purposes.

Hi everyone. Thanks for joining me again this week. My name's Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. As many of you know, on this channel we have been exploring the new kinds of educational institutions that are emerging in response to the challenges that our legacy institutions are facing. For the last 150 years, we've gotten used to compulsory standardized schooling being provided at scale by either the state as public government schools or by the market as private fee-paying schools. I'm fascinated by the question of what alternatives there might be to this binary choice. Homeschooling networks, religious and intentional communities are certainly examples, but often still very much at the margins. My guest this week, David Brolia, is a global expert in the way that communities work together to steward shared resources, often known as the commons, rather than relying on the market or the state. So I was really keen to ask him about the implications of reframing education itself as a commons? What would this do to the way that we provide, fund, and govern education? David is an author, activist, blogger, and independent scholar with a primary focus on the commons as a new paradigm of economics, politics, and culture. He's the Reinventing the Commons program director at the Schumacher Center for New Economics. David has written and edited many books on the commons, including most recently the revised second edition of Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons, which was published earlier this year. David also hosts a podcast, Frontiers of Commoning, and blogs regularly at bolia.org. You can find more information and links to David's extensive and incredible work in the show notes.

Thank you, David. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to have the conversation with you. This is something that came to me perhaps through Jennifer Brunsberg Engelmann I'd mentioned, because her and I have been talking a lot and we've had her on the podcast previously about her work on rethinking the economics curriculum and the way education is done for economics. But the idea of the commons and the, and the commoning and the commonsverse and all of these amazing things, which perhaps listeners have not heard of, is I think an incredibly rich area to discuss as we're thinking about new kinds of institutions, the transforming education, a lot of the discourse that is happening. Right now in education. And well, let's say it, you are probably the globally most eminent person to be speaking to about this topic. I don't want to embarrass you, but I think I, I'd like to say that's true.

Well, I mean, I've been studying for the commons for the past 25 years, and I frankly live in this interstitial space. I'm not an academic, I'm not a journalist, I'm not a political activist. I'm a little bit of all of them in the middle, and therefore I've evolved outside of the usual institutional identities and constraints.. And so that's sort of how I've come to the commons as a, what I see as an important vehicle for rethinking transformation personally, societally, and through practical projects. And we can get into that, but that's sort of my self-introduction. And I work with the Schumacher Center for New Economics in the US, which is a very hospitable nonprofit for talking about such transformations, talking about relocalization. And otherwise, I kind of am a serial partner with various players who see value in the commons in making change in their theaters of action.

Fantastic. So, I mean, as we will discuss, I'd love to talk to you about this concept in the context of education, but bearing in mind that's not necessarily your domain of expertise, but that's what I'd really like to bring to listeners is just this concept and a lot of the discourses around it and see how it lands with them in schools or in, you know, just thinking about it. So, I mean, perhaps we could just start basically in bearing in mind, you've probably said this tens of thousands of times and I apologize in advance, but just for listeners who aren't very familiar with, with this concept, thinking about in education, let's say the providers of education, private schools, public schools, whatever you call them in different countries, is the market providing them commercial private organizations or the state providing education? That's an incredibly familiar binary to people working in education. And so this idea that there's, there may be another way of thinking about managing systems, resources, et cetera, called the commons, may be less familiar to people. So if you don't mind just starting there, just basically.

Well, I mean, the commons will first of all ask you to step outside of whatever legacy roles and institutional identities you have. Because the commons is about self-organized cooperation to meet needs in the ways that you find valuable and important in your particular context. And so it's not as if it's this universal blueprint. It's something that you make, but there is kind of a template of cooperation for shared benefit in ways that are not simply instrumental and economic, but that are part of your integrated personal life in relationship with others, in relationship with the Earth, in relationship to past and future generations. So in some ways, it's about a different conception of what an integrated, whole human being is, trying to enact it in your own self-created, or I should say, peer-created institutions. So immediately when you think of education, You know, education is ultimately a very relational thing. You have people who are helping you learn. You have peers who are part of the whole process. You may have, you know, the, the so-called master-apprentice relationship or be part of an ensemble in artistic circles that are trying to learn. So it's this kind of framework of learning as inherently social and collaborative and drawing upon inherited knowledge and culture as part of that process.. And I contend that this is essential to being fully alive. And so it's not just about information transfer to learn X or Y in a cognitive intellectual way. It's about developing as a human being. And so it's, that's a different framework for education.

Yeah, I know. Amazing. And I mean, hearing important resonances already in what you're saying, but just to dwell slightly on the concept. People might be more familiar with it as a kind of a way of managing material assets, let's say like a lake or a, you know, farm or a forest, or whereas the concept, the idea that managing the commons together in a community might also be intangible or, you know, immaterial, like education, like the digital space, et cetera. Could you just say just a little bit about that?

Well, much of the historical scholarship and thinking about the commons has been that the resources— it's a resource, it's a lake, it's a forest, it's a fishery. And in fact, there is a shared resource as part of the commons. But I think there's a profound, if you'll excuse the term, ontological and epistemological error in seeing commons as things. Commons really are social systems that manage things. And it's just that standard economics and politics refuses to see that. It prefers to see it, oh, the ocean is a common, the internet is a common, the atmosphere is a commons. No, those are shared resources that we do not yet have governance or stewardship systems for managing. So, you know, making the shift to commons as a social system, a very living, organic social system, is the shift we need to make. And once you do that, your perspective immediately changes because you see, oh, it's the dynamic interrelations. It's about the becoming through a process. And it's a very— it's what I call an ontological shift or onto-shift in which you start to relate to phenomena in a different way. And I don't mean to get kind of abstract and eggheady about it, but it is true that when you're in the midst of a commons as a participant, not just as a neutral scientific observer, you have a different set of relationships, you feel differently and so on. So that's the kind of shift that proposing when bringing the commons to learning and education.

No, that's great. And I, we, I would love to talk about the ontological shift despite the language, but I think it is, again, it's just something that comes up a lot in the podcast in different ways. But I have to be honest, even just doing the research and, you know, listening and reading your work. I had that slight shift myself, 'cause I think I was thinking of it still much more as a, as a thing in a way, or, or, you know, even if it's an intangible thing, but it's still a resource that we can manage. But actually shifting to a perspective that it is the set of interrelationships about the way that we essentially interact around things we care about fundamentally, right? How do we organize and self-organize around things that we care about? And that was part of, I think, one of my questions was it's a different kind of theory of value because even the kind of the thingness and the economic value theories colonize all of the spaces, including education. So for example, if you talk about the things we care about or that we value in education, even if you've got posters on the wall saying you care about compassion and empathy and these other things, actually the thing that the system says it cares about is is the outputs, which are the, you know, the outcomes around credentials and diplomas or whatever it might be, transcripts to get to the next stage. And this idea of almost accruing capital, individual credential capital, social capital, human capital, or this language of capital of, of that you, that's part of the thing that often the system tells educators that we are doing is helping young people develop their own capital. And so this idea of shifting it to a set of relationships about managing the things we care about differently, not just trying to get to the end goal of the outputs of the enclosed capital concept is, yeah, I, that, that felt to me like a really useful way of talking about some of the shifts away from some of those more bounded entities or these, these things that we like to say hold the value. But actually when we are in the relationships of a school in a community, we kind of know that's not where the real value is, but it's the, it's the thing that all the incentives are pointing towards us making sure we get done.

And it's very daunting to try to reject the entire apparatus of education and the principles on which they're founded. You know, right. We try to carve out a little safe space or haven for the empathy, the co-learning and so forth. But the truth is education is trying to build human capital, which ironically is the title by the great British scholar of the commons. Guy Standing has a new book coming out in the next several months called Human Capital, and it's about how schooling has been created for competition, economic success, individual achievement, and that, you know, credentialism, standardized tests, the way curricula and teaching are structured are all about those things. Now, it's hard to just wholesale reject it when it's so pervasive and all-encompassing in one's life. However, we know at a certain intuitive level that human beings are made for more than just being slotted into a job or a career and working on credentials, that we have larger aspirations and we have deeper commitments emotionally, spiritually, socially. Than just our cognitive information bank of knowledge. So, you know, I try to see the commons as a way to start to open up this space for empathy and ethics, for creative thinking, for play, for poetic exploration even. And it may sound kind of airy-fairy, you know, but I think that it's precisely the being more integrated as a person, being able to make those judgments, that is the contribution to society rather than just being slotted into a bureaucratic or professional slot.

Because I mean, in a way, that's what the state or, or the market as the two binary alternatives do, right? It's either the kind of the citizen attributes of, are you contributing to society? Or is it the, the market value that you have or the, the ability to create value in the market as a result of your education. And, you know, the fact that you want a return on your investment of the payment that you make to, to get the university degree or whatever it is. So it's really difficult, I think, sometimes to talk about an alternative to either of those things. And that's why I think the commons is so rich as a set of, as a discourse, like as a, as a set of ideas, because it, it feels like another way to talk about the things that have value to us, but that are not— that the state and the market don't include in their theories of value. That's true.

Absolutely. And the, the problem of course is that many of these alternatives as projects or institutional systems are pretty underdeveloped or sort of one-off projects. Having said that, you know, there are dozens and rich varieties of commons out there And a little slogan that some colleagues and I use is that all commons are knowledge commons, meaning they're all about the sharing of knowledge and putting it into practice for whatever they're doing, whether it's creating knowledge or open-source software systems or urban social services, or there's just huge varieties of types of commons. And it's about getting the practice aligned with one's personal aspirations. The, you know, the existing system does not necessarily honor the search for truth, the inculcation of moral virtue, or the learning and practice of citizenship, which are three goals in education that Guy Standing identifies in his book. It's really more about these secondary credential tokens of education. So the commons, I think, is trying to get to this deeper level through the collaborative process. And, you know, as I say, it manifests in everything from fab labs to stewardship of lakes and forests and fisheries and on and on. And I think it's that kind of practice that makes one more integrated in the world in one's learning, as opposed to just being squirreled away in the library and thinking that you're educated.

Right. And that, I mean, that's why the word, the verb commoning, I thought was quite interesting cuz it, I mean, it partly indicates that shift away from commons as a resource to it's the commoning as a practice. So I think that's really powerful, but also just what you're saying there about virtue and, and attributes of citizenship. There, there's something interesting about the ideology around it because this is something I notice in education sometimes the, the pushback or the claims or the desire to build a different kind of education is often dismissed as more ideological with this more romantic agenda, let's say, or the, you know, whatever the particular ideology is, but there's something that is ideologically driven, which I think is interesting because it's almost like it kind of invisibilizes the ideology that underlies the market and the state, right? So it's kind of implying that that's somehow ideologically neutral and the thing that's pushing back against it is the ideological thing. Well, the reason I'm saying this all is because what I've, I heard you talk about with Douglas Rushkoff, which I'd really recommend people listening to, cuz it's a brilliant conversation on his Team Human channel. But you talked about the fact that this, the commoning should appeal to people of all ideologies, which I found super interesting.

I mean, yes, I, I don't think, in some ways I regard the commons as a pre-political phenomena of our need and desire to be in relation. And I mean, I would flash back to some biological findings that at the cellular level in evolution, it's the relationality between different phenomena, bacteria and mitochondria, to create different types of cells, that this symbiosis is what leads to creative evolution. And I think that life is a relational phenomena. A term that some biologists have used is reciprocal specification. In other words, it's not as if entities have some essential nature. It's in relation to their context and other living organisms that they evolve. And I think that this is true all the way up the scale to humanity, if you want to say that we're at the top, but in fact we're embedded in this web and that it's exploring our relationality, understanding it, working within that context that we evolve, not that we're some individual self-made person who's, you know, solely responsible for what we achieve in this larger system, as if there was not many, many invisible means of support making it happen.

That's interesting. But couldn't you also, though, say that the evolution of the market and the state are two ways that humans have evolved to as social technologies to distribute resources or to manage cooperation?

No question. I think that that has, you know, you could say that capitalism was an emancipation from the Middle Ages by giving people greater agency and scope of purpose. We've also seen, however, that some of the new conceptions of humanity that the Enlightenment brought about and capitalism brought about have profound limitations that we're now understanding. You know, we're not— humanity is not separate from the Earth. We're integrated with it. We're integrated with other parts of life. And so the conceit that we preside over the earthly systems as separate and autonomous from the rest of life and geological history is erroneous. And I think that we're— especially climate change is forcing us to realize how truly integrated we are We just don't understand it. Our culture, our politics, our economics doesn't understand that. And I think that's part of the crisis we have, more of a crisis of cultural perception than anything else. And I, I see the commons as a way of making culturally legible things that we otherwise ignore or regard as trivial, inconsequential, peripheral.

Love it. It's amazing. And, and building or enabling the emergence of the institutions that will help to manage that.

Exactly.

Because I think that's, that's part of what we are lacking, right? And that's what this podcast is, is very much about.

Yeah. And I, I think that we have to, this is, we're on the frontier of creativity a lot in a lot of these. How do we manage ourselves as a commons in terms of the interrelations? I've spent a lot of time thinking about that in the book I wrote with Silke Helfrich called Free, Fair and Alive, which You know, economics has its little paradigm of what a human being is. You're an individual, rational, utility-maximizing, materialist person trying to gain maximum advantage. You know, I said to myself, what does a commons look like? What are the dynamics there? And we identified a whole lot of so-called patterns of commoning where there are certain behaviors and attitudes that in successful commons are present. And there are ideas such as cultivate shared purpose and values, contribute freely, practice gentle reciprocity, trust situated knowing, and so on. We identified some 25 or 30 such patterns, and it's not as if all commons have all of them. But the point is there are certain behaviors that allow a commons to be successful practice and learning organism. As a collective thing. And it's not as if the individual is erased or it doesn't matter, or individual talents don't matter. It's more that they're integrated and aligned with collective purposes. And it's not as if it's irrational or non-rational. It's just that the rationality and the irrational are integrated so that your feelings and your spiritual life and your, your ethical values are all integrated. So the patterns of commoning are part of how I've come to understand how commons work. And I think there's obvious implications for education in that.

I'm in 100%. Sign me up.

Now, now let's, now let's build that school. Exactly.

So, but, but I think there's something really interesting there that really, as you were saying, just really kind of gets to the nub of the issue for me is that some of these shifts, these changes. I worry sometimes that some of the languages, and not about commoning solely, but just in general around a lot of the kinds of conversations about the kinds of transformations we might need, inverted commas, right now depend on the shifts in individual kind of value sets or perceptions, and then we can move. And I wonder whether, I mean, clearly it's not one or the other, but there is, there's kind of a chicken and egg problem, right? It's almost like in those patterns of commoning that you talk about, by participating in them, many people will develop different kinds of habits and patterns themselves about the way that they, the kinds of things they are valuing or the kinds of ways they are being in the world, or ultimately potentially the kinds of beliefs they're holding about the world in terms of their ontologies. And so there's a really interesting question there for me about you know, which comes first. And that's, that's where I think some of the conversations really become problematic and sometimes slightly neocolonial when we say, oh, here are all the idealized behaviors or, or things that we want everybody to realize that is true about the world. Once we've got everybody on that page, we can then move and build anew.

Oh, see, that's the old paradigm of education that I've got the knowledge and I will transfer it to you.

Right, exactly.

And, and I think that this is something more deeply internalized and acculturated that has to be absorbed. And you're right that it's chicken and egg in a way, but let's acknowledge the relational dynamics. The point is you can grow into and become a commoner. It takes other people and it takes time and it takes trust. And then it's sort of like developing a set of muscles that many people don't have or don't realize they have. And I like the term proprioception. The self-awareness of our bodily capacities. That's what a commons is all about. Now, many commons come into being because there's some need that needs to be met, or perhaps it's even survival. And people find, oh, we have to cooperate and negotiate and make rules and punish those who break the rules and all the classic behaviors of within a commons if we're going to succeed. And then over time those evolve, and then you get with the program and say, oh, within this group, this is how you do it. I mean, you could have a fantastic computer programmer, and if he ends up at IBM or if he ends up in a free software community, he or she is going to evolve in a very different way. So the context will grow a different type of human being, just as the existing educational system has grown types of individuals who want to go to Wall Street or want to go to law school or Exactly.

Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, could we get practical for a minute and just talk through some of those different kinds of patterns of commoning just to give, you know, if there's school leaders listening or there's, you know, education system leaders listening, like what are the kinds of more practical, like I've heard you call them legal hacks, you know, they, they, they get very practical about the kinds of arrangements that we might like a Creative Commons license is an, is a great example, I think. But, but I think some concrete practical examples would help people situate it.

Well, I, I, the most concrete I think gets to the level of these behaviors, which we separate into three realms: social life, provisioning, and peer governance. And I won't, I won't go through all of those, but depending upon your context, you often need certain structures to deal with the existing realities of the world. So you mentioned Creative Commons licenses. Those are licenses that allow copyright holders to signal that their works can be copied and reused, modified for free without permission or payment. And this has opened up all sorts of legal sharing that was very problematic, at least at an institutional level before the Creative Commons licenses. And so that there's obvious implications for education in terms of making things more accessible, more affordable. Open textbooks. There's a whole open educational resources movement that creates curriculum and videos and datasets and much else that is freely shareable and modifiable for education, which, you know, brings down costs, makes things more accessible. So that's one hack, legal hack on copyright law that Congress and other government bodies was not going to make that commoners made. This was an initiative 25 years ago by a number of law scholars and artists. I think in creating educational commons, there's other types of hacks that will have to be made in terms of funding, in terms of facilities. And, you know, it's not as if there's a blueprint. These are improvisational, creative modifications for making something work. And it could be anything from a standalone homeschooling project to things sections or parts of existing institutions where they sort of carve out a space and get permission from the administrators, you know. So it's, it takes a lot of different forms, but the point is to get this collaborative relational dynamics of co-learning underway.

No, absolutely. And you know, I don't want to situate it only in education cuz I think it's also useful for people to be able to hear of other types of legal hacks or improvisations that have been used in other sectors that they might think, oh, you know, it might spark something for them in an education context. But for example, one of the things I wanted to ask you about was relationalized finance. I've heard you talk about that, you know, just again, some of these, the patterns of the way that we've been essentially kind of taught somehow, it's been normalized that really there are only a few available ways to do contracting or financing or or all of these things that we just have to do 'cause they're part of the bureaucracy of running an institution. But how do we get creative about some of those things to bring them into more of a commons kind of approach?

Absolutely. I mean, we all are familiar with the standard bureaucratic and free market ideas of property and contract and top-down administration and so forth. I'll just name a few of these kind of hacks that, that are instructive and perhaps even modifiable. You know, people might be familiar with community supported agriculture. It's where the farmer solicits upfront payments by food eaters to essentially share the risks of growing the food and the harvest months from now. And it's kind of a pooling of money to grow food in ways that don't go through the more expensive industrial agriculture and food processing system. It's more localized. It's— and you have more control. You know the farmer. That's a fantastic paradigm of people coming together to meet their needs, share risks together. It's a form of so-called, what I call, relationalized finance. And what I mean by that is people have personal relationships and commitments with each other. They pool their commitments, and by doing so, they avoid the kind of coercion that outside investors or lenders have where they say, You've got to make as much money as possible to pay back the interest or dividends to me. You have to structure yourself as a productivity machine to sell, sell, sell. You know, it avoids that by essentially decommodifying the shared wealth and sharing the risks and the benefits together. So, you know, that's one example of how a commons can successfully bypass— let's just call it the market state system as it normally functions. And there, I mean, there's other— I've seen that CSA model actually applied interestingly in my area to a jazz subscription series where people pay money upfront for, you know, $120 for 6 or 10 performances and artists come through and perform. And then they will put the performers as they're traveling between Boston and New York City in their off days during the week. They put them up in their homes or have receptions after the performance. And it's an example of getting outside of the kind of typical business-driven performance model using the CSA sharing model. And so, you know, this kind of innovation is what's needed in the commons to, in a system that is either financially or legally hostile to collective alternatives, it can work. So that's the kind of thinking that has to be applied here.

Amazing. Super interesting to me and deeply ironic that as I was listening to you on other, you know, in other discussions or reading your work prior to this, one of the things that struck me was the irony of the kinds of attributes or dispositions that you are talking about are required to be able to do this relational work, like creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, precisely the kinds of language that we use in education to signal a kind of a, the so-called 21st century skills, right? Coined in 1992 by Microsoft and, you know, all of the big tech companies, right? And so it's just a really interesting irony embedded in those kinds of language that we use in education because they are insidiously in service to the market actually, the way they've been used, but they're also core to commoning, right?

I would go even further. I mean, most universities in their incentive and reward structures for tenure or promotion, it's all about the individual. It's not about the collective collaboration and their department or their discipline or many others are a core part of that. So can we have metrics that recognize that, you know, and can we start to understand that we're part of this larger enterprise? Yes, there's a need for individual review and accountability, but knowledge creation, creativity is inherently a social and collective affair, either on the present level or with previous generations.

I do sometimes in my more cynical moments, I do sometimes wonder that it's hard work doing that work, right? The, the relational work is deeply rewarding, but also hard work. And I want, I sometimes wonder that this like kind of obsession with transactional efficiency, or, you know, to, you, you don't wanna have to deal with the relational thing because we've got a contract that says you mustn't behave like this, or as you, this individual or whatever. It kind of avoids, or it pretends to avoid some of that more challenging work. Yeah.

Well, let me just a little tell a little parable though, you know, but one reason that open source software communities are so valuable is because they're not so tightly controlled and regimented the way a corporate software development operation would be. And as a result, the weirdos, the misfits, the creative ideas can surface. The, the phrase goes, "If you have an itch, you can scratch it." And it's precisely that open space for different ways of doing things, for creativity, for insight, that some of the most profound innovations in software development have emerged. And, you know, of course, to the extent possible, the corporate big tech world has tried to capture, control, monetize, bureaucratize those innovations. But the larger point I'm trying to make is these open spaces that are relatively uncontrolled and hospitable to creative exploration are essential and indeed should be a core part of education. In developing these creative, critical impulses and knowing how to do it with others, because that's how you complete— you expand your knowledge, you know. So I just sort of use that Focus story as a small parable with larger implications of why the commons is important against this superstructure of marketization, bureaucratization, and control.

I mean, 100%. And actually reflecting on my, my moments of cynicism are when probably the conditioning is coming through in me of this current system that people are difficult to deal with, right? Like there is a divide and conquer kind of logic in that control, right? Is that if we prioritize efficiency and we prioritize control, we are kind of conditioning people into being cynical about other people. And actually that's just such a depressing and zero-sum way to live, Right. That I think that's part of what people are, not only the effects on the, on the planet, but also that people are feeling is not feeding them somehow in some deep way. Right.

Yeah. And I, I mean, what I've found that is our very language for talking about things is often embedded with these value propositions.

Right. Exactly.

For so long, a lot of people talked about commons as how you manage resources. Which is of course what capitalism does all the time. And I came to realize that resources was a category error because in a commons you care about the things you're stewarding, you care about their long-term survivability, you care about their robustness. And so we came up with the term care wealth instead of resource to indicate that you have these affective relationships with the resource. And it's not just a commodity that you know, price indicates its value, it has much more richer, deeper personal value to you. And you could replicate this little story about vocabulary in other aspects of the commons because, you know, it's not just in economics, it's rational to use as much as you can, you know, to have a free-for-all and become the richest person. But to the extent that that requires externalizing costs onto others and inequalities, it's grotesquely irrational. And so we came up with a term using the South African indigenous term Ubuntu, which means I am because we are, meaning my personal identity is integrated with our larger identity and so on. And so we became very mindful in developing our understanding of the commons that there's these tripwires in our vocabulary that we need to be more reflective about and say, oh man, that's really an artifact of 20th century capitalist modernity, and which is what we're trying to escape.

Exactly. It's embedded everywhere. Like it's, it, it has absolutely embedded itself in every thought and concept and yeah, no, absolutely. And that's super interesting cuz it makes me think, you know, if rather than talking about value even, and certainly resource in education and certainly words like capital, if we were talking about education as a means of investing in developing care wealth in all sorts of ways for ourselves and in our communities. And again, it just, it kind of provides a different kind of language that may take people a little bit of getting used to, but it indicates a different set of values embedded in it somehow.

Well, it, it indicates a deeper commitment to creating the conditions and context for creating value. And the value is not necessarily property or money. Yeah, monetized. My little catchphrase for my alternative theory of value is living systems are generative. It's just the value is not necessarily monetized and proprietized. And, you know, that may sound vague, but that's what nature is all about. It has all sorts of complex interrelations that produce things that are valuable to the world. Fruits and nutrients for other living beings, for us. And none of that goes through the scrim of property law or market exchange, but it's enormous value. It's incalculable, priceless value. But we don't have the categories for thinking about it because we're so anthropocentric and capitalistocentric. So I think The Commons is an invitation to step out of some of these frameworks that guide our thought. And to try to get more elemental, more human, more connected with each other and the earth.

Love it.

And I mean, maybe just to wrap it up, I think one of the things that I also heard you speak powerfully about was the idea of building a parallel polis because there's a lot of work being done kind of pushing back against the current systems. But it's kind of the Buckminster Fuller idea, right? Of just kind of building the thing that you want. And there is some something for me that feels very full of possibility in the diversity of people doing commoning kind of work in all sorts of different sectors. But to have a kind of a collective or shared language that they might then speak to each other across agriculture, economics, education, healthcare, different spaces. But they're, if they're talking in a language that they can somehow share and understand each other around patterns of commoning, that feels incredibly generative to me and full of possibility to build this kind of set of alternative kinds of institutions.

Well, the term— I had an epiphany when I encountered this term parallel polis. Václav Havel, when he was a cultural dissident in Czechoslovakia before it became the Czech Republic, was asked, how in a totalizing system do you make change when rational persuasion or civic action is impossible? And his answer was, you build a parallel polis, by which he meant a set of horizontal relationships that have a certain integrity and commitment that allow you to speak the truth and enact wholesome values without being co-opted, without being self-censoring yourself. And this resonated for me because after 20 or 30 years working in the Washington policy scene as an activist, I realized that it was a rigged game that had such limited transformational possibilities, the whole system was captured by capitalist interests and corporations. And there's a great liberation in saying, let's build what we want on our terms, do what we have to do to make it legal or financial within the existing system, but do it on our terms and do it with a different logic and different values and commitments. And so I found that quite liberating, and I find that it's arguably the best strategic pathway forward because once you create an alternative entity the way open source software and Linux did in its early days, or local food systems did, it scares the larger existing enterprises that somebody can withdraw from the dependency on their system and create something of their own with a fair degree of independence in their own terms. And that is a form of, frankly, political power, right? And it asserts a different moral authority and asserts a different vision of the future than that being retailed by the established systems. So I find that it can be very subversive and effective and practical, even though many traditional liberal reformers might say, oh, it's just escapist. But I think that it, over the midterm and long term, it's a way of proving an alternative and leveraging it for change.

No, I love it. And I, as I say, I think there's something really full of possibility about the, the way to connect across, as you say, horizontally, but across different sectors. And that's why I wanted to bring this this idea of the commons into education, cuz I think there's a lot of possibility there. I think there's a lot of people building alternative kinds of institutions within education and struggling, you know, financially or struggling to establish themselves, but really committed innovators doing that, but not necessarily having a language with which they can talk. And actually the commons language may be useful as a bridging across.

I think it has a lot of strategic value, one in asserting the possibility of a different framework that is homegrown on your terms, it's a form of critique of the existing system without being sort of lost into a moral righteousness about that and leaving it at that, because it's not only critique but constructive, right? And it has these strategic connecting values that just like people whose software code was being commodified and privatized by Big Tech instead of being open source, people who were trying to share seed were finding that that was being turned— made illegal by big agriculture. In other words, there was a kinship politically, philosophically between seed sharers and code sharers. And you could say between people in the academy who want to share, right, and their system doesn't allow it. So there, I think, is that kind of connective tissue philosophically that can be of great value in Opening up new possibilities, right?

Absolutely. And defending against co-optation as well, interestingly, 'cause I think, you know, with Couchsurfing or things like that, that then end up getting integrated, you know, essentially are a kind of an innovation incubator for capitalism, and then they get integrated in and then turn into a unicorn and sold for millions.

And a lot of people thought that creating an open platform would be adequate. Turns out no, an open platform is not sufficiently a commons because it's not protecting itself against outside forces that wish it harm.

Right. And I think that's what I've heard you speak again, really powerfully about is that this, this ability to hold some defenses in a way, some porous boundaries, but that defend your, the integrity of the thing that you're trying to build against the things that will see value in it and then want to co-opt it into either the state or the market. And that's, that's really appealing to people who are kind of maybe financially struggling to keep a school going that's innovative and new and based around some of these more relational approaches. Suddenly they want to be acquired by a big school group who see value in it, right? And there's something really appealing about that 'cause it's validation that you've done something of real success and clearly the market wants it, so it must be valuable. But it's like, no, how do we defend against that, right?

I mean, we've, we've seen the whole history of big tech and social life in being parasitic and shutting it down the way social media was once a fantastic liberation until they started to get the algorithms going to maximize attention. And to do data surveillance and, and so on. You know, that's what companies do. And they change the inner logic of what otherwise is a freer, more exploratory, open-ended human process. And the other point I want to make in that is, but these commons are living systems that have to breathe and exist in a larger context. So I talk about a semi-permeable membrane around them, like any organism. In which nutrients and energy and difference can come in, but poisons or things that might hurt the organism, the commons, can be screened out, sort of like the blood-brain barrier that all humans have. In other words, it can remain a living system and not just a resource or a corporate asset. It is evolving, becoming, it lives, it has this larger context. So that's, I think, an important conceptualization of any commons if it's going to succeed.

Amazing. Thank you, David. I mean, it, this is quite a deep dive for people that have never heard of this set of concepts before, but I would really recommend them visiting your website and there's so much, you know, your old blog posts and then your book that you've just revised and republished, I think, Think Like a Commoner.

I'll just give 3 quick things. My website is bollinger.org. And it's— I've been doing it for 20 years. There's a wealth of materials that you can prowl there. Most of my more recent books are online for free. One is The Commoners' Catalog for Changemaking, which is like a whole earth catalog overview of variety of commons. But then, as you just mentioned, my book Think Like a Commoner, second edition, is an introduction to the commons, which kind of gives a quick, popularly accessible overview.

Thank you for everything you're doing, and I'm really excited to explore it more.

Well, I really so appreciate you having me on. I've enjoyed this conversation.

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