Giving narratives a framework for a better world

"At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. "'Free' as in 'free speech,'" Richard Stallman says, not "'free' as in 'free beer.'" But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low cost or no cost. When the marginal cost of production is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn't charge – well, the world looks a little different. This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice."
Jeremy Rifkin, in Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 220]


The Second Enclosure Movement - James Boyle - Conference on the Public Domain

"When you give a monopoly to someone it is an incentive for governmental corruption. You are setting up a continuing system os incentives designed to ensure the corruption of your government."
[26:17]

James Boyle: The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain:

Abstract:

"We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. It sounds grandiloquent to call it "the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind," but in a very real sense that is just what it is. True, the new state-created property rights may be "intellectual" rather than "real," but once again things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights. In this article, I try to develop the vocabulary and the analytic tools necessary to turn the tide of enclosure. I offer an historical sketch of various types of skepticism about intellectual property, from the antimonopolist criticisms of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, through the emergence of affirmative arguments for the public domain, to the use of the language of the commons to defend the possibility of distributed methods of non-proprietary production. In many ways, it turns out, concepts of the public domain show the same variation in assumptions, and the same analytic differences, as the concept of property itself. I conclude by arguing that, for a number of reasons, the appropriate model for the change in thinking which I argue for comes from the history of the environmental movement. The invention of the concept of "the environment" pulls together a string of otherwise disconnected issues, offers analytical insight into the blindness implicit in prior ways of thinking, and leads to perception of common interest where none was seen before. Like the environment, the public domain must be "invented" before it is saved. Like the environment, like "nature," the public domain turns out to be a concept that is considerably more slippery than many of us realize. And, like the environment, the public domain nevertheless turns out to be useful, perhaps even necessary."
here


The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose


The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine


The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law


The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back

[Seventeenth century protest against English enclosures]

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Thomas More (one of the only political theorists who are also a saint!):

"your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heard say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities."
Here