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the great awakening Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contri- butions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our ad- venture is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) the great awakening: New Modes of Life amidst Capitalist Ruins. Copy- right © 2020 by the editors and authors. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books en- dorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-sa/4.0/ First published in 2020 by punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com ISBN-13: 978-1-953035-08-0 (print) ISBN-13: 978-1-953035-09-7 (ePDF) doi: 10.21983/P3.0285.1.00 lccn: 2020945724 Library of Congress Cataloging Data is available from the Library of Congress Copy Editing: Lucy Barnes Book Design: Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei punctumbooks spontaneous acts of scholarly combustion Th e Great Awakening New Modes of Life amidst Capitalist Ruins Edited by Anna Grear & David Bollier Contents Introduction · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 13 Anna Grear and David Bollier Modernity, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and the Climate Crisis · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 23 Sam Adelman Twilight of the Nation-State (at a Time of Resurgent Nationalism)? · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 57 Richard Falk The Decline of Liberal Politics · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 79 Andreas Karitzis Awakening to an Ecology of the Commons · · · · · · · · 111 Michel Bauwens and Jose Ramos Beating the Bounds: Inside the Struggle to Make Open Source Seed · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 149 Maywa Montenegro de Wit Blockchain Technology: Toward a Decentralized Governance of Digital Platforms? · · · · · · · · · · · 185 Primavera De Filippi and Xavier Lavayssière ix Hacking the Law to Open Up Zones for Commoning · · · · 223 David Bollier Thinking Law, Ecology, and the Commons · · · · · · · · · 247 Vito De Lucia CommonsWealth: The Difference Engine: Complexity and Generativity — New Ontological Foundations · · · · · · 277 Paul B. Hartzog Resisting Anthropocene Neoliberalism: Towards New Materi- alist Commoning? · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 317 Anna Grear Reference Bibliography · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · 357 x Acknowledgments This book has its origins in our collaborations with Professor Burns H. Weston, a distinguished law scholar specializing in human rights and international law at the University of Iowa. The three of us shared a keen sense of the productive synergies that could be developed by bringing together the emerging practices of the commons with human rights and law. Much of Burns’s thinking on this topic found expression in the 2013 book that he co-authored with David Bollier, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons. Burns and David sought to follow up this work — drawing in Anna Grear, a legal theorist and radical human rights scholar with whom Burns had been collaborating — to further explore how the commons, law, and social transformation could be re- imagined. However, as the project began to take shape, Burns tragically and suddenly passed away in October 2015. We miss our spirited, fiery, passionate, and optimistic friend and colleague. We are thrilled to see the seeds he helped to plant for this project yield such a rich harvest of ideas. This anthology is dedicated to him. We also wish to thank the Open Society Foundations for its generous grant, which enabled us to convene two workshops that brought many of the ideas in this volume to the surface in new configurations. Our appreciation also extends to the Uni- versity of Iowa, and especially Jonathan Carlson, for their stel- lar administrative support, and to the Charles Léopold Mayer xi Foundation, which graciously hosted a group of scholars, activ- ists and others involved in the project at La Bergerie, its lovely retreat center north of Paris. The intense, far-ranging discus- sions in those workshops helped us to clarify the framing of this book and to identify which strategic themes to develop. Finally, we wish to thank the twenty-seven scholars and ac- tivists who participated in our two workshops in 2016 and 2018, respectively, and the twelve contributors to this book, who have all helped bring such depth and clarity to emerging topics that remain very much on the frontier of new modes of living amidst capitalist ruins. xii Introduction Anna Grear and David Bollier The catastrophic, slow-motion decline of neoliberal capitalism and its accomplice, the nation-state, presents a disturbing pic- ture. The symptoms of pressure are everywhere: stranded polar bears on shrinking ice floes; desperate refugees washing up on the shores of Europe; angry white supremacists threatening ad- versaries with violence and committing violent terrorist crimes; authoritarian leaders — including a US President — flouting the rule of law; a surge of “deaths of despair” from suicide, drugs, and alcohol; and much more. Basic structures of contemporary life seem to be falling apart, no longer able to contain the chaotic energies unleashed by global capitalism, digital technologies, libertarian market culture, and modernity. One might call it a Great Unraveling. Yet, paradoxically, this period of history might also be called, accu- rately, the Great Awakening. There is a growing awareness of the need for a fundamental shift in mindset and culture, as suggested by the youth climate protests of recent times; the rise of progressive politics; and a general sense that the system is broken and needs to be replaced. Amidst the messy unwinding of obsolete paradigms, many stur- dy, fresh, and green sprouts of change — marginal, as yet, to the public consciousness — are emerging. A growing cohort of self- identified commoners, working largely outside the circles of re- 13 the great awakening spectable opinion, is developing important new frameworks of thought and innovative tech platforms. Such commoners bring an almost dizzying array of creative approaches to central chal- lenges of human social organization. They are pioneering, for example, creative hacks of law and new sorts of currencies. They are re-imagining regional food systems and systems for keeping agricultural seeds shareable. They are developing new models of peer production such as “cosmo-local production,” which lets people share knowledge and design globally, open-source-style, while building physical things locally. Notwithstanding pervasive crises and traumas, it turns out that this is a fertile time to reinvent the world with collaborative initiatives. This book explores some of the more promising ones, with special attention paid to tracing out the new consciousness and worldviews they reflect. It quickly becomes clear that commons are not just inert, unowned resources (such as oceans, space, and the atmosphere) as economists would have us believe. They are living eco-social systems that are incubat- ing alternative rationalities. Through commoning, groups of people — some at very large scales — are demonstrating some profoundly new ways of being, knowing and acting in the world. In exploring the many ingenious ways in which people are healing themselves and the world from the ravages of modernity and capitalism, we take considerable inspiration from the title and central project of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s landmark book, Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.1 She describes her book as “an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.”2 By exploring how a prized and hardy mushroom, matsutake, flourishes in ne- glected, disrupted landscapes — and how collaborative human 1 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Pos- sibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015). 2 Ibid., dust jacket. 14 introduction efforts are needed to harvest matsutake — Tsing sheds light on what she calls “third nature,” or “what manages to live despite capitalism.”3 We share Tsing’s conviction about the importance of collaborative labors as essential for continuing life on Earth. Collaborative survival will require some serious experimenta- tion and creativity. This means messy beginnings, a willingness to improvise, new types of collaborative institutions, and, ulti- mately, an awareness that we must act and live within a re-sto- ried ontological-epistemological reality. Despite the alienation produced by capitalist plunder and the conditions of precarity characterizing contemporary life,

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