Citations

Introduction

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3	Silent Theft. David Bollier, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (Routledge, 2002).
3	Richer theory of value.  The power of commons to generate value — working outside of a scheme of private property rights, contracts and markets – is mystifying or not interesting to most economists. The study of gift economies and Internet communities (not necessarily in association) can yield some answers to this question, however. A few worthwhile books: Lewis Hyde,The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Vintage Books, 1979); Jonathan Zittrain,The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press, 2008); David Graeber,Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); and David Cheal,The Gift Economy (Routledge, 1988). The classic work on the generativity of (non-market) blood donations is Richard M. Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (Pantheon, 1971). For more references on the question of value generated via commons, in constast to capitalist markets, see notes below on the financialization of nature (p. 51-52), civic infrastructures (p. 68), alternative currencies (p. 144), commons-based peer production (p. 152), and ecological value vs. “green capitalism” (p. 182).
4	Market/State duopoly . For a longer discussion of the Market/State duopoly, see Burns H. Weston and David Bollier, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially pp. 20-23 and pp. 178-180 (referred to in this book as the “State/Market duopoly).
5-6	R. Buckminster Fuller quotation. The provenance of this quotation has been called into question, but Quote Investigator website conducted a thorough examination of the origins and accuracy of this Fuller quotationon August 18, 2024, available here. The researcher concluded: “Mike Vance [a book author] interviewed Buckminster Fuller before his death in 1983. Vance presented an excerpt spoken by Fuller in the 1995 book “Think Out of the Box”. The instance of the quotation in this excerpt is probably the most reliable. Other versions of this quotation do not have solid supporting evidence. Admittedly, Fuller may have expressed this notion in more than one way on different occasions.”
7	The Commonsverse. David Bollier, “Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse,” International Journal of the Commons, Spring 2024, available here. See also David Bollier, The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2021), available here.

Chapter 1: The Rediscovery of the Commons

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9-11	Seed-sharing in Erakulapally, India. This account derives from a personal visit to the village in January 2011. A longer account can be found at Bollier.org, “The Seed-Sharing Solution,” available here. For more on seed-sharing as a contested, often-illegal activity, see page 198 below.
12-14	The rise of GNU/Linux. There are many accounts of the origins and development of the GNU Project and Linux. Among the better ones: Glyn Moody: Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Perseus, 2001); Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Harvard University Press, 2004); and Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software (O’Reilly & Associates, 2002).
15	Collective-action problems. Wikipedia has a helpful summary of the frameworks and literature that address collection-action problems, available here.
15	Pink Lake, Senegal. The extraction of salt from Pink Lake is discussed in a chapter, “Salt and Trade at the Pink Lake: Community Subsistence in Senegal,” in David Bollier and Silke, editors, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press, 2012), pp. 21-276.
16-17	The Wolfpak surfers of Oahu, Hawaii. Matt Higgins, “Rough Waves, Tougher Beaches,” The New York Times, January 23, 2009, available here. There is some controversy about whether the Wolfpak is simply a local gang that uses intimidation to impose its surfing rules or a necessary form of on-site authority for managing safe access to enormous, dangerous waves. In any case, one surfing website notes that Oxycontin addictions decimated the Wolfpak group as a viable commons for the Pipeline waves. A scholarly literature on “the political ecologies of surfscapes” — or governance models for managing “surf tourism” — focus on such frameworks as local surf associations, systems for regulating commons access and behavior, surf-protected areas, and government-sponsored “surf cities” leveraging tourism for development. See Tara Ruttenberg and J. Peter Brosius, “Revisiting governmentality in surf tourism governance: a diverse ecologies approach,” Frontiers in Sustainable Tourism, January 8, 2025, available here.
17-18	Boston neighborhoods that treat parking spaces as commons after snowfalls. Personal conversation with Elinor Ostrom at Harvard University, 2008. See also Jess Bidgood, “Efforts to Mark Turf When Snowstorms Hit Endure Despite Critics,” The New York Times, February 15, 2014, p. A8. The City of Boston now allows “space savers” to save a parking spot only if the City has declared a snow emergency. They must be removed after 48 hours.
18	Vernacular Law. For a longer analysis of Vernacular Law, see Burns H. Weston and David Bollier, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 10-4-11 and pp. 229-230. For more on the role of customary practice as a form of commons, see Carol M. Rose, “The Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce, and Inherently Public Property,” in Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (Westview Press, 1994), chapter 5. See also W. Michael Reisman, Law in Brief Encounters (1999); Robert C. Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Harvard University Press, 1991); and Robert C. Ellickson, The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (Princeton University Press, 2008).
20	Indigenous cultures and commoning. There is a growing literature, fueled by contemporary ecological crises, that examines how various Indigenous peoples engage with nature in respectful ways and integrate their cultures with ecological dynamics. See, e.g., Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Milkweed Publishers, 2013); Kimmer and John Burgoyne, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner, 2024); and Washinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) and Darcia Narvaez, PhD., Restoring the Kinship Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth. See also notes for pp. 84, 85, 86, and 132.
20-21	“For a description of a successful fisheries commons, see Gloria L. Gallardo Fernández & Eva Friman, “Capable Leadership, Institutional Skills and Resource Abundance Behind Flourishing Coasting Marine Commons in Chile,” available here.
21	“No commons without commoning.” Peter Linebaugh, “Some Principles of the Commons,” Counterpunch, January 8-10, 2010, available here. As Linebaugh puts it in his book, The Magna Carta Manfesto (p. 45): “Commoners think first not of title deeds, but of human deeds: How will this land be tilled? Does it require manuring? What grows there? They begin to explore. You might call it a natural attitude.”

Part I: Enclosure, Dispossession, and the Eclipse of Commoning

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23	Enclosures. While enclosures take place within many types of political regimes, it is mostly closely associated with the development and expansion of capitalism. Histories of early industrialism in England, Europe and the United States often amount to histories of enclosure, with or without that terminology. In terms of commons-oriented histories of enclosure, see, e.g., David Bollier, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (Routledge, 2002); Brett Cristophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018); James Ridgeway, It’s All for Sale: The Control of Global Resources (Duke University Press, 2004); Fred Pearce, The Landgrabbers: The Fight Over Who Owns the Earth (Transworld Publishers, 2012); Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (Bloomsbury, 2020). There are also countless books on enclosures of specific domains, such as creative works, culture, genes, and so forth, which can be found throughout Think Like a Commoner.
24	Western colonialism and enclosures.

Chapter 2: The Tyranny of the “Tragedy” Myth

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25-28	The “tragedy of the commons” essay . Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” 162 Science (December 13, 1968), pp. 1243-1248.
28	William Forster Lloyd. Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010), pp. 33-34.
28-29	Lewis Hyde quotation on Hardin & Lloyd. Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010), p. 4.
29	Prisoner’s dilemma games. The origins of prisoner’s dilemma game theory are traced in William Poundstone, Prisoner’s Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb (Anchor, 1993).
29	Lewis Hyde on “The Tragedy of Unmanaged, Laissez-Faire….” quotation.  Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010), p. 44, footnote.
29-30	Homo economicus. There is a large literature refuting the idea of Homo economicus, particularly in behavioral economics and complexity theory economics but also in realms outside of economics such as anthropology and social psychology. See, e.g., Daniel Kahneman,Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrrar Straus Giroux, 2011); Robert Nelson,Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (Pennsylvania State University, 2001); Eric D. Beinhocker, The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity and the Radical Remaking of Economics (Harvard Business School Press, 2006); and Friederike Habermann, “We Are Not Born as Egoists,” in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, editors, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press, 2012), pp. 13-18.
30	Economics textbooks. Paul A. Samuelson and William D. Nordhaus, Economics, 17th edition (McGraw-Hill, 2001); and Joseph E. Stiglitz and Carl. E. Walsh, Economics, 3d edition (W.W. Norton, 2002).
30-33	Elinor Ostrom. For a good overview of Ostrom’s life and scholarship, see Derek Wall, The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, Contestation and Craft (MIT Press, 2014). See also Wikipedia entry for Elinor Ostrom available here. A 90-minute video documentary about Elinor and Vincent Ostrom, “Actual World, Possible Futures,” which aired on Public Broadcasting System on May 25, 2020, can be viewed here.
31	Hardin’s acknowledgment about “unmanaged commons.” Garrett Hardin, “Extension of The Tragedy of the Commons,” 1126 Science (May 1, 1998), pp. 682-683. Also available here.
31	Nancy Folbre quotation. From the obituary by Catherine Rampell, “Elinor Ostrom, Winner of Nobel in Economics, Dies at 78,” The New York Times, June 12, 2012, available here.
32	Governing the Commons book. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
32	Examples of successful commons cited by Ostrom. See Ostrom, Governing the Commons: Törbel, Switzerland, pp. 61-66; heurta in Spain, pp 59-61 and pp. 71-82; and Los Angeles groundwater, 104-106.
32-33	Ostrom’s design principles for effective commons. See Governing the Commons, pp. 88-102, but especially Table 3.1, “Design Principles Illustrated by Long-Enduring CPR Institutions,” on p. 90. A group of German activist-commoners, dissatisfied with the omniscient, scientific perspective of Ostrom’s design principles, later reformulated them in a first-person voice so they could reflect the firsthand, personal experience of commoning and be better understood by the general public. German Sommerschool on the Commons, “Eight Points of Orientation for Commoning,” Bechstedt, Thuringia in June 2012, available here. A German translation is available here. A French translation is available here.
35	Ostrom-founded institutions. Ostrom Workshop (formerly, Workshop on Political Theory and Policy Analysis) at Indiana University available here. Digital Library on the Commons, available here. International Journal of the Commons: available here. International Association for the Study of the Commons, available here.
36	Ostrom’s work after winning the Nobel Prize. See her obituary by Catherine Rampell, “Elinor Ostrom, Winner of Nobel in Economics, Dies at 78,” The New York Times, June 12, 2012, available here. See also Derek Wall’s book, The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, Contestation and Craft (Routledge, 2014).
36-37	Global commons movement. The history commons-based activism and advocacy is a long, complicated story that has yet to be written. However, a few landmarks in this history, extending roughly from the late 1990s to the present, include the rise of free and open source software in the 1990s and networked software platforms in the early 2000s; an international activists’ conference hosted by the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Mexico City in 2006, with follow-on conferences in 2010 and 2013 in Berlin Germany; a proliferating scholarly literature devoted to commons, especially under the auspices of the International Association for the Study of Commons; and adoption of the commons mindset and discourse in hundreds of projects, organizations, and policy proposals worldwide. Many of these developments are featured in David Bollier, The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2021), available here. See also David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), available here; and an essay by David Bollier, “Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse,” in a special issue of the International Journal of the Commons, 17(1), Spring 2024, dedicated to “Advancing the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of the Commons,” available here.

Chapter 3: Enclosures of Nature

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40-41	Enclosure in Camberwall, Australia. Nick O’Malley, “Villagers Fuming After Their Commons Is Handed to Mine,” Sydney Morning Herald, April 16, 2010, available here.
41	Mining Act of 1872 (US): Carl J. Mayer and George A. Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion: A History of Public Mineral Policy in America (Sierra Club, 1985); see also Robert McClure and Andrew Schneider, “The General Mining Act of 1872 Has Left a Legacy of Riches and Ruins,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 10, 2001, available here. See also Wikipedia, “General Mining Act of 1872” available here.
41	Corporate extractions of timber, oil, fish, water.  Timber: Richard W. Behan, Plundered Promise: Capitalism, Politics and the Fate of the Federal Lands (Island Press, 2001); Harold K. Steen, The U.S. Forest Service: A History (University of Washington Press, 1976). Oil:  See, e.g., “Arctic Refuge Drilling Controversy,” Wikipedia, available here. Fish: See, e.g., Fiona McCormack, Private Oceans: the Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas (Pluto Press, 2017); Guy Standing, The Blue Commons (Pelican, 2024); Daniel Pauly, 5 Easy Pieces: The Impact of Fisheries on Marine Ecosystems (The State of the World’s Oceans), (Island Press, 2010). See also Callan J. Chythlook-Sifsof, “Native Alaska, Under Threat,” The New York Times, June 27, 2013, available here. Water:  Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox, Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water (Jossey-Bass, 2007); Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (New Press, 2002); and Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water (Bloomsbury, 2008).
41-42	Maristella Svampa of Argentina on neo-extractivism. “Commons Beyond Development: The Strategic Value of the Commons as a Paradigm Shift in Latin America,” Remarks at Economics and the Commons Conference, Berlin, Germany, May 23, 2013. YouTube video available here. Presentation slides available here as a pdf.
42	Conga mining project in Peru: See Wikipedia entry, “Conga Project,” available here.
42	Belo Monte dam in Brazil. Gerhard Dilger, “Belo Monte, or the Destruction of the Commons,” in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, editors, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press, 2012), available here.
42	Road construction through TIPNIS in Bolivia. See Emily Achtenberg, Rebel Currents, “Bolivia: TIPNIS Road on Hold Until Extreme Poverty Eliminated,” NACLA April 25, 2013, available here.
42	Cannibal Capitalism book. Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (Verso, 2022).
43	Massimo de Angelis quotation. Massimo De Angelis, “Opposing Fetishism by Reclaiming Our Powers: The Social Forum movement, capitalist markets and the politics of alternatives,” January 13, 2005, available here.
43-46	International Land Grab. See, e.g., Liz Alden Wily, “The Global Land Grab: The New Enclosures,” in The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press, 2012), pp. 132 – 140. See also Liz Alden Wily, “The Law is to Blame: Taking a Hard Look at the Vulnerable Status of Customary Land Rights,” Africa Development and Change vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 733-757; and Fred Pearce, The Landgrabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth (Transworld Publishers/Eden Project Books, UK, 2012).
46	Statistics on dimensions of the land grab. Liz Alden Wily, “The Tragedy of Public Lands: The Fate of the Commons Under Global Commercial Pressure,” International Land Coalition (January 2011), available here.
46	Liz Alden Wily quotation. See citation for p. 46.
46-48	Enclosures of water. Alan Snitow, Deborah Kaufman and Michael Fox, Thirst: Fighting the Corporate Theft of Our Water (Jossey-Bass, 2007); Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water (New Press, 2002); and Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs and the Battle Over America’s Drinking Water (Bloomsbury, 2008).
47	Water war in Cochabamba, Bolivia. See Wikipedia entry, “2000 Cochabamba Protests,” available here.
47-48	T. Boone Pickens’ water holdings. Susan Berfield, “There Will Be Water,” BloombergBusinessWeek magazine, June 11, 2008, available here; and Joe Nick Patoski, “Boone Pickens Wants to Sell You His Water,” Texas Monthly, August 2001, available here. For a retrospective view, see Matt Dotray, A-J Media, “Remembering the Water Race between Pickens and West Texas Cities,” Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, September 11, 2019, available here.
48	Municipal water systems. See various reports by Food and Water Watch on this topic, such as “Private Equity, Public Inequity: The Public Cost of Private Equity Takeovers of U.S. Water Infrastructure,” August 22, 2012, available here; and “Borrowing Trouble: Water Privatization Is a False Solution for Municipal Budget Shortfalls,” April 4, 2013, available here.
48-49	Corporate culling of apple diversity. Mark Kurlansky, The Food of a Younger Land (Penguin, 2009). Verlyn Klinkenborg, “Apples, Apples, Apples,” The New York Times, November 6, 2009, p. A30, available here.
49	The monoculture of Cavendish bananas. Mike Peed, “We Have No Bananas,” The New Yorker, January 10, 2011, p. 28, available here. See also Dan Koeppel, “The Beginning of the End for Bananas,” The Scientist, July 22, 2011, available here; and Anna Purna Kambhampaty, “What We Can Learn from the Near-Death of the Banana,” Time, November 8, 2019, available here.
50	The Loss of diversity in American Food. Mark Kurlansky, The Food of a Younger Land (Riverhead Books, 2009).
50	On the proliferation of fast food. Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal (Houghton-Mifflin, 2001), especially Chapter 10, “Global Realization,” pp. 225-254.
51	Enclosures of outer space. Shane Chaddha, “A Tragedy of the Space Commons?” available here. Baker, Space Debris: Legal and Policy Implications (1988).
51	Enclosures of living things (cell lines, genes, genetically engineered mammals).  See, e.g., Melinda Cooper, Life As Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (University of Washington Press, 2008); and Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2006).
51	Enclosures of nanomatter. ETC Group Report, “Nanotech’s ‘Second Nature’ Patents: Implications for the Global South,” ETC Group Special Report – Communiqués No. 87 and 88, March/April and May/June 2005.
51-52	Financialization of nature. Adrienne Buller, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester University Press, 2022). See also the work of Green Finance Observatory, an “independent think tank working on environmental markets and sustainable finance,” directed by Frédéric Hache.

Chapter 4: All That is Shared Becomes a Market Commodity

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53-54	The copyright history of the song “Happy Birthday.” Robert Brauneis, “Copyright and the World’s Most Popular Song,” GWU Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1111624, October 14, 2010), available here For more on Jennifer Nelson’s 2013 lawsuit against Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., see Benjamin Weiser, “Birthday Song’s Copyright Leads to a Lawsuit for the Ages,” The New York Times, June 13, 2013, available here.
54-55	ASCAP and singing at summer camps. This account is drawn from David Bollier, Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), pp. 14-17.See also, Elisabeth Bumiller, “ASCAP Asks Royalties from Girl Scouts, Regrets It,” The New York Times, December 17, 1996, available here; and Ken Ringle, “ASCAP Changes Its Tune: Never Intended to Collect Fees for Scouts’ Campfire Songs, Group Says,” Washington Post, August 28, 1996, pp. C3-C6. Copyright industries routinely fail to mention the fair use rights of users, implying that all unauthorized uses of copyrighted works constitute “piracy.” This simply is not true. See also Tarleton Gillespie, “Characterizing Copyright in the Classroom: The Cultural Work of Anti-Piracy Campaigns,” Communication, Culture and Critique, 2(3) (September 2009), pp. 274-318, cited in Lewis Hyde, Common As Air: Revolution Art and Ownership (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010), pp. 6-10.
55	Intergenerational borrowing of creativity among artists. For more on the inevitable, necessary borrowing needed for “original” creativity, see Siva Vaidhyanathan,Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (NYU Press, 2001); and Joanna Demers, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Affects Musical Creativity (University of Georgia Press, 2006). The music of Bob Dylan is a prime example of artistic re-purposing of existing music. Groucho Marx has an excellent account of how “theft” was critical to vaudevillian comics in developing their own personas, in David Lange, “Recognizing the Public Domain,” 44 Law and Contemporary Problems 4 (1981). For an excellent overview of the creative, financial, and legal issues raised by digital sampling, see Kembrew McLeod and Peter DiCola, Creative License: The Law and Culture of Digital Sampling (Duke University Press, 2011).
55	Woody Guthrie quotation. Guthrie wrote this line on mimeographed copies of lyrics distributed to fans in the 1930s, according to Pete Seeger in an NPR interview, “Pete Seeger remembers Woody,” (1996).
56	History of copyright law extensions. Three excellent books about the history of copyright law include James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2008); Jessica Litman, Digital Copyright (Prometheus Books, 2001); and Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (NYU Press, 2001). See also the website Copyfight: The Politics of IP available here.
56	Expansions of copyright law.  James Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain,” in 66 Law and Contemporary Problems No. 1 and 2 (Winter/Spring 2003), available here. There was a surge of legal scholarship on this topic in the early 2000s, much of it associated with the early development of the group Creative Commons. Besides the books cited for p. 56, see the note for p. 156 re Lawrence Lessig and the emergent digital “culture of sharing.”
57-58	Big Tech using market power, technology & copyright to enclose creativity. For some early accounts of the entertainment and technology industries fighting user empowerment, see James Lardner, Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the VCR Wars (W.W. Norton, 1987), and J.D. Lasica, Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). A more recent overview of Big Tech and entertainment industries entrenching capitalist control of creativity and culture is Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back (Beacon Press, 2022).
58	Antitrust lawsuits against Apple. The U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust complaint against Apple, joined by sixteen states, was filed on March 21, 2024, available here. The case alleges that Apple has limited access to iPhone apps, prevented consumers from using alternative services to Apple, thwarted competition for mobile cloud streaming and digital wallets, among other anti-competitive actions. There is also a class action lawsuit pending against Apple allegng that Apple inflated its 30% sales commission to developers. Apple has denied any illegal behavior.
58	Warren Buffett quotation. Cited in Giblin & Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism, p. 6, drawing on Tepper and Hearn, The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition (Wiley, 2019), p. 15, and Warren Buffett and Carol Loomis, “Mr. Buffett on the Stock Market,” Fortune, November 22, 1999, additional details available here and here.
59	Mattel and trademark bullying. See David Bollier, Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), pp. 84-93 and p. 265 (endnotes). Mattel’s aggressive legal actions against perceived trademark violators of the Barbie doll trademark have been written about extensively. See, e.g., Mattel v. Walking Mountain Productions, 353 F.3d 792 (2003), which issued a stinging rebuke to Mattel for “groundless and unreasonable” litigation against a photographer who had made parody photographs of Barbie dolls.
59	McDonald’s trademark control of “Mc”. David Bollier, Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), pp. 211-212 and 293 (endnotes). See also Quality Inns International, Inc. v. McDonald’s Corporation, 695 F. Supp. 198 (1988); Elissa Elan, “What’s in a McName? As Far as McDonald’s Trademarks Are Concerned – Everything,” Nation’s Restaurant News, December 10, 2001, p. 19; Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (Picador, 1999), pp. 177-178.
59	“Voice” and trademark claims. Alexander Zaitchik, “The Village Bully One Voice Under God,” New York Press, April 29, 2003, available here; Seth Rolbein, “Is Anyone Really Confused?” Cape Cod Voice, November 21, 2002, (now defunct).
59	Ownership of words, colors and smells. See David Bollier, Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture (Wiley, 2008), pp. 211-220. The rise of “scent marks” – legal protection for proprietary smells – is described in Faye M. Hammersley, “The Smell of Success: Trade Dress Protection for Scent Marks,” 2 Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review 105 (1998); and Florent Latrive, “The Smell of Cut Grass Privatized,” Liberation, December 6, 20003, available here.
60	The university as a commons. Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann and Katherine J. Strandburg, “The University as Constructed Cultural Commons,” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, vol. 30 (2009), available here.
61	The enclosure of academia. An excellent early account is Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of Higher Education Basic Books, 2005). See also Sheldon Krimsky, Science in the Public Interest: Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Geoffry D. White, Campus, Inc.: Corporate Power in the Ivory Tower (Prometheus Books, 2000); and Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press, 2003). See also David Bollier, “The Enclosure of the Academic Commons,” 88 Academe 5 [American Association of University Professors] (September/October 2002), pp. 18-22, available here.
61	Harvard University’s patents on the oncomouse and nanomatter. “Oncomouse,” Wikipedia entry, available here. ETC Group Report, “Nanotech’s ‘Second Nature’ Patents: Implications for the Global South,” ETC Group Special Report – Communiqués No. 87 and 88, March/April and May/June 2005.
61	University patents on AIDS drugs. One of the early, most notorious examples of university patents on medicines needed for urgent public health needs was Yale University’s patent on d4T, an antiretroviral drug also known as stavudine or the brand name Zerit. For more, see Donald G. McNeil Jr., “Yale Pressed to Help Cut Drug Costs in Africa,” The New York Times, March 12, 2001, available here.
62	Taxpayer-financed research for breakthrough drugs. This list comes from work originally done by James Love of the Taxpayers Assets Project and Consumer Project on Technology (both now defunct; Love now directs a successor group, Knowledge Ecology International, available here). This work is summarized in David Bollier, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (Routledge, 2002), Chapter 11, “The Giveaway of Federal Drug Research and Information Resources,” pp. 163-172. See also Ralph Nader and James Love, “Looting the Medicine Chest,” The Progressive, February 1993, pp. 26-28; Daniel Newman, “The Great Taxol Giveaway,” Multinational Monitor, May 1992, pp. 17-21.
62-63	Corporate influence of university research agendas. See the books cited in note for p. 61. Corporate influence on research is often implicit and subtle, but real. Only when brave researchers challenge the premises of corporate partnerships do things become clearer. For example, Ignacio Chapela, a microbial ecologist and mycologist at UC Berkeley, because a cause celebre when he was denied tenure in 2003. His work had found transgenic DNA in wild Mexican maize. He and his supporters argued that the University’s extensive ties with the biotechnology industry was a factor in his denial of tenure. See “Ignacio Chapela” Wikipedia entry available here.
63	Dr. Marcia Angell on Big Pharma’s corrupting influence on medical research and practice. Dr. Marcia Angell’s pioneering essays on this topic include: “Big Pharma, Bad Medicine,” Boston Review, May 1, 2010, available here; “The Truth About Drug Companies, New York Review of Books, July 15, 2004, available here; “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption” [book reviews], New York Review of Books, January 15, 2009, available here; and “Is Academic Medicine for Sales?” New England Journal of Medicine, May 18, 2000, pp. 1516-1518. See also Ben Goldacre, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (Faber & Faber 2013); and Merrill Goozner, The $800 Million Pill: The Truth Behind the Cost of New Drugs (University of California Press, 2005).
63-64	Corporate suppression of academic research. See, e.g., David Shenk, “Money + Science = Ethics Problems on Campus, The Nation, March 22, 1999, pp. 11-17. I summarized many pre-2002 cases in Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (Routledge, 2002), on pp. 142-145.
63	Patent thickets / the “tragedy of the anti-commons. Columbia law professor Michael Heller has been a leading thinker on this topic. A seminal essay was Rebecca Eisenberg and Michael Heller, “Can Patents Deter Innovation? The Anticommons in Biomedical Research,” Science, May 1, 1998, pp. 698-701. See also Michael Heller, The Gridlock Society: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation and Costs Lives (Perseus, 2008); and Michael Heller, “The Tragedy of the Anti-Commons,” in The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers, 2012), pp. 68-72, available here.
64	Supreme Court ruling on the patentability of human genes. Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, 569 U.S. 12-398 (2013). For an overview of the case, see the Wikipedia entry on it, available here.
64	Enclosures of public spaces in cities. Margaret Kohn, “The Mauling of Public Space,” Dissent, Spring 2001, pp. 71-77. See also Christian Iaione, “City as a Commons,” available here.
64-65	Selling naming rights to stadia. Wikipedia, “List of sports venues with sole naming rights,” December 12, 2013, available here.
65-66	Starbucks’ enclosure of the coffee shop experience. Leslie Wayne, “Starbucks Chairman Fears Tradition is Fading,” The New York Times, February 24, 2007.
66-67	Pulska Grupa statement, Kommunal Urbanism Social Charter. As cited in David Bollier, “Re-imagining Urban Design and City Life,” September 2, 2011, available here.
67	Occupy movement and public space. See, e.g., David Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (Spiegel & Grau, 2013)
67	Right to the City movement. See “Right to the City” entry, Wikipedia, available here. World Charter for the Right to the City, available here.
68	Enclosure of civic infrastructure. See “Infrastructures for Commoning” section of report, “Economics and the Commons Conference,” and presentation of Miguel Vieira Said, May 31, 2013, available here. See also Brett M. Frischmann, Infrastructure: The Social Value of Shared Resources (Oxford University Press, 2012).
68	Microsoft monopoly over computer desktops. United States v. Microsoft Corp., 84 F. Supp. 2d 9 (D.D.C. 1999). See also, Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 43-98.
68-70	Tech giants’ hostility to open standards. See Glyn Moody’s four-part posts, “How Microsoft Fought True Open Standards,” on ComputerWorld UK website, April 16, 2012, available here. The “end-to-end principle” of open standards for Internet infrastructure is responsible for assuring the interoperability of diverse computer networks and fair, open competition in software markets. See “End-to-end principle,” Wikipedia entry, available here.
70	Net neutrality. See, e.g., Public Knowledge website, “Network Neutrality,” available here. See also Robert W. McChesney, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy (New Press, 2013), pp. 118-120.
70	Broadcast deregulation in the 1990s. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 ratified and extended many deregulatory initiatives that President Ronald Reagan has instigated in the 1980s. See Wikipedia entry, “Telecommunications Act of 1996,” available here.
70-71	Wall Street privatization of public infrastructure. Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian, The Privatization of Everything: How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (New Press, 2021). See also Ellen Dannin, “Infrastructure Privatization Contracts and Their Effect on Governance” [report], 2009, available here. Also, In the Public Interest, “A Guide to Evaluating Public Asset Privatization” [report], 2011, available here.
71-72	Public/private partnerships as forms of corporate/investor subsidy. Mary Williams Walsh and Louise Story, “A Stealth Tax Subsidy Faces New Scrutiny,” March 4, 2013, available here. See also Donald Cohen and Allen Mikaelian, The Privatization of Everything (2021). These partnerships are often vehicles for “de-risking” private investment — i.e., subsidizing it through public funds — when they involve social or ecological purposes that capital markets do not find lucrative enough to invest in. In recent years,commoners have put forward plans to develop “commons/public partnerships” that invert the commercial exploitation of public treasuries by forging collaborations between commons projects and city governments. See, e.g., Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell, “Public-Commons Partnerships: Democratising Ownership and Urban Development,” September 2021, available here. See also Paul Jerchel and Judith Pape, “Commons-Public Partnerships: New Avenues of Cooperation for Socio-ecological Transformation,” Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, Germany, December 2022, available here.
72	Government bailout of banks & abandonment of homeowners following 2008 financial crisis. The literature on this subject is large, but see, e.g., Yves Smith, Econned (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and David Streitfeld, “Report Criticizes Banks for Handling of Mortgages,” The New York Times, April 13, 2013, available here.
73	Marx quotation. The full quote is, “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” From Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, Chapter 1, “Bourgeois and Proletarians.” A brilliant meditation on this subject is Marshall Berman’s 1982 book, All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Simon & Schuster, 1982).

Part II: Commons as Living, Generative Systems

Chapter 5: Many Galaxies of Commons

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81-83	Subsistence commons. Marie Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy (London: Zed Books, 1999); and Tony Waters, The Persistence of Subsistence: Life Beneath the Level of the Marketplace (Lexington Books, 2008). Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, “Subsistence: Perspective for a Society Based on Commons,” in Bollier & Helfrich, editors, The Wealth of the Commons, pp. 82-86, available here. See also literature on Indigenous subsistence practices in specific settings, such as M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources (University of California Press, 2013); and J. Stephen Lansing, Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali (Princeton University Press, 2006); and Dave Jacke with Eric Toensmeier, Edible Forest Gardens (Chelsea Green, 2005). From an Ostrom scholarship perspective, see International Food Policy Research Institute, Resources, Rights and Cooperation: A Sourcebook on Property Rights and Collective Action for Sustainable Development (CAPRi (CGIAR Systemwide Program on Collective Action and Property Rights, 2010).
81	Free, Fair and Alive book. David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishes, 2019), available online available here.
81-82	Acequias in New Mexico. New Mexico Acequia Commission: available here. See also Stanley Crawford, Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 1993); Juan Estevan Arellano, Enduring Acquias: Wisdom of the Land, Knowledge of the Water (University of New Mexico Press, 2014); and Shoshi Parks, “In the Water-Scarce Southwest, an Ancient Irrigation System Disrupts Big Agriculture,”Yes! magazine, November 3, 2017, available here.
83-87	Potato Park (Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Area). Potato Park website. See also Alejandro Argumedo, “The Potato Park, Peru: Conserving Agrobiodiversity in an Andean Indigenous Biocultural Heritage Area,” in Thora Amend et al, editors, Protected Landscapes and Agrobiodiversity Values (2008); and Satoyama Initiative to United Nations University Institute of Advances Studies, “The Ayllu System of the Potato Park, Peru,” available here.
84	Aboriginal Australians.     India and Traditional Knowledge Commons    Attempted biopiracy of neem and turmeric in India.    Madagascar genetic resources.
84	Marcel Mauss quote. Marcel Mauss, Ian Cunnison, translator, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (W.W. Norton, 19__ / 1967), p..
84	Traditional Knowledge Digital Library available here.  The TKDL describes itself as “a pioneering initiative of India to protect Indian traditional medicinal knowledge and prevent its misappropriation at International Patent Offices. Traditional Knowledge (TK) is a valuable yet vulnerable asset to indigenous and local communities who depend on TK for their livelihood. The healthcare needs of more than 70% population and livelihood of millions of people in India is dependent on traditional medicine.”
85	Rebecca Tsosie. “Tribal Environmental Policy in an Era of Self-Determination: The Role of Ethics, Economics, and Traditional Ecological Knowledge,” 21 Vermont Law Review 225, at 226 (1996).
85	Robin Wall Kimmerer.  Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. (Milkweed Editions, 2013), p. ____.
86	N. Bruce Duthu quotation. “The Recognition of Intergenerational Ecological Rights and Duties in Native American Law,” in Weston & Bach, Recalibrating the Law of Humans withn the Laws of Nature: Climate Change, Human Rights, and Intergenerational Justice (Climate Legacy Initiative, Vermont Law School and The University of Iowa, 2009), Appendix A, Background Paper No. 3. More generally, see N. Bruce Duthu, American Indians and the Law (Penguin Books, 2009).
86	The Rights of Nature. There is a growing literature on the rights of nature, but there are several good places to start: The Global Alliance of the Rights of Nature, at therightsofnature.org; the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, which pioneered many rights of nature initiatives, at celdf.org/advancing-community-rights/rights-of-nature/rights-nature-resources; David R. Boyd, The Rights of Nature: A Legal Revolution That Could Save the World (ECW Press, 2017); Mihnea Tanasescu, Environment, Political Representation, and the Challenge of Rights: Speaking for Nature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021); and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment (Summer 2000), at igs.duke.edu/initiatives-global-asia-initiative-publications-and-presentations/rights-nature.
86	Self-owned land. See Bollier, “Rights of Nature, Self-Owning Land, and Other Hacks on Western Law,” Bollier.org, July 1, 2023, available here. See also the work of Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Council at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, in developing the legal notion of self-owned land, available here.
87	Feminist authors on care.  See, e.g., Diane Elson       Julie Nelson          Alicia Girón Gonazález
87-88	Anarchist guide on mutual aid.  “Survive the Virus: An Anarchist Guide,” March 18, 2020, available here; and Dean Spade, “Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next)” (2020), available here. See The Anarchist Library for a large selection of essays and reports on mutual aid, available here.
88	Blood and organ donation systems. An early, major work on blood donation as a gift economy is Richard Titmuss, The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (Pantheon, 1971). Two fascinating books about the changing attitudes towards markets for human organs and other body parts, and the complications of blood donation in the AIDS era, are Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell, Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2006); and Melinda Cooper, Life As Surplus: Biotechnology & Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (University of Washington Press, 2008).
88-89	The university as a commons. Michael J. Madison, Brett M. Frischmann and Katherine J. Strandburg, “The University as Constructed Cultural Commons,” Washington University Journal of Law and Policy, vol. 30 (2009), available here. See also Warren O. Hagstrom, “Gift Gifting as an Organizing Principle of Science,” in Barry Barnes and David Edge, editors, Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science (MIT Press, 1992), p. 28.
89	Lewis Hyde.The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (Vintage, 1979). Later editions of book bore new subtitles — “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World” (2007) and “How the Creative Spirit Transforms the World” (2019) — presumably for commercial reasons. The original title seems the most precise and insightful, however.
89-90	Couchsurfing. The history of Couchsurfing is nicely set forth in its Wikipedia entry available here. For more detail, see Andrew Federov, “Paradise Lost: The Rise and Ruin of Couchsurfing,” Input (September 15, 2021), available here. A 2013 account of Couchsurfing’s transformation, by Roy Marvelous, is available here.
90-93	Will Ruddick, Bangla-Pesa and alternative currencies.  See William O. Ruddick, Grassroots Economics: Reflections and Practice (2025). PDF download | Print version.  For more on Ruddick’s work, visit The Grassroots Economic Foundation. For Ruddick quotations, see Frontiers of Commoning podcast episode #48, with David Bollier (March 1, 2024), available here.
93-94	ROSCAs and Carlone Shenaz Hossein quotations. See Caroline Shenaz Hossein, The Banker Ladies: Vanguard of Solidarity Economics and Community-Based Banks (University of Toronto Press, 2024) and Caroline Shenaz Hossein and Sharon D. Wright Austin et al, editors, Beyond Racial Capitalism: Co-operatives in the African Diaspora (Oxford University Press, 2023).See also Frontiers of Commoning podcast episode #18 with Carolina Shenaz Hossein (September 1, 2021), available here.
94	Time banking. See timebanks.org and the Wikipedia entry for “Time-based currency.”
95	BerkShares currency available here. See also Schumacher Center for a New Economics, “Local Currencies Program,” available here; and Abby Patkin, “Why do the Berkshires Have Their Own Currency?” Boston.com, April 2, 2024, available here.
96	Jessica Nembhard Gordon’s book. Collective Courage: A History of African American Economic Thought and Practice (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), p. ____.
97	Cooperatives.There is a large literature on co-operatives; here are a few noteworthy books: John Restakis, Humanizing the Economy: Co-operatives in the Age of Capital (New Society Publishers, 2010); George Cheney et al, Cooperatives at Work (The Future of Work), (Emerald Publishing, 2023); Nathan Schneider, Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition that is Shaping the Next Economy (Bold Types Books, 2018); Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya, Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi (Daraja Press, 2017); and Jane Cornwell et al, Building Cooperative Power! Stories and Strategies from Worker-Cooperatives in the Connecticut River Valley (Levellers Press, 2013).

Chapter 6: The Eclipsed History of the Commons

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99	The history of commons. Derek Wall, The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict and Ecology (MIT Press, 2014).
100	Human reciprocity and cooperation go back millennia. See note for pp. 102-103, “Group selection research in evolutionary sciences.”
102	Homo economicus as an historical aberration. The literature on the fallacies of homo economicus is burgeoning, but here are a few varied selections: Friederike Habermann, “We Are Not Born Egoists,” in Bollier and Helfrich, editors, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press, 2012), pp. 13-18, available here; Robert H. Nelson,Economics as Religion: From Samuelson to Chicago and Beyond (Pennsylvania State University, 2001; Daniel Kahneman,Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011); Alex Pentland, Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lessons from a New Science (Penguin, 2014).
102	Petr Kropotkin’s book, Mutual Aid. Kropotkin, Petr, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers/ Extending Horizons Books, reprint of 1914 edition).
102-103	Group selection research in evolutionary sciences. E.O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (W.W. Norton, 2013). Nowak, Martin A., Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed (Free Press, 2011). Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, Unto Others (Harvard University Press, 1998). Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis, The Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton University Press, 2011). Gintis, Herbert, Samuel Bowles, et al., Moral Sentiments and Material Interests: The Foundations of Cooperation in Economic Life (MIT Press, 2005). See also books on the culture and politics of cooperation: Natalie Henrich and Joseph Henrich,Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation (Oxford University Press, 2007); Sennett, Richard, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (Yale University Press, 2012). Of course, many scientists remain committed to the idea of individual selection of evolutionary traits, e.g., Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (Oxford University Press, 2009). See website.
102	E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson quotation. E.O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson, “Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Sociobiology,” 82 Quarterly Review of Biology 4 (December 2007), pp. 327-348.
103	Rebecca Solnit on spontaneous altruism in disasters. Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (Penguin, 2010).
103	Martin A. Nowak quotation. Super Cooperators: Altruism, Evolution and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed (Free Press, 2011), p. _____.  For more on how humans are neurologically wired to be interdependent, see Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of How We Connect to Others (Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2008); and Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, The Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton University Press, 2011).
103	Interdependence. See, e.g., Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I. Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” Quarterly Review of Biology 87(4) (December 2012).
104	Ostrom’s findings about cooperation. Ostrom’s most notable statement about cooperation was her 1990 book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990). A complete listing of her published works – many with weblinks – can be found on her c.v. available here.
104	The legal history of the commons. See Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberty & Commons for All (University of California Press, 2009); Guy Standing, Plunder of the Commons: A Manifesto for Sharing Public Wealth (Pelican, 2019), especially Appendix, “The Charter of the Commons”; and Burns H. Weston and David Bollier, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially Chapter 5, Section B, “A Brief History of Commons Law and the Right to the Environment,” pp. 131-145.
105	“Stealing the goose” poem. Law scholar James Boyle has an extensive endnote on this provenance of this poem in his book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 264-265.The earliest printed appearance of the poem that he could locate was 1821, in Tickler Magazine, February 3, 1821, p. 45, but he notes that the poem “probably originates in the enclosure controversies of the eighteenth century.”
106	English enclosure movement. There are many useful books on this subject, but among the better ones are J.A. Yelliing, Common Field and Enclosure in England, 1450-1850 (Archon Books, 1977); Thomas More, Utopia (W.J. Black, 1947); Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford University Press, 1992); Peter Linebaugh,The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All (University of California Press, 2008); Christopher Hill,The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Penguin, 1972); Karl Polanyi,The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1944, 1957); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004); and Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, editors, Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property and Culture in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1994). See also Derek Wall, The Commons in History: Culture, Conflict and Ecology (MIT Press, 2014). See also notes for Chapters 3 and 4, pp. 39-75.
107	Enclosures of one-seventh of English land.  citation?
107	Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1957/2001). Quotation. ___________
108	Karl Marx and the commons.  See, e.g., Rethinking Marxism, vol. 22, no. 3 (July 2010), “Editors’ Introduction,” by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, available here; David Bollier, “Michel Bauwens on Marxism, Commons and Capitalism” [blog post], Bollier.org, January 5, 2012, available here.
109	Vernacular law. See, e.g., Alison Dundes Renteln and Alan Dundes, editors, Folk Law: Essays in the Theory and Practice of Lex Non Scripta (University of Wisconsin Press, 1995); W. Michael Reisman, Law in Brief Encounters (Yale University Press, 1999) for a discussion of informal “micro-law”; Trent Schroyer, Beyond Weston Economics: Remembering Other Economic Cultures (Routledge, 2009), for a discussion of Ivan Illich and “vernacular law”; Robert C. Ellickson, The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth (Princeton University Press, 2008); and Robert C. Ellickson, Order Without Law: How Neighbors Settle Disputes (Harvard University Press, 1991).  See notes on p. 18 as well.
109-110	David R. Johnson essay. David R. Johnson, “The Life of the Law Online,” 11 First Monday 2 (February 6, 2008), available here.
110	Peter Linebaugh quotation. Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberty and Commons for All (University of California Press, 2008), p. 45.
110-111	Carol Rose quotation. Carol M. Rose, “Comedy of the Commons: Custom, Commerce and Inherently Public Property,” in Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership (Westview Press, 1994), p. 134.
111	Commons law. For an extended discussion of commons law, see Burns H. Weston and David Bollier, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially pp. 104-112. See also John Clippinger and David Bollier, “The Rise of Digital Common Law: An Argument for Trust Frameworks, Digital Common Law and Digital Forms of Governance,” 2012, available here. Of course, the many historical books about the law of commons in England, Europe and other regions of the world are illuminating.
111-112	Institutes of Justinian. Caesar Flavius Justinian, The Institutes of Justinian with English Introduction, Translation and Notes, translator, Thomas Collett Sandars (William Hein & Co., 1984); also available here. See Book I, On Things.
112	Public trust doctrine. The most recent and comprehensive treatment of public trust doctrine is Mary ChristinaWood’s book, Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
112-113	King John’s treatment of commoners. See, e.g., Peter Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberty and Commons for All (University of California Press, 2008), especially Chapter 4, pp. 69-93.
113	The Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, pp. 41-43 and elsewhere. See also Guy Standing, Plunder of the Commons..__________
113-114	Peter Linebaugh quotation, “Commoning is an embedded labor process….” Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, p. 45.
114-115	Dissolution of monasteries and enclosure of the land. Linebaugh, The Magna Carta Manifesto, pp. 48-52. Error: The text should say King Henry VIII, not King Henry III.
115	Silivia Federici’s feminist history of commons. Silivia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004).
115	Lewis Hyde quotation, “Enclosure meant a shift away….” Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art and Ownership (Farrar Straus Giroux, 2010), p. 39.
115-116	Karl Polanyi quotation, people who were “migratory, nomadic, lacking in self-respect….” Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1944, 1957), p. 128.
116-117	On the ineffectuality and corruption of state regulation. Thomas O. McGarity, Sidney Shapiro and David Bollier, editors, Sophisticated Sabotage: The Intellectual Games Used to Subvert Responsible Regulation (Environmental Law Institute, 2004). Law scholar Mary Christina Wood makes the pithy judgment: “With few exceptions, [environmental] statutes authorize agencies to issue permits to damage Nature….As long as the decisionmaking frame [for regulation] presumes political discretion to allow damage, it matters little what new laws emerge, for they will develop the same bureaucratic sinkholes that consumed the 1970s laws. Moreover, a fundamental frame change in the field as a whole stands as the only practical response to an environmental bureaucracy that is now enormous.” Mary Christina Wood, Nature’s Trust: Environmental law for a New Ecological Age (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 7 and 13.
118	Autonomous Marxists, the state, and the commons. See, e.g., Massimo De Angelis, Omni Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism (Zed Books, 2017); Camille Barbagallo et al. Commoning with George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici (Pluto Press, 2019); Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004), and Re-enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (PM Press, 2018); Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosure and Resistance (PM Press, 2014); Michael Hardti, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2001); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Penguin, 2005); and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negrei, Commonwealth (Belknap Press, 2009).  Midnight Notes Collective, see James Lindenschmidt, “Revolution at the Witching Hour: The Legacy of Midnight Notes,” September 2015, available here.

Chapter 7: The Commons as a Relational Organism

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121-122	Ontology and Epistemology in Commons. Silke Helfrich and I tackled this topic in our book, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishing, 2019), especially in Chapter 2, “The OntoShift to the Commons,” and Chapter 3, “Language and the Creation of Commons.” available here and here, respectively. See also this report from a 2019 workshop: Zach Walsh and Commons Strategies Group, “Ontology as a Hidden Driver of Politics and Policy: Commoning and Relational Approaches to Governance” (Commons Strategies Group, 2019), available here.
122	Ostrom design principles for successful commons.  Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990).
123	Christopher Alexander and pattern languages. The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Books 1-4. Center for Environmental Structure, 2002-2012).
123	Pattern language methodology applied to commons.  See Appendix A: Notes on the Methodology for Identifyingt Patterns of Commons,” in Bollier and Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), pp. 351-364, available here.
123-126	The Triad of Commoning and its patterns.  See Part II: The Triad of Commoning and Chapters 4-6 inBollier and Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), pp. 93 – 200, available here.
126	The OntoShift. See Chapter 2, “The Ontoshift to the Commons,” in Bollier and Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive, pp. 29-50, available here.
127	Rabindranath Tagore. The Religion of Man (Martino Fine Books, 2013 reprint of 1931 edition). Martin Buber. I and Thou, Ronald Gregor Smith, translator (Collier Books, 1958). Martin Luther King, Jr. Why We Can’t Wait (Harper & Row, 1964). Pope Francis, Laudato Si’, Encyclical Letter, “On Care for Our Common Home,” available here.
127	David Abram. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Vintage, 1997); Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Vintage, 2011). Graham Harvey. Indigenous Religions: A Companion (Cassell, 2000); Shamanism: A Reader (Routledge, 2003); Handbook of Contemporary Animism (Acumen 2013);              Andreas Weber. Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling, and the Metamorphosis of Science (New Society Publishing, 2016); Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017); Enlivenment: Toward a Poetics for the Anthropocene (MIT Press, 2019). Isabelle Stengers. Thinking with Whitehead: a free and wild creation of concepts (Harvard University Press, 2011); Cosmopolitics I, R. Bononno, translator (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, A. Goffey, translator (Open Humanities Press, 2015). Philippe Descola. Beyond Nature and Culture, Janet Lloyd, translator (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Tim Ingold.  (and G. Palsson), editors, Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology (Cambridge University Press, 2013);
128	Graham Harvey quotation.
128	Lynn Margulis on symbiosis. Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Life on its Environment in the Early Earth (W.H. Freeman, 1981); Early Life: Evolution on the PreCambrian Earth, 2d edition (Jones & Bartlett, 2002); and Symbiotic Planet (Basic Books, 1999); among other books.
128	Francisco Varela on autopoiesis. (and Humberto Maturana Romesin), “Autopoiesis, Structural Coupling and Cognition: A history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition,” Cybernetics & Human Knowing 9(3-4), 2000, pp. 5-34. Varela quotation on “meshwork of selfless selves.” Francisco J. Varela, “Organism: A Meshwork of Selfless Selves,” in A.I. Tauber, editor, Organism and the Origins of Self (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991). See also Andreas Weber, “Beyond Emptiness: ‘Compassion’ as the Hidden Ground of Francisco Varela’s Thinking,” in Journal of Consciousness Studies 30(11) (2023, pp. 259-281.
128-129	Andreas Weber on humans as “colonies.”
129	Daniel J. Siegel. IntraConnected: MWE (Me + We) as the Integration of Self, Identity and Belonging (W.W. Norton, 2023).
129	Andreas Weber quotations on interdependence and “creative aliveness.”
130	Andreas Weber quotation on commons as a unifying priniciple dissolving society/culture divide.
130	Merlin Sheldrake. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures (Random House, 2021). Peter Wohlleben. The Secret Life of Trees: What they Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries from a Secret World (Greystone, 2016).  Suzanne Simard.  Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest (Vintage, 2022).
130-131	Eduardo Kohn. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human (University of California Press, 2013).  Quotation, “All beings…are constituitively semiotic.”  This
131-132	Gaia theory. James Locklock,The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of the Living Earth (W.W. Norton, 1995); and Bruce Clarke, Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Stephan Harding, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia (Green Books, 2006); and Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (Polity, 2017).  Stephan Harding quotation….
132	Indigenous understandings of nature.  Wahinkpe Topa and Darcia Navaez, Restoring the Kinshiop Worldview: Indigenous Voices Introduce 28 Precepts for Rebalancing Life on Planet Earth (North Atlantic Books, 2022); Vanessa Marchado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism (North Atlantic Books, 2021); and Yuria Celidwen, Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Well-Being  (Sounds True, 2024).
132-133	Biopoetics: living organisms as meaning-making and subjective. Andreas Weber, Enlivenment: Towards a Fundamental Shift in the Concepts of Nature, Culture and Politics, available here. See also Weber, Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017).
133-134	Biopoetics and reality as a commons.  Andreas Weber, “Reality as Commons: A Poetics of Partyicipation for the Anthropocene,” in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Patterns of Commoning (Off the Common Books, 2015), pp. 259-290, available here.
134	Thomas Berry quotation. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (Harperone, 1994), p. 243. See also Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club Books, 1988 / Counterpoint Press, 2015); and Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community (Sierra Club, 2006), p. 149.

Chapter 8: Local, Vernacular, and Alive

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135	On capitalist modernity.
135-136	Wendell Berry quotation, “This alignment destroys the commonwwealth….”  The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (Couterpoint, 2003), p. 58.
136	Recovering local ownership & use of land. This is a large and complicated topic whose dynamics vary from country to country, but a good overview can be found in Frank Moulaert et al., editors, From Land Ownership to Landed Commons: Social Innovation in the Commoning of Scarce Land Resources (Edward Edgar, 2024); the work of the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, especially in its community land trust program, available here. See also Eric T. Freyfogle, The Land We Share: Private Property and the Common Good (Island Press, 2003). A brilliant, well-written meditation on the social boundaries set by property law, or at least ascribed to the law, is Nick Hayes, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines That Divide Us (Bloomsbury, 2020).
136	Wendell Berry quotation on “coherent community.” From a speech, “The Purpose of a Coherent Community,” delivered on September 29, 2004, to the National Preservation Conference of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Louisville, Kentucky, USA, published in Forum Journal, 19(2) (2005), pp. 14-20, available online at Project MUSE, available here.
136	Alexander Pope quotation, “Consult the genius of the place in all.” Epistles to Several Persons, Vol. 3, No. 42, Epistle IV, “To Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlingham” (1731).
136-137	David Fleming on localism.  David Fleming, Lean Logic: A Dictionary for the Future and How to Survive It (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2016)
137	Rejecting the global/local binary.  Bruno Latour argues in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climate Regime (Polity, 2020), that “becoming modern” has for generations been juxtaposed with “the local.”  The modern is upheld as an aspirational world of innovation, progress, and cosmopolitian sophistication and development, whereas the local is seen as backward, premodern, and in need of technoogy, growth, and modernization. Latour believes we need a new “third attractor” to help articulate a new vision for humanity, which he names “the Terrestrial,” by which he means reconnecting with the biophysical realities of the Earth and rejecting the fantasties of modernity.
137	Aldo Leopold’s The Land Ethic and quotation. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press 2020). See also the Aldo Leopold Foundation, “Understanding the Land Ethic,” available here.
138	John Locke’s theory of land ownership.  See note for p. ____ below.
138	Culture Hack report. Culture Hack,Territories of Transition — A Narrative Research Report (issue #2, September 19, 2022), available here.
138-139	Community Land Trusts. Schumacher Center for a New Economics, Community land trust program, available here. See the Directory of Community Land Trusts in North America, available here. See also books by John Emmeus Davis such as Reweaving the Tapestry of Tenure: Eight Elders of the CLT Movement Who Championed Community Ownership of Land (Terra Nostra, 2023); The Community Land Trust Reader (Lincoln Institute 2010); and On Common Ground: International Perspectives on Community Land Trusts (Terra Nostra, 2020).
139	Agrarian Trust. See website.
139	Terre de Liens.  See website (in French).
139-140	Community supported agriculture (CSAs). Elizabeth Henderson,Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture, 2d edition (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2007). Josh Trought, The Community-Scale Permaculture Farm (Chelsea Green, 2015). Bonnie Gregson and Bob Gregson, Rebirth of the Small Family Farm A Handbook for Starting a Successful Organic Farm Based on the Community Supported Agriculture Concept, 3d edition (Acres U.S.A., 2024). Find a local CSA near you: www.localharvest.org/csa.
140	Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares. See website.
140	Cape Anne Fresh Catch. See website.
140	Community-owned forests. Several organizations in the US help establish and sustain community forests: Northwest Community Forests, www.nwcommunityforests.org; Northern Forest, www.northernforest.org/programs/community-forests/overview; and Sustainable Northwest, wwww.sustainablenorthwest.org
141	Convivial Conservation. The international network Convivial Conservation is attempting to forge new strategies and a new ethic for conservation: learn more. See also the seminal book by Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher, The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Sharing Nature Beyond the Anthropocene (Verso, 2020).
142	Shadow Work. Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (Marion Boyars, 1981).
142	Trent Schroyer quotation. Trent Schroyer, Beyond Western Economics: Remembering Other Economic Cultures (Routledge, 2009), p. 69.
143	Margaret Stout quotation on “a constant state of mutual becoming.” “Competing Ontologies: A Primer for Public Administration.” Public Administration Review, 72(3) (May/June 2012), pp. 388-398.
143	Friar Richard Rohr quotation on God as an experience of reconnecting parts to the Whole.  Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life (Jossey-Bass, 2023). Summary by Rohr: download pdf
144	Airline pilot after 9/11. David Remnick, ” Many Voices,” The New Yorker, October 7, 2001, available here.
144	Alternative currencies movement. This topic has a vast literature that focuses on many different spheres such as digital currencies, crypto-currencies, local complementary currencies, and so on.  Some useful, insightful books: Gwendolyn Hallsmith and Bernard Lietaer, Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies (New Society Publishers, 2011); Bernard Lietaer and Jacqui Dunne, Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity (Berrett-Koehler, 2013); William O. Ruddick, Grassroots Economics: Reflection and Practice (2025), bound book:  available here and here as a PDF. Pacific Northwest College of Art, “What Counts: Signaling Our Values Through Creative Currencies,” download PDF. Local Currency Directory.
144	Mutual credit and timebanking. The Wikipedia entry for “mutual credit” offers a good overview available here. See the entry for “time-based currency” available here.  For more on Timebanks.org.
145	Food sovereignty movements. Matthew C. Canfield, Translating Food Sovereignty: Cultivating Justice in an Age of Transnational Governance (Stanford University Press, 2022); Ivette Perfecto et al., Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Biodiversity Conservation, and Food Sovereignty, 2d edition (Routledge, 2019). Liza Grandia, Kernels of Resistance: Maize, Food Sovereignty, and Collective Power (University of Washington Press, 2024); Ken Meter, Building Community Food Webs. (Island Press, 2021).
145	Charters for commoning. See website. Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, www.celdf.org/community-rights. The European/African Atlas of Urban Community Charters, available here (in French).
145	Repair cafes. See the website Repair Cafe. Aaron Perzanowski, The Right to Repair: Reclaiming the Things We Own (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Podcast interview with Aaron Perzanowski on Frontiers of Commoning, Episode #45 (December 1, 2023), available here.
145	Solar Commons projects. Solar Commons. Solar Commons Project. Podcaster interview with Solar Commons instigator Kathryn Milun on Frontiers of Commoning, Episode #41 (March 1, 2024), available here.
145	Urban commons in various cities.  Barcelona. Seoul. Bologna.
146	LabGov. See website. LabGov – the “LABoratory for the GOVernance of the City as a Commons” – is “an international network of theoretical, empirical and applied research platforms engaged in exploring and developing methods, policies, and projects focused on the shared and collaborative management of urban spaces and resources.”
146	Barcelona En Comú.
147	City Repair Project. See website.
147	Mietshäusher Synkikat co-housing federation in Germany. See account in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), pp. 252-257, available here.
147	Fab Labs. See website.  Fablab Guide. Find a makerspace or Fab Lab near you. Tomas Diez, Fab Lab: The Mass Distribution of (Almost) Everything (Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, 2018), available here.
147-148	Mutual aid networks.  Dean Spade, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso, 2020). J.R. Mortimer, Mutual Aid for Beginners: How to Start a Project or Join a Group (Mercury Guides, 2024). The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence (Verso, 2020). The classic work on the biological, evolutionary, and social bases of mutual aid is Petr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (Boston: Porter Sargent Publishers/ Extending Horizons Books, reprint of 1914 edition).
148	Buen vivir in Ecuador and Bolivia. “Buen Vivir: South America’s Rethinking of the Future that We Want,” The Conversation, July 23, 2015, available here. See also Heinrich Boell Foundation (Berlin) report, Buen Vivir: Latin America’s New Concepts for the Good Life and the Rights of Nature (July 22, 2011), available here. See also Oliver Balch, “Buen Vivir: The Social Philosophy Inspiring Movements in South America,” The Guardian (UK), February 4, 2013, available here.
148	Bioregionalism.
148	Specific bioregional projects. Earth Regenerators (international). Bioregional Learning Centre UK (Totnes). Cascasdia (Pacific Northwest, US). All Together Now Pennsylvania (Philadelphia area).  There are also a number of initiatives to establish bioregional fibersheds for growing textiles for clothing. See, e.g., PA Fibershed; New York Fibershed; and a report by Zoe Gilbertson, “Bioregional Resilience Through Bast Fibres: Exploring Machinery and Methods to Support UK Fibre Production (2024), available here as a PDF download.
148-149	Solidarity and Social Economy.  RIPESS Network; US Solidarity Economy Network; US Solidarity Economy Map and Directory.
149	Transition Networks. See website. Rob Hopkins, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience (UIT Cambridge Ltd., 2014).
149	Organizations dedicated to local economies.  Local Futures; Schumacher Center for a New Economics; Institute for Local Self-Reliance; Institute for Social Ecology.
149	E.F. Schumacher quotation on ‘the proper scale for things.’  Schunmacher delivered a lecture, “Nonviolence,” in Berkeley, California, in February 1977, which contained this remark. The full speech can be found here.

Chapter 9: Digital Rebels in the Big Tech Imperium

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151	Microsoft executive calling Linux ‘communistic’. In 2000, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called Linux “communistic” and “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”  Graham Lea, “MS’ Balmer: Linux is Communism,” The Register, July 31, 2000, available here.  In 2016, Ballmer said, “I may have called Linux a cancer but now I love it.” Liam Tung, ZDNET, March 11, 2016, available here. Corporate fear of free and open source software is nicely captured in Peter Wayner, Free for All: How Linux and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans (HarperCollins, 2000).
151	“Information wants to be free” quotation.  This quotation was famously made by Whole Earth Catalog fame. The full quotation is: “On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.” Brand made this statement to Steve Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computer, as later recounted in Whole Earth Review, May 1985, p. 49.
151-153	Early history of the Internet. See note for p. 200.
152	Yochai Benkler quotation om ‘commons-based peer production’. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006), p. 63.
152	Free software and open source software. See note for p. 153 on Richard Stallman and the history of free software, below.
153	Wikipedia. Joseph Michael Reagle Jr. and Jackie Koerner, editors, Wikipedia @ 20: Stories of an Incomplete Revolution (MIT Press, 2020); Zachary J. McDowell and Matthew A. Vetter, Wikipedia and the Representation of Reality (Routledge, 2021); Andrew Lih, The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Group of Nobodies Created the World’s Greatest Encyclopedia (Hyperion, 2009); and Joseph Michael Reagle Jr., Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia (MIT Press, 2010).
153	Big Tech’s reengineering of online sharing.  Nathan Schneider, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life (University of California Press, 2024). Quotation on “implicit feudalism.”  See Chapter 1 of Governable Spaces, “Implicit Feudalism: The Origins of Counter-democratic Design,” pp. 17-38.
153	Nathan Schneider on ‘implicit feudalism.’
153	Free software.  Free Software Foundation. Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008). On the subculture and ethics of hacking, see E. Gabriella Coleman, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press, 2013).  See also Charles M. Schweik and Robert C. English, Internet Success: A Student of Open-Source Software Commons (MIT Press, 2012).
153	Richard Stallman and the history of free software. This is a large and diverse literature on this topic, but here are five volumes that I have found helpful Glyn Moody, Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (Perseus, 2001); Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source (Harvard University Press, 2004); Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software (O’Reilly, 2002); Joshua Gay, editor, Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman (GNU Press, 2002); and Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press,2008).
154	The General Public License for software. See notes above on free software and Richard Stallman, but see also Andrew M. St. Laurent, Open Source & Free Software Licensing (O’Reilly, 2004) for greater detail on the legal and technical implications of various FLOSS [Free, Libre, Open Source Software] licenses.
155	Linus Torvalds and Linux. Glen Moody, Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Software Revolution (Perseus, 2001).
156	Open source software after Linux.
156	Commons and markets can “play nicely together.”  An early attempt to explore this topic is Yochai Benkler, “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production,” Yale Law Journal vol. 114 (2005), pp. 273-358, available here.
156	Lawrence Lessig and the emergent “culture of sharing.” Lessig was a hugely influential interpreter of the emerging Internet culture and its legal dimensions between 1999 and the early 2010s, especially through his books and the founding of Creative Commons in 2001. See Creative Commons website. His early books on copyright, creativity, and law include Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books, 1999);  The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (Random House, 2001); Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity (Penguin, 2003); and Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in ther Hybrid Economy (Penguin, 2008). For a broader, interpretive overview of the early attempts to legalize creative sharing and culture in digital spaces, see David Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Created a Digital Republic of Their Own (New Press, 2009).
156	Creative Commons licenses.  David Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Created a Digital Republic of Their Own (New Press, 2009). See also Creative Commons website.
157	Corporate “terms of service” (TOS).  Margaret Jane Radin, Boilerplate: The Fine Print, Vanishing Rights, and the Rule of Law (Princeton University Press, 2013).
158	Corporate platforms and user vulnerability. Digital sharecropping. See, e.g., David Bollier, “When Digital Communities Become Ghost Towns,” Bollier.org, August 24, 2009, available here.
158	The “enshittification” cycle of digital platforms.  Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow, Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back (Beacon Press, 2022).
158	Open platforms and how they are different from commons. See “How Commoning Moves Beyond the Open/Closed Binary,” in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), pp. 69-72.
159	Other modes of legal sharing inspired by CC and GPL licenses. Paul Stacey and Sarah Hinchcliff Pearson, Made with Creative Commons (Ctrl-Alt-Delete Books, 2017), examines 24 different business models built around CC licenses and CC-licensed content. Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Duke University Press, 2008).
159	Open access scholarly publishing. The Wikipedia entry for “open access” has a good overview of the history and state of OA, available here. For a listing of open access publishers, go to Scholarly Open Access, available here for a listing of OA journals, go to the Directory of Open Access Journals, available here. There is now an Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, available here. The Open Educational Resources movement is quite diverse; a good place to learn more is the OER Commons, available here.
160	Scholarly and scientific journals raise subscription rates by 273%. Josko Lozi, “Zero marginal cost in magazine industry: Changing of cost paradigm in ‘new’ magazine industry,” 44th International Scientific Conference on Economic and Social Development,’ Split, Croatia (September 19-20, 2019), available here.
160	Harvard University goes “open access.”  See Harvard University Faculty Advisory Council, “Memorandum on Journal Pricing: Major Periodical Subscriptions Cannot Be Sustained,” April 12, 2012, available here.
161	More than 21,000 open access journals now publish.  Directory of Open Access Journals, available here.  On February 14, 2025, there were 21,332 open access journals.
161	Viral Spiral book. David Bollier, Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Created a Digital Republic of Their Own (New Press, 2009).
161-162	Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources. See website.
161	OER Commons [open educational resources]. See website.
162	Open design. Open Source Hardware and Design Alliance. Bas van Abel, Lucas Evers et al. Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive (Amsterdam: Bis Publishers, 2011), also available here.
162	Cosmolocal design and production. P2P Foundation entry for “Cosmo-Localism” available here. Jose Ramos, Michel Bauwens et al., The Cosmolocal Reader, available here. Open source motor vehicles. Wikipedia entry for “open-source car” available here.  Arduino: available here.
163	Farm Hack. See website.  Open Source Ecology. See website.
163	Open Prosthetics Project. See website. See also the work of the movement, @WeAreNotWaiting, that has developed an open-source automated insulin delivery (OS-AID) device for people with diabetes. The homegrown OS-AID system consists of a continuous glucose monitoring sensor worn on one’s body, an electronically connected insulin pump, and a smartphone app whose sophisticated algorithm automatically monitors glucose levels and delivers just the right amount of insulin needed, in near-real time. David Bollier, “The Breakthrough Insulin Device Developed by Commoners,” Bollier.org, November 1, 2023, available here.
163	Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). See website.
163	Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
163-164	Nathan Schneider quotatation on ‘implicit feudalism’.  See note for p. 153 above.
164	Furtherfield, the artists’ collective.  Furtherfield, the artists’ collective. Ruth Catlow and Penny Rafferty, editors, Radical Friends: Decentralised Autonomous Organizations and the Arts (Furtherfield Collective, UK, 2022), available here. Furtherfield Collective prefers to talk about “DAOWs” an acronym for, “DAOS with Others.”
165	Commons-based digital infrastructures.  Loomio:  CoBudget:   Open Collective:  Community Weaver 3:  Holochain:  NextCloud:
165	Thomas Lommee quotation.

Part III: Expanding the Commonsverse

Chapter 10:  Relationalized Property and Finance

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167-168	Vaclay Havel.  P. Mishra, “Vaclav Havel’s Lessons on How to Create a ‘Parallel Polis’.” The New Yorker. February 8, 2017, available here.
169-170	“Allegory of the deck chairs”.  Heinrich Popitz, Phänomene der Macht (Tübingen, 1986), cited in Silke Helfrich, Rainer Kuhlen, Wolfgang Sachs and Christian Siefkes, The Commons – Prosperity by Sharing [report] (Heinrich Boell Foundation, 2010). PDF file available here.
170	Blackstone quotation. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England in Four Books. Notes selected from the editions of Archibald, Christian, Coleridge, Chitty, Stewart, Kerr, and others, Barron Field’s Analysis, and Additional Notes, and a Life of the Author by George Sharswood. In Two Volumes. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1893). Vol. 1 – Books I & II. Chapter 1: Of Property, In General, available here.
170-171	On the malleability of property rights. There are many treatises that one could read on this subject, but here are five volumes that I have found useful: Carol M. Rose,Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory and Rhetoric of Ownership (Westview Press, 1994); Stuart Banner, American Property: A History of How, Why and What We Own (Harvard University Press, 2011); Margaret Jane Radin, Reinterpreting Property (University of Chicago Press, 1993); Eduardo Moisés Peñalver and Sonia K. Katyal, Property Outlaws: How Squatters, Pirates and Protesters Improve the Law of Ownership (Yale University Press, 2010); and Joseph William Singer, Entitlement: The Paradox of Property (Yale University Press, 2000).
171	Fictional commodities. This idea was introduced by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Beacon Press, 1944). p. 72. Polanyi writes, “The commodity description of labor, land, and money is entirely fictitious,” noting that labor “is only another name for a human activity which goes with life itself”; that land “is only another name for nature, which is not produced by man”; and money “is merely a token of purchasing power, which, as a rule, is not produced at all, but comes into being through the mechanism of banking of state finance.” For a hilarious but serious treatment of the fuzzy boundaries of property law in practice, see Theodore Steinberg, Slide Mountain, or the Folly of Owning Nature (University of California Press, 1996).
171	Property as a relational system. See David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), Chapter 7, “Rethinking Property,” pp. 207-236; and Chapter 8, “Relationalized Property,” pp. 237 – 282), available here and here, respectively. See also Trent Schroyer, Beyond Western Economics: Remembering Other Economic Cultures (Routledge, 2005). The implicit but oft-unstated social and ethic ties between property and a culture — and questions of what should be regarded as inalienable, not for sale — is explored in Joseph L. Sax, Playing Darts with Rembrandt: Public and Private Rights in Cultural Treasures (University of Michigan Press, 1999).
172	Gerrard Winstanley quotation. Christopher Hill, editor, ’The Law of Freedom’ and Other Writings (Cambridge University Press, 1973/2006), p. 99.
172-173	Goethe poem. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Catechism,” translated by Silke Helfrich and included in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, editors, The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (Levellers Press, 2012), p. 112.
173	Copyright over MLK Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. See, e.g., Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. v. CBS, Inc., 194 F.3d 1211 (1999). David Firestone, “Tears and a Confession from Another Dr. King,” New York Times, January 16, 2001, available here.
173-175	John Locke and property rights. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (1690).
175	Enclosures of coastal fishery commons. See, e.g., Fiona McCormack, Private Oceans: the Enclosure and Marketisation of the Seas (Pluto Press, 2017); Guy Standing, The Blue Commons (Pelican, 2024); Daniel Pauly, 5 Easy Pieces: The Impact of Fisheries on Marine Ecosystems (The State of the World’s Oceans), (Island Press, 2010). See also Callan J. Chythlook-Sifsof, “Native Alaska, Under Threat,” The New York Times, June 27, 2013, available here.
176	The engineering of scarcity. Wolfgang Hoeschele, The Economics of Abundance: A Political Economy of Freedom, Equity and Sustainability (Gower, 2010). See also “A Conversation with Brian Davey, Roberto Verzola and Wolfgang Hoeschele,” on The Abundance of the Commons,” in Bollier and Helfrich, editors, The Wealth of the Commons (Levellers Press, 2012), pp. 102-113, available here.
176	Rousseau quotation. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men and A Dissertation On the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind. Translation by G.D.H. Cole, available here.
177-179	The deficiencies of the price system. The rising dissatisfaction with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as the default measure of national progress is evidence, writ large, of the deficiencies of the price system. This is a growing literature. See an early analysis, Clifford Cobb et al., “If the GDP Is Up, Why is America So Down,” Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, p. 59, available here; and Eyal Press, “Beyond GDP,” The Nation, May 2, 2011, pp. 24-26.
178	Genuine Progress Indicator and GDP. Ida Kubiszewski et al., “Beyond GDP: Measuring and Achieving Global Genuine Progress,” Ecological Economics 93 (2013), pp. 57-68, available here; and Robert Costanza et al., “Time to Leave GDP Behind,” 505 Nature (January 16, 2014), pp. 283-287, available here.
179	John Ruskin and “illth.” Peter Barnes has re-popularized this term, especially in his book Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (Berrett-Koehler, 2006).
180	Neera Singh and the importance of ‘affective labor’. Neera M. Singh, “The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India,” Geoforum 47 (2013), pp. 189-198. See other articles by Singh, too, such as “Payments for ecosystem services and the gift paradigm: Sharing the burden and joy of environmental care,” Ecological Economics 117 (2015), pp, 53-61; and “Becoming a Commoner: The Commons as Sites for Affective Socio-Nature Encounters and Co-Becomings” (undated draft circa 2016), available here.
180-184	Relationalized property.  See note for p. 171, “Property as a Relational System.”
181	Vernacular Law.  Commons relies on informal and vernacular law.
182	The Value of a Whale & Green Capitalism.  Adrienne Buller, The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester University Press, 2022).
183	Self-owned land. See Bollier, “Rights of Nature, Self-Owning Land, and Other Hacks on Western Law,” Bollier.org, July 1, 2023, available here. See also the work of Thomas Linzey, Senior Legal Council at the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights, in developing the legal notion of self-owned land, available here.
183	Right-to-roam laws (UK).
183	Seed-sharing legal innovations.
183-184	Federated wiki platform. The wiki and federated wiki platforms were both developed by Ward Cunningham, who describes the latter as “a chorus of voices” that allows users to share content while maintaining their individual perspectives,” in contrast to the wiki platform, which centralizes editorial control and requires consensus or at least acquiescence; often flame wars result instead.  See website and the Wikipedia entry for “federated wiki.”
184-185	Relationalized finance.  David Bollier, “Why We Need Relationalized Finance,” Video presentation at AmsterDOEN, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. September 18.

Chapter 11: Reimagining State Power

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187	Liberal state order and commons. This topic was extensively discussed at a 2016 workshop hosted by the Commons Strategies Group and Heinrich Boell Foundation. See David Bollier, “State Power and Commoning: Transcending a Problematic Relationship” [report on a workshop, February 28-March 2, 2016] (Commons Strategies Group, 2017), available here. PDF of 50-page report available here. The limitations and problems of liberal polities prompted the Catholic Academy of Berlin to host a workshop on May 31-June 2, 2023, on “Beyond Liberalism: Commons, Constitutionalism, and the Commons Good,” available here.
188	James C. Scott’s books on state power. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale University Press, 1998),  Quotation, pp. 81-82.  See also The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upload Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).
189-190	Roy L. Heidelberg essay.  “The Incompatibility of the Commons and the Public,” International Journal of the Commons 18(12) (2024), pp. 177-187, available here. Heidelberg quotation re commoners and state.  “The Incompatability of the Commons and the Public,” op. cit.
190	Bob Jessop quotation, “There is no general theory of the state and commons.”  David Bollier, “State Power and Commoning: Transcending a Problematic Relationship” [report on a workshop, February 28-March 2, 2016] (Commons Strategies Group, 2017), p. 9. PDF of report can be found available here.
192	Green Governance book. Burns H. Weston and David Bollier, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
193	State / commons relationships.  A Belgian research project, DOMINIA, at KU Leuven and VUB, has completed a forthcoming book anthology (to which I have contributed), Commoning For, With, Against or Beyond the State, edited by Zenia Katsigianni and Pieter Van den Broeck, on “the role of the state, spatial policy systems in particular, in hindering or supporting the commons.” This topic includes explorations of “commons/public partnerships” (CPPs) and other novel ways in which states and commons are attempting to co-develop operational protocols. For more on CPPs, see note below on pp. 200-204.
194	Camila Vergara book.  Systemic Corruption: Constitutional Ideas for an Anti-Oligharchic Republic (Princeton University Press, 2020).
194-196	State trustee commons. The idea of the state acting as a trustee for common assets and the common good — and the structural limitations and pitfalls of such arrangements — is discussed in Burns H. Weston and David Bollier, Green Governance: Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commons (Cambridge University Press, 2013), especially Chapter 8, “Catalytic Strategies for Achieving Green Governance,” pp. 226-260.
195-196	Alaska Permanent Fund.  Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation, available here.  K. Widerquist and M. Howard, Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend: Examing Its Suitability as a Model [for Universal Basic Income] (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). See also Peter Barnes’ proposed adaptations and extensions of the stakeholder trust idea in Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (Berrett-Koehler, 2006/2022).
196	Peter Barnes’ book Ours:  Barnes, Ours: The Case for Universal Property (Polity, 2022).
196	Peer to Patent Project.  See Wikipedia entry, “Peer to Patent,” for an overview.
196	Legal hacks as a concept.  See David Bollier, “Hacking the Law to Open Up Zones of Commoning,” in Anna Grear and David Bollier, The Great Awakening: New Modes of Life Amidst Capitalist Ruins (Punctum Books, 2020), pp. 223-246, available as book and free PDF available here.
196 & 197	Serge Gutwirth quotations. Serge Gutwith and Isabelle Stengers, “The Law and the Commons,” presentation at Third Global Thematic International Association for the Study of the Commons Conference on the Knowledge Commons, October 20-22, 2016.
196	Ivan Illich and vernacular practice. Ivan Illich, Shadow Work (Marion Boyars, 1981). See also Tools for Conviviality (Marion Boyars, 2001) and David Cayley’s intellectual biography of Illich, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024).
197	GPL and Creative Commons as legal hacks.  See note for p. 153 on “Richard Stallman and free software,” and note for p. 156 on “Creative Commons licenses.”
198	Open Source Seed Initiative. See website.
198	Rights of nature and self-owned land.  See citations for p. 86.
199	Sustainable Economies Law Center. See website.
199	J.K. Gibson-Graham quotation, “If to change ourselves….”  The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (University of Minnesota Press, 1996/2006), p. xvi.
200-204	Commons-public partnerships. See Kai Heron, Keir Milburn and Bertie Russell, “Public-Commons Partnerships: Democratising Ownership and Urban Development,” in common-wealth.co.uk, available here. See also Paul Jerchel and Judith Pape, Commons-Public Partnerships: New Avenues of Cooperation for Socio-ecological Transformations (Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies Potsdam, December 2022) available here; and M. Pera & S. Bussu, “Public-Commons Partnerships and the Democratisation of Public Administration: The Citizen Assets Program in Barcelona,” International Journal of the Commons 18(1) (2024), pp. 164–176. See also Bollier and Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive, pp. 333-344.
200	TCP/IP protocols as a model for communications. The importance of the TCP/IP protocols in the evolution of the Internet – by enabling end-to-end connectivity and therefore heterogeneity and decentralization in network systems – are described in two histories of the Internet: Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet (MIT Press, 1999); and M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Viking, 2001).
201	Volunteer fire departments in Germany. Bollier and Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive, pp. 333-336.
201-202	Baan Mankong neighborhood housing and services program (Bangkok).  Community Organizations Development Institute [Thailand], “Baan Mankong: Thailand’s national people-driven, collective housing program,” October 2019, available here and here. See also website for the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights. Search for “CODI” (Community Organizations Development Institute), “secure housing,” and “Baan Mankong.”
202	Barcelona En Comú.  ddd
202-203	Co-Cities Protocols & Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of Urban Commons.  See Sheila R. Foster and Christian Iaione, Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities. (MIT Press, 2022). P2P Foundation, “Regeneration of Urban Commons” (2024), available here.
203	LabGov.org.  LABoratory for the GOVernance of the City as a commons, available here.
203	Commons-public partnerships and interfaces. David Bollier, “How Commoners Can Engage with State Power: Legal Hacks, Commons/Public Partnerships and Interface Patterns” [book chapter] in forthcoming anthology, Xenia Katsigianni and Pieter Van den Broeck, editors, Commoning For, With, Against or Veyond the State? (working title), 2025.
203-204	Ugo Mattei quotation. Ugo Mattei, “First Thoughts for a Phenomenology of the Commons,” in Bollier & Helfrich, The Wealth of the Commons (2012), p. 42, and available here.

Conclusion

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208	Jenny Holzer quotation.  The phrase is part of a larger collection of aphorisms, Truisms, presented by conceptual artist Jenny Holzer.
211	Alain Lipietz on commons as gift and duty.  Alain Lipietz, “Questions About Commons,” (French, “Questions sur les ‘biens communs,’ Intervention au débat de la foundation Heinrich Boell, FSM de Bélem, Janvier, 2009), available here.
	The Commonsverse. David Bollier, “Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse,” International Journal of the Commons, Spring 2024, available here. See also David Bollier, The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2021), available here.

Acknowledgements

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Johannes Goethe quotation.  The original passage reads: “Everything that I hvae seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity, and old age all have brought me their thoughts….their perspectives on life.  I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.” Quoted in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, “The Law of Texts: Copyright and the Academy,” College English 57(7) (November 1995), p. 769.

Chapter 1: The Rediscovery of the Commons

Global commons movement. The history commons-based activism and advocacy is a long, complicated story that has yet to be written. However, a few landmarks in this history, extending roughly from the late 1990s to the present, include the rise of free and open source software in the 1990s and networked software platforms in the early 2000s; an international activists’ conference hosted by the Heinrich Boell Foundation in Mexico City in 2006, with follow-on conferences in 2010 and 2013 in Berlin Germany; a proliferating scholarly literature devoted to commons, especially under the auspices of the International Association for the Study of Commons; and adoption of the commons mindset and discourse in hundreds of projects, organizations, and policy proposals worldwide. Many of these developments are featured in David Bollier, The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking: Tools for the Transitions Ahead (Schumacher Center for a New Economics, 2021), available here. See also David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair and Alive: The Insurgent Power of the Commons (New Society Publishers, 2019), available here; and an essay by David Bollier, “Challenges in Expanding the Commonsverse,” in a special issue of the International Journal of the Commons, 17(1), Spring 2024, dedicated to “Advancing the Commonsverse: The Political Economy of the Commons,” available here.