David Bollier's Blog

Torange Khonsari on the Potential of Commons/Public Partnerships

DavidBollier — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:00:00 +0000

As the Commonsverse becomes more robust worldwide, a more urgent question is arising: Can commoners work constructively with the state, and if so, how?

State power tends to have its own narrow ideas about how to get things done – and what governance, law, bureaucratic power, and public participation should look like. Commons open up new possibilities for getting things done, however. They can generate types of value that elude markets and bureaucracy, and offer new ways of knowing and being.

But there’s a catch. It can be tricky and difficult for the state and commons to work together. Each has such different premises about power and worldview. Can they develop some sort of rapprochement?

Torange Khonsari of Public Works Group

One of the more astute commentators on this topic is she instigates bottom-up commoning initiatives while navigating around barriers erected by the state, but sometimes actually facilitated by it.

A few months ago, Khonsari published a new book, Frontiers of Commoning.)

As new commons take root and become visible, the very definition of the “common good” or “public good” begins to shift.

Khonsari was always disturbed that “the common good” has been understood as a glittering abstraction. This makes it easy to co-opt the idea. Politicians and business executives claim that state programs or the mythical Invisible Hand of the free market benefit everyone, for example, even though benefits actually flow to the privileged few or politically connected. Khonsari calls this a communal commons – an abstract version of the common good disconnected from people’s personal lives.

By contrast, a distributive commons, as she calls it, is stewarded by commoners themselves. It produces things in particular ways to serve particular, identifiable people. It’s not a generic “common good,” but one that takes place in a distinct context for specific purposes. The commons good here is produced interpersonally through relationships,” said Khonsari, “and the process includes the self.” That means we have personal roles and identities in making this type of common good happen, via our commoning. In a distributive commons, the common good arises from real, autonomous commoners enacting care in their own voices, fulfilling their own priorities. The process engages our individual sense of self, something that doesn’t happen in communal commons.

You can listen to my full interview with Torange Khonsari here. LINK

Taking Co-Living Seriously in Architecture & Design

DavidBollier — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Surging real estate markets, among other factors, have made US housing unaffordable to large segments of the population, especially young people. So much of it is designed for conventional nuclear families and upscale buyers seeking luxury amenities. For lower- and middle-income people, simply finding affordable housing is hard enough; it almost seems utopian to want housing with attractive public amenities, shared spaces, and a spirit of neighborliness and belonging.

Fortunately, a number of renegade architects, builders, and city planners see great potential in shared living arrangements. There are many varieties, from housing cooperatives and intentional communities to co-housing and communes. The common goal is to use innovative architectural and social design to make residential living more enjoyable and affordable.

In my latest podcast episode (spent years as a San Francisco architect and urban designer at the California College of the Arts. His research – much of it conducted via infrastructure, housing, and urbanism. He recently joined the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and won the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture for 2026-2027.

Bhatia first discovered the potential of collective living when he visited “The Embassy,” an urban commune in an old Edwardian house in San Francisco. When attending a public lecture there, some residents took him on a tour.

“It was so incredible to see the type of work they were doing,” he recalled, “—the radicality of the ways that they were living, the experimentation in labor practices, the emotional support they were able to provide each other, this really high quality of life they were able to achieve in a very expensive city like San Francisco.” As a point of reference, he pointed out that San Francisco has a 200,000-unit shortfall of affordable housing relative to need.

Along the way, Bhatia began to collaborate with architect a collaborative practice focused on public/urban spaces, public art, and architecture, and a former principal of Studio Urbis.

Steinmüller and Bhatia began to conduct in-person interviews to explore the social dynamics of co-living, discover what residents really want, and understand what types of people choose such to live in such settings.

They also embarked on a more systemic study of co-living options around the world to study the range of existing options. “We looked at models in Asia and the share houses in Japan and Korea,” said Steinmüller. “We looked at Baugruppen in Germany and Austria, and cooperatives in Switzerland, to augment the breadth of purpose-designed structures. We weren't able to find as many in the U.S.” [Baugruppen is something of a cross between a communal home and a condo association, in which prospective residents of a building come together to plan and build housing, and then develop it themselves, without a general contractor, to reduce costs.]

Bhatia and Steinmüller realized that a lot of contemporary research on collective housing focuses mostly on “the aesthetics of the architectural product. It sometimes doesn’t get into how day-to-day life works in these places. I think that’s something we wanted to do in our research….At the scale of twenty people deciding on day-to-day life,” said Bhatia, “it felt so intimate and material that I could study how politics and governance interact with architectural form.”

They began to do “post-occupancy appraisals” of architectural design in collective housing to learn what actually works and what doesn’t. Which groups seem to be thriving and why? What designs amount to window-dressing, and what designs functionally improve a community?

They explored how group living arrangements could be made more sociable and enjoyable, and what types of design and governance to avoid. For example, some commercial developers think it’s enough to hire a “community manager” to orchestrate a social scene and group harmony. But Bhatia realized that the very idea of a community manager is an oxymoron. “You don’t manage a community; the community has to create itself,” he said.

One jointly authored study, which distills their findings from collective living case studies and served as the basis for changing group housing legislation.

Certain amounts of shared space – properly situated in a building – can make for a more sociable community. Building techniques can improve the construction economics. City planning offices can craft policies to support co-living as a viable option. Well-designed governance for co-living is important, of course, though in the end, community members must put in the time and hard work to “invent themselves” as a community.

Bhati has long lamented the tidal wave of expensive, market-rate housing and the corresponding scarcity of affordable housing in cities. So he and Steinmüller began to ask how the co-living model as a social/architectural form might compete with commercially driven real estate.

The found some promising ideas in the

A Stunning Visual History of English Land Commoners and Their Folk Culture

DavidBollier — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 04:00:00 +0000

Our modern mental maps of commons are woefully inadequate, in part because we have forgotten the history of commons and its once-flourishing folk culture.

Leah Gordon, an English photographer, writer, and filmmaker has set out to fix that through a deep dive into the history of English commons. The result, produced with two collaborators, is her fascinating and beautiful book, Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance. Her two partners in the project are Stephen Ellcock, a renowned visual curator, and writer Anabelle Edwards, who has studied alternative lifestyles that reject the modern market/state and its culture.

British photographer, writer, filmmaker Leah Gordon

Common People is a stunning visual portrayal of English commoners over the centuries. It looks at their everyday struggles, feelings, creativity, and cultures, bringing the human vitality of that world alive in ways that print usually does not.

The book draws upon dozens of captivating paintings, etchings, and folk relics from English history as well as many contemporary photographs of commoners who carry on premodern traditions. The photos, taken by Gordon and Edwards, provide revealing glimpses into the eccentric, glorious, and sometimes unsettling realities of commoning as a culture.

There is the tradition of The Burryman, for example. For 1,000 years, on the second Friday in August, the English town of South Queensferry has selected a man to dress up in a costume covered with about 11,000 itchy plant burrs, with openings only for his eyes, nose, and mouth. The role can only be played by a man born there and “requires deep commitment,” said Gordon. The Burryman then walks a ceremonial nine-mile route while carrying flower-covered rakes, along with two attendants, and is frequently plied with shots of whiskey along the route. The origins of the tradition may have been to bring good luck to local fishermen or to commemorate the hiding of Scottish king Malcom III from the English, through this disguise.

To learn such curiously fantastic commons traditions, I spoke with Leah Gordon in my l

The Burryman of South Queensferry. Photo by Leah Gordon

It quickly becomes clear that Common People is not just a history of commons. It is also about how memory of the commons persists through a shared culture, shaping contemporary life and politics. The book contains a photo of the Travelly Well, which has been used to water livestock for thousands of years; it is near an ancient route used by travelers. In Longmead, England, commoners host a spectacular event twice a year in which herding dogs escort large flocks of sheep back from common fields in the highlands.

David and Sandra Webb, holders of user-rights to Silvington Common. Photo by Leah Gordon

There are many English people who legally hold rights to commons via their land ownership, sometimes in improbable modern settings. Through their land deed, David and Sandra Webb have rights to use Silvington Common for the right of pannage (pigs grazing acorns in the forest), the right of estover (collecting wood for fuel and fencing), and piscary rights (taking fish, which are gone).

Poacher. Photo by Leah Gordon

Modern-day commoners often manifest in different social identities than they did centuries ago while nonetheless continuing cherished traditions and values. For example, today’s commoners may be activists who campaign against new highways and nuclear power in order to defend the land. They resist limits on their “right to roam” and camp on privately owned land, echoing memorable acts of civil disobedience such as the Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932 in which thousands of commoners surged over private land to protest enclosures.

Yesterday’s commoners were often forcibly marginalized by emerging capitalist society. Today’s commoners may have been similarly pushed to the margins of mainstream life as Ramblers, Gypsies, nomadic travelers, festival-goers, ravers, and nature lovers. Gordon has photos of them all, many posed in old-style clothing and postures, their images printed with old-timey color-tints to echo the archaic colorizing technique of 18th Century photographs.

A series of essays accompany the book’s many images, providing detailed treatment of such themes as “Enclosed Land and Vanquished Peasants,” “Rural Rebels and Traditions,” and “Vagabonds.” The essays are useful complements to the evocative photographs and art works, providing background histories of the premodern experience of being a commoner.

Gordon explained that some of her interest in the commons comes from growing up between Liverpool, once a center for the slave trade, and Manchester, where the Industrial Revolution got started. She came to realize that enclosures of commons were an essential third force propelling early capitalism.

At a certain point, Manchester industrialists came to see that “the plantation system based on slavery wasn’t creating enough capital any more,” said Gordon, citing the book

Brave New Alps: New Forms of Rural Resurgence Through Commoning and Care

DavidBollier — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 04:00:00 +0000

To outsiders, the Alps may conjure images of majestic mountain landscapes and carefree ski vacations. But to tens of thousands of people living in small Alpine towns, the challenges they face aren’t so different from those of many rural towns: How to meet basic needs and make the economy more resilient? How to deal with the worsening disruptions of climate change? How to assert greater regional control when distant, city-based politicians and investors push very different priorities?

Paradoxically enough, remote rural locations are precisely where a lot of exciting ecosocial and economic innovations are arising. Constraint tends to focus the mind and expand the imagination. It forces people to think creatively, leading to unexpectedly robust innovations.

These were my conclusions after interviewing designer . The group began as a collaboration between Elzenbaumer and her partner

Bianca Elzenbaumer, cofounder of Brave New Alps

Elzenbaumer explained in an essay: “After having studied and worked as an eco-social designer across Europe and Palestine, my partner and I decided to dedicate our next 40 years studying how design can support commons and community economies” in a post-capitalist world.

By 2012, Brave New Alps had evolved into a formal “cultural association” dedicated to building community design practices that could “reconfigure the politics of social and environmental issues.” But their vision of development had a significant twist. They wanted to build systems that could operate beyond markets, such as commons, and to step outside the conventional client-designer framework in favor of participatory processes.

Intrigued, I interviewed Bianca Elzenbaumer for

Alpine Community Economies Laboratory

Some of its most prominent projects include a community academy called ; and the , a highly competitive award that honors innovative building projects that focus on sustainability, inclusiveness, and beauty. The project prioritizes social and ecological concerns, informal economic exchange, and acts of community care.

The Eco Lab fosters mental health and well-being by hosting “convivial practice” in non-stigmatizing spaces for anyone who wishes to participate. There are monthly outings in the surrounding areas and sessions for “repair and sewing, social gardening, carpentry, and cooking” led by local residents eager to share their passions and skills.

SEXyProject is a welcoming space for open dialogue about sexuality and emotional education, aimed at young people and teenagers.

Forno Vagabondo is a traveling community bakery that uses an oven on an electric cargo bike to bake bread and focaccia in various public squares, parks, and borders between city and countryside. The goal is to foster community relationships in public spaces while teaching the practice of breadmaking. The process also makes abstract ecological issues, like the source of grains and other ingredients, more tangible to people.

Skeptics may wonder how such heterodox experiments in commoning are funded. Elzenbaumer jokingly explained: “We have this slogan, ‘No money, no problem.’ It’s not completely true that no money is no problem. But it really helps us to remember, Don’t put the money first. Look first at what do we need, what do others need in this community, and galvanize people around those needs, but also the desires connected to those needs. And then, let the money come later.”

Members of Brave New Alps at work

“And this is where we bring in commons and community economies, in theory and practice, to say, well, but we have each other. Every one of us has some resources to share, has something to contribute. Let’s work with that first.”

New initiatives arise from people’s “feral” enthusiasm for a project, their willingness to contribute, the open invitation to others to join, and a collective discipline in making things happen. Funders and institutions with in-kind support sense that energy and commitment. Somehow resources seem to materialize.

While this approach may sound counterintuitive and risky, the courage to engage with real needs and produce solid results has a power of its own. There is also power in recognizing that huge amounts of value quietly arise from outside of market economies and the state.

This is the notable insight of the famous iceberg image developed by the Community Economies Research Network. In standard economics, value is the visible tip of the iceberg -- wage labor, commodity markets, and capitalist enterprise. But beneath the water, the bulk of the iceberg features other, non-transactional varieties of value-creation -- social, local, informal, ecological -- which markets and state power cannot see or mobilize. These include neighborly assistance, barter, care work, open source collaborations, libraries, gifting, scavenging, and much else. Brave New Alps help mobilize these forces for commoning and change.

For more, listen to my full interview with Bianca Elzenbaumer ____________

For some videos about La Foresta’s work, see this and another featuring the

Jeremy Lent’s ‘Ecocivilization’ – A Bold Vision for System Change

DavidBollier — Fri, 01 May 2026 04:00:00 +0000

With so many social movements seeking system change – cooperatives, commons, Doughnut Economics, peer production, relocalization and more – things quickly get confusing. There are so many different vocabularies, political premises, and theories of change swirling about. How can we possibly work toward a coherent, common future?

is possible precisely by drawing upon the rich pluriverse of possibilities. Lent’s book is therefore a relief to encounter. At last, a bold, empirically grounded vision of how diverse players could construct a post-capitalist world.

I’ve known Jeremy and his thinking in previous books for eight or ten years, especially through The Patterning Instinct and The Web of Meaning. The Patterning Instinct, published in 2017, distills a vast scholarly literature to describe humanity’s search for meaning – from the time of hunter-gatherers to early agricultural civilizations to modern societies and religion traditions. The Web of Meaning, published in 2021, explores how traditional wisdom and modern science could together provide a new narrative for modern humans. (My 2021 blog post and podcast interview with Jeremy about The Web of Meaning, can be found here.)

Naturally, I was excited to learn more about Ecocivilization, a book that Lent had been working on for five years. So I asked Jeremy to join me on

Ecocivilization starts by providing an incisive overview of the history of modern capitalism. He introduces the mythical Indigenous figure of Windigo as a shorthand for the voracious, predatory hunger driving capitalism. Windigo is a terrifying monster in Ojibwe mythology that is always hungry and has a heart of ice.

“If it caught you, it would take a bite out of you. And the more of you that a Windigo ate, the hungrier it got,” said Lent. “The worst thing was, if you got bitten by one, you turned into a Windigo monster yourself, doomed always to roam the world to eat more and more, never satisfied.

“When Europeans arrived in North America with a gold fever and a desire to keep taking more and more, the Ojibwe looked at them and said, ‘This is Windigo!’”

After a few succinct chapters on the pathologies of capitalism, Ecocivilization gets down to the work at hand – explaining multiple strategies for revamping the economy. In sixteen chapters, he addresses a wide spectrum of domains – business organization, agriculture, technology, finance, infrastructures, law, global governance, and more.

Here’s a quick sampling of the types of prescriptions that Lent offers:

Industry must begin to embrace the principles of the “circular economy” to minimize wastes and begin to account for the market “externalities” (pollution, social disruptions, over-development) of conventional commerce.

Agriculture must embrace agroecology priniciples and perennial crops. It must move away from factory farming and toward small farms and local food systems.

Wealth inequality can be addressed through caps on wealth, inheritance taxes, and commonwealth trusts serving the common good.

Modern systems of fiat currency need to make room for alternative currencies, community-owned public banks, and debt jubilees to wipe debts clean. Universal basic income schemes should be enacted.

To escape growing forms of techno-feudalism, digital technologies need to become open source and distributed, not centralized and consolidated. We need greater commons-based peer production and cosmolocal production (open source design and local physical production). We need public-platform accelerators to help finance and incubate these tech designs, including convivial technologies that escape closed, proprietary systems and enable users to use tech systems to serve their own needs.

What unites the many vectors of change that Lent chronicles is their capacity to bring about stable, sustainable, fair, and dignified ways of life for all. He wants to outline “a new global system of living, one based on life-affirming principles modeled after nature’s own design.”

This is no idiosyncratic personal vision, however. Lent’s goal is to synthesize dozens of proven and promising genres of existing projects and real-world activism. Some of these are daring and paradigm-breaking. Others operate well within the dominant market/state system but offer credible possibilities for post-capitalist transitions.

The framework that Lent uses for conceptualizing system change is known as the “Three Horizons Model.” It posits three interlinked realms of strategy and action. Initiatives operating within the “first horizon” accept the premises of current institutions and try to eke out incremental improvements within them. Think: laws, regulations, and business models to "reform" the system. In our time, horizon one has been largely neutered by big money, political corruption, and free-market ideology.

The “second horizon” is also bounded by current political and economic realities, but its strategies aim to disrupt conventional practices and move beyond them. Sometimes horizon two gambits are exposed as charades or feints toward the transformative. Companies may find it useful to use use deceptive approaches or PR strategies to make their initiatives appear more progressive and consequential than they really are.

Such examples earn the tag, horizon "two-minus.” They can be seen in the plastics industry’s duplicitous recycling programs purporting to solve the problem of plastic waste; and in Wall Street’s ESG (“environmental, social, governance”) investment filters, which were quickly dismantled when the Trump II administration took office.

In some instances, however, horizon two strategies actually open up new fissures in conventional logics and politics, providing enough visibility and space for activists to open up pathways to horizon three – an Ontological Shift to a new paradigm.

The third horizon, writes Lent, refers to “ideas that are outside the ballpark, shifting the entire paradigm and thus permitting possibilities that could never have been imagined within the first two horizons.”

In Ecocivilization, Lent clearly wants to take readers – or at least, those of us in the Western world – to horizon three. These are his preferred examples, but he also, necessarily, cites attractive examples within horizon two that could be helpful.

The hard truth of the matter is that getting from horizon one to the paradigm shift of horizon three – a space unintelligible to people living within horizon one – requires patience, ingenuity, and a sharp machete for hacking a pathway there.

Years ago, Lent created The , a new group that seeks to actualize some of the transformative ideas described in Ecocivilization, the book.

The group takes inspiration from a bit of wisdom by Nobel Laureate Ilya Progogine, a chemist: “When a system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.” There are many islands of coherence out there. Can we expand and interconnect them, and begin to enter horizon three?

You can listen to my recent interview with Jeremy Lent

One point of using a Creative Commons license is to make a book (and other creative works) as widely available as possible. To that end, I’m thrilled to announce a new stage in the life of .

The printed text of the book is now posted online, for free. Here’s the weblink:

The license essentially means that the work can be copied and shared so long as credit is given to me as the author (BY). Noncommercial uses are allowed without permission, but any commercial reuses require my permission (NC). Any derivative uses of this book, including translations, new printings, and excerpts, are permissible so long as they also use the same license requiring sharing (SA).

I’m also happy to announce that an audiobook version of the book is now available, at

I had not given much thought to doing an audiobook because I didn’t like the terms offered by Audible, the near-monopoly retailer of audiobooks owned by Amazon.

Audible’s exclusive contracts with authors prevent libraries and independent bookstores from lending or selling audiobooks, in effect preventing competition. Its royalty rates are below industry standards, and author complaints about lack of transparency are legion. Audible also uses digital rights management (DRM) technology that vastly empowers sellers to set the terms of the user experience, by, for example, dictating what devices may be used to listen to an audiobook, declaring whether sharing is possible (generally no), and making it difficult for authors and users to leave the Audible platform.

[For more on Audible’s hammerlock on audiobook sales and their anti-social terms, see

This Thai edition of 'Think Like a Commoner, 2d Edition' (2025) may not have occurred without a Creative Commons license authorizing a derivative use at no cost.

Fortunately, my friends at

Understanding how online communities function is a particularly vexing challenge. For example, is a wiki best understood as a volunteer club and nonprofit organization? Or does it more closely resemble a business that organizes the wisdom of crowd -- or tames the unruliness of a mob? It becomes even more complicated when you consider that wikis have porous boundaries, enabling people to become either formal members or casual lurkers.

People trying to grasp how collaborative spaces work often turn to the literature of the commons. It has a lot to say about the dynamics of collective action and sharing wealth, after all. But does the stewardship of land or water really resemble the stewardship of online information by quasi-strangers scattered around the world?

Professor Benjamin Mako Hill

These are the sorts of conceptual challenges that tug at Benjamin Mako Hill, a computer science professor at the University of Washington and scholar of digital collaboration. Mako, as he’s usually called, brings special talents to this inquiry. He’s not just a scientist and scholar, but a committed free software activist and hacker who has made significant contributors to the Debian and Ubuntu projects, two versions of the GNU/Linux computer operating system. He advises the Wikipedia project and has received a prestigious US National Science Foundation grant to study the governance and lifecycles of knowledge commons.

I was curious to learn more about the social life and governance of digital commons, so I invited Hill to join me on

“If you look at the median number of contributors to an open source software project,” said Hill, “it's a single person. If you look at the median number of contributors to wiki on a large wiki-hosting platform, it's very often no more than a small handful.” This situation naturally motivates collaborative sites to make themselves quite open to anyone who wants to contribute.

But as the number of participants on a site grows, perhaps acquiring a reputation in specialist circles or even mainstream culture, the needs of the community changes. Its members need to protect their stock of knowledge from increasing attacks by vandals and trolls. Such attacks tend to become more frequent as the community becomes larger and more robust.

But at a later stage of development, the goal of attracting newcomers often comes into conflict with the need to protect the shared wealth of the community from attacks. “Wikipedia is one of the top ten websites in the world,” said Hill, “so there are a lot of eyeballs on it and a lot people who want to vandalize it….Epistemic legitimacy [of a collaborative website] can absolutely be appropriated.” So steps need to be taken to protect that commons.

He cited the cautionary example of the Croatian language edition of Wikipedia and its startling takeover. “For a period of about ten years, Wikipedia Croatia was completed captured by a cabal of far-right Croatian nationalists,” he said, which resulted in the site becoming a haven for Holocaust denialism, for example. Croatia was the site of the third largest concentration camp in Europe during the Second World War, but you wouldn't have known that if you looked in Croatian Wikipedia between 2010 and 2020. I think that this represents a kind of threat that is actually common to a lot of peer production projects.”

But dealing with attacks or attempted takeovers can require serious tradeoffs in the terms of the governance of collaborative websites. A common response is to create new types of security and participation filters. This can secure the shared stock of information from vandalism and disruption, but it can also make it more difficult for people to contribute to the site. This, in turn, can lead to a decline in the quality of information collectively contributed.

One favored solution is to restrict participation to people who have registered accounts, thereby preventing anonymous contributions. Several Wikipedia editions have in fact done this, including the English language, Portuguese, and Farsi versions of the site. So have many alternative wikis such as Wookieepedia,

Mako Hill, adrift in a sea of plastic orbs

Initially, in the early 2000s, commoners had figured out that the only way to scale collaboration to massive sizes of participants, was to make content really open, put it out under a free license, and manage it all as a commons. “That, in fact, was the only way that we knew how to do it,” said Hill. Before corporate platforms arrived, that’s how open source software, blogs, wikis, and other collaborative innovations sustained themselves as commons.

When the iPhone launched in 2007, Hill noted, there was no App Store. The iPhone was sold with only the apps that Apple had installed on it. But enough iPhone owners were unhappy with this arrangement. An estimated 25% of all iPhones sold were “jailbroken,” or hacked, to enable users to fix bugs and install homegrown, non-Apple apps.

After first fighting this development, Apple realized that this was a battle it couldn’t win. So it created the App Store, allowing anyone to make apps for the IPhone. But Apple insisted upon becoming the official gatekeeper of the apps, with its own terms of what could be sold. It also charged a 30% fee to developers to retail their apps via the App Store.

This became a rough model for other tech companies to exploit and refine: use one’s capital, market power, and tech to enclose a social community….monetize people's relationships and personal information through data surveillance and targeted marketing….and slowly privatize control over the community by converting it into a hybrid market of individuals. Cory Doctorow has incisively called this process (which has other dimensions) “enshittification.”

Despite such forces, Hill believes that digital commoners can secure control over their shared wealth and innovation ecosystems, even with the potent threats posed by new AI systems. You can listen to my full interview with Mako Hill

Humanity cannot continue to expand production and consumption exponentially on a finite planet. It’s biophysically impossible. The carbon emissions are already producing more volatile weather patterns, more frequent floods, droughts, and wildfires, and disruptions of agriculture, commerce and global supply chains.

And yet the US Government and respectable opinion remain in zones of denial or deflection. The Trump administration is savaging climate science, environmental regulation, and international treaties, while saner responsible adults are at least focused on energy efficiency and renewables. But few people dare to name, let alone tackle, the real driver of climate collapse – the capitalist economy’s demand for relentless economic growth.

Professor Federico Savini, University of Amsterdam

To take stock of this quandary, I decided to have a long talk with a leading degrowth scholar and activist,, Savini has suggested how cities, agriculture, energy, and transit need to change, and how affordable housing, better land stewardship, and infrastructures for social care and eco-resilience could help reduce climate impacts.

I recently interviewed Savini for my podcast

But to the extent that economic growth and carbon-fuel usage are tightly linked – and not capable of being “decoupled” – some degrowth agenda is ultimately inescapable. The only question may be whether it will arrive via catastrophe or choice.

Savini concedes, “The term degrowth is not a political winning narrative. This is quite clear. You don't get votes or move large masses of people with terms like ‘degrowth’ or ‘postgrowth.’” He explained that these terms “are often used by scholars to make an analysis of the socio-ecological consequences of capitalism,” but that crafting a mainstream political message “is not our job. We're not politicians.”

Having said that, Savini notes that degrowth is playing an important role in central and western European countries today. “Many cities are open to engaging with these new narratives of social transitions that have explicit social targets at their core,” he said.

Savini stresses that the social and ecological are “two sides of the same coin” in that both are connected to economic growth. Growth is often justified as the best way to create a surplus and tax revenues that can fund essential social services for everyone, but that very growth also expands carbon emissions and destroys ecosystems.

“The way to break this vicious circle,” Savini argues, “is to focus explicitly on building up the essential economies of care, housing, transport, health, education, creativity and art.” This can “reduce the need to push for economic growth." The challenge “is to break the link between the provision of essential services and the need to produce aggregate economic wealth.” And the only way to do that is to stop privatizing and commodifying all the social services that are needed.

Here is where a variety of social movements offer constructive options. Commons, cooperatives, the Solidarity Economy, cosmolocal production, peer production, community wealth-building, bioregional forms of relocalization -- they all are doing a fairly good job in trying to build a prefigurative social and economic order, at least in Europe, said Savini.

What’s not occurring, however, is a change of political attitudes that can win elections and change state policies. Citing the work of political scientist Erik Olin Wright, Savini believes that various system-change movements need to come together to work for a rupture in politics-as-usual, enough to create “a post-capitalist transition.”

This transition may be more imminent in regions of the world, especially the Global South, where climate-driven collapse is already occurring. In places experiencing severe drought and flooding, basic services essential for survival “cannot be provided at affordable and accessible costs," said Savini. In these areas, people are thinking about how to create or regenerate the economy in ways that can increase their security and autonomy.

Savini admits that the word “autonomy” is a loaded term that is usually seen in capitalist contexts. But for him, “It’s very simple: the socially just way to define autonomy is cooperation. If you are cooperating, you are autonomous subjects who need each other to support each other. This is the socially progressive view of autonomy. It's cooperation.”

You can listen to my full interview with Federico Savini

The western world has long promoted “development” as a high-minded mission to bring capitalist markets and growth to impoverished areas of the world. But what if development were seen not just as a matter of creating markets, but of strengthening social collaboration and sharing in meeting needs? In short, what if development agencies were to support commoning?

One major national development agency – the

Stéphanie Leyronas of Agence Française de Developpement (AFD)

To learn more, I spoke with Leyronas for , Leyronas explained how supporting the commons requires that development programs engage with the “relational logics” of a community. It has to focus on how people relate to each other, learn to cooperate, and care for natural systems. There must be time and space for commoners to experiment, to develop a collective solidarity and stewardship of shared wealth; to collectively learn; and to integrate practice & reflection, even at small scales.

It is an interesting sign that the FAO – a major global institution dedicated to improving agriculture and food security – is beginning to recognize commoning in its work. At an October 2025 conference in Rome, top officials publicly embraced the social and practical logics that commoning entails in a session entitled, “From Silos to Cooperation: Shifting science, technology and innovation paradigms for sustainability transitions.”

In our podcast interview, Leyronas stressed that taking the commons seriously requires a reassessment of the character of time, knowledge, and nature. “Today, we have a linear view of time in which progress lies ahead and there is only one direction to time.” Modern life presumes that instrumental, expert rationality is the best way to manage natural resources. But this is misleading, Leyronas suggested, because it fails to take account of social relations, processes, and context. In many instances, local, situated knowledge has much to contribute, but development agencies tend to impose their own scientific, decontextualized, expert knowledge on communities.

Development donors often presume that their scientific knowledge is “objective” and superior to the types of knowledge that local commoners bring to the table, said Leyronas. Expert rationality and objectivity are often used to justify the imposition of top-down “solutions” on communities, and the distancing of donor-experts from the affected communities. But Leyronas emphasized that “we [development agencies] are fully embedded in power relations. We are carrying our own value constraints.”

Adopting a commons-based approach to development is helpful, she suggested, because it requires “a more embedded, collaborative process” to help “mobilize local knowledge." Embracing a commons framework requires a shift of epistemology, too. Different (relational) categories of thought and language must be adopted.

Leyronas cautions that AFD’s commons work is a relatively small, exploratory project. And yet it has attracted keen interest in the development community. In 2017, the World Bank was starting to look at development through the lens of political economy. This led to a partnership with AFD in producing a 2023 book,

For now, the investor class seems to prefer authoritarian drift over democracy, or at least acquiescence to the former. In coming years, it will be difficult to implement or champion forms of “development” that are not stable, humane, fair, and eco-sustainable. The commons paradigm offers many promising alternative pathways forward.

You can listen to my interview with Stéphanie Leyronas

In the late 1970s, well before I became interested in the commons, one of the most formative books that I encountered, at age 23, was . I first read an excerpt in the Whole Earth Review – the countercultural quarterly edited by Stewart Brand – and shortly thereafter the book. I was thunderstruck by the invisible social relationships wrought by gifts and their karmic ramifications, all of which Hyde brought vividly into view.

Drawing on anthropologist Marcel Mauss’ famous 1923 book on gift-exchange, Hyde took the idea much further, showing how gift exchange is a ubiquitous social phenomenon for forging and maintaining reciprocal relationships. As Hyde shows, gift economies of reciprocity are particularly important to artists and creative communities in their functioning as commons. In their artistry, musicians and performers must learn to see their creative talents as gifts, something they must share without expectation or guarantee of return, but invariably important benefits materialize – inspiration, creative mastery, a sense of belonging – that manifests as if by grace.

Lewis Hyde. Photo credit: Anna Schuleit Haber

These ideas had obvious value when I began exploring the commons in the late 1990s. Hyde cites many examples in all sorts of unexpected realms of how gift exchange animates a gentle reciprocity and mutual benefits – blood banks and organ donation systems, Indigenous culture and countless artistic contexts. The generativity of gift-exchange has an almost mysterious aura and spiritual dimensions, as ratified numerous fairy tales affirm.

After being so influenced by The Gift in my younger day, I recently asked Hyde to join me for a conversation on my podcast,

Since writing The Gift as a young man, Hyde has gone on to become one of the most distinctive voices in American letters: a celebrated scholar, essayist, literary critic, poet, and MacArthur Fellow. He taught for many years at Kenyon College, and now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We could have enjoyably discussed a wide variety of topics on the podcast. Hyde has written about such diverse topics as the mythic tradition of trickster, Henry David Thoreau’s essays, the “oxherding series” of medieval Chinese poems and drawings about Buddhist practice, and the art of forgetting as a path to peace and rebirth, among other topics.

But in our conversation, we focused on his writings about the commons, especially The Gift and Common as Air. Both books avoid the stylized, often-clotted discourses of academia, dealing with their topics with the expressive wisdom of a poet, sage, and engaged citizen, but also with the rigor of a scholar and historian.

The Gift was illuminating for me in showing how circuits of gift-exchange operate with very different social logics and values than capitalist culture. Hyde is quick to note that his book “was not necessarily an attack on capitalism or on the market economy, but in fact, a simple act of differentiation. It was saying, These two things [capitalist culture and gift-exchange] are really different in kind, seriously so.”

This theme was an urgent personal concern for Hyde when he wrote the book as a struggling poet his late twenties. The Gift was a way of making sense of the tensions of trying to be an artist in a capitalist society that reflexively commodifies everything. In our podcast, Hyde told me that the book was a way of explaining, “If what you do as a poet doesn't fit into the commercial economy, that's not a problem.”

For me, I now realize in hindsight, The Gift was equally an early meditation on the inner dimensions of commoning. While the commons in the 1970s and beyond were largely treated as an economic topic – how can people collectively managed shared resources? – Hyde showed how gift-exchange is a deeply relational phenomenon that is central to the human condition.

Lewis and I had crossed paths in the early 2000s when both of us, from different angles, became concerned with copyright law as serious obstruction of creative and cultural freedom. My interests resulted in my co-founding .

As early Internet culture was exploding, the music, film, and publishing industries were panicking at the prospect of nonmarket online sharing obliterating their markets. They largely succeeded in expanding the scope and enforcement penalties of copyright law – the very tensions between commercialism and creativity that Hyde had explored, in a different context, in The Gift. But that time also saw the significant emergence of the Creative Commons licenses, which copyright holders can use to authorize the sharing and reuse of their works.

Hyde recalls, “I began then to think, in a way naively, that if people only knew the history of this [creativity and intellectual property law], they would not pass a law” that squashed creative innovation and sharing. “I was wrong about that,” he concedes.

Nonetheless, Hyde brilliantly excavates from history many stories of invention (Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod and wood stove), intergenerational borrowing (Bob Dylan of Woody Guthrie’s folk music), and scientific research (the Human Genome Project’s attempt to keep genome sequences in the public domain), all of which expose capitalist mythologies about individual genius and creativity at the expense of collective influences.

In Common as Air, Hyde takes these themes to a deeper level, exploring the very idea of the fixed, individual “self” that intellectual property implies. He cites a letter by the poet Rimbaud who once wrote, “I is someone else.” Bob Dylan, similarly, once wrote, “That day I listened all afternoon to Guthrie as if in a trance and I felt like I had discovered some essence of self-command, that I was in the internal pocket of the system, feeling more like myself than ever before.” A voice in my head said, ‘So this is the game.’” The best artists discover that creativity is a co-mingling of souls.

You can listen to my interview with Lewis Hyde