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Media Commons and the Sad Decline ofVancouver IndymediaScott Uzelman aa Independent Scholar

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Media Commons and the Sad Decline ofVancouver Indymedia

SCOTT UZELMANIndependent Scholar

The author argues that the concept commons is a productive wayof thinking about and practicing democratic and participatorymedia. He begins by defining media commons in such a way as toemphasize the relational and regulated nature of commons. Sucha definition critiques the idea that commons are resources avail-able to a public without limits as well as the tendency to definecommons in terms of the essential characteristics of the resourcesin question. Next, the author’s experience in the Indymedia move-ment is summarized to suggest that the failure of VancouverIndymedia was due, in part, to the general inability to establisheffective commons within the collective and over the website. Heconcludes the article by offering a survey and critique of tenden-cies in the formulation of the commons within wider academicand activist literatures, as well as its use in work more specificallyfocused on media and communication.

When you are a species of 6.5 billion wily bastards you have to bevery careful about how you regulate access and rights of usage to[the commons]. A lot of communication, information, and bargainingand democratic decision-making are needed to keep the commonsgoing. Actually generosity and trust are the poisons that kill democraticaccountability . . . (P.M., 2006, p. 48)

Commons are flourishing in academic and activist literature (McCarthy,2007). They are used to make sense of the origins of capitalism standingas the commonwealth seized by emergent capitalists in moments of orig-inal and primitive accumulation. They are also invoked to understand the

Address correspondence to Scott Uzelman, 39 Patrick Street, Kingston, Ontario, CanadaK7K 3N7. E-mail: s.uzelman@gmail.com

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continuous enclosure of contemporary public goods as justified by neolib-eral ideology. They are used to understand specific and localized forms ofcommon property as well as shared resources existing at a global level suchas the atmosphere or the oceans. Commons are at once policy prescriptionsto solve pressing social problems and at the same time problems themselvesin need of solving through public policy. In other words, the concept hasbecome an attractive tool for explaining a wide range of social phenomena.In this article, I argue that it can also be used as a particularly productiveway of thinking about and practicing democratic and participatory media.Yet, despite its power as a rhetorical device, often the concept is used with-out a great deal of analytical precision, resulting in consequences that areboth practical and political.

Against those formulations that present the commons as resourcesavailable to a public without limits, I argue that commons should be under-stood as limited, community-managed resources founded upon crucial andconstitutive exclusions. This claim implies first that we should understandcommons not in terms of the essential characteristics of the resource inquestion but rather as particular, historically, and culturally contingent (andthus fragile) social relations. Second, the commons relation is generallyestablished through often-implicit ethicopolitical commitments to sharingand preserving finite resources amongst members of a community whoseboundaries are the product of ongoing political struggle and negotiation. Thelimits of the capacities both of the resources held in common and the man-agement capacities of the community of commoners force us to recognizethe commons, and its community, as founded upon constitutive exclusions.Often when these exclusions weaken, both the resources in question and theregulatory capacities of the commoners become stressed by the weight ofincreased demands. In such situations, the commons relation tends towardthe open access regime described but mislabeled in Hardin’s (1968) “Tragedyof the Commons.”

The article begins with what I suggest is a more precise formulation ofthe concept of media commons in the hopes that it will prove useful forunderstanding and organizing democratic media.1 Following this, I brieflypresent an example that illustrates well the practical and political effectsof specific understandings of the commons. Drawing on my experienceas a media activist and participatory action researcher in the IndependentMedia Center (IMC or Indymedia) movement, the section below describesa moment of enclosure that was integrally connected to the way in whichcommonly regulated resources were understood and managed. I argue that

1 Democratic media here is roughly analogous to alternative media as used by authors such as Atton(2002) or Hamilton (2000) in that it refers to media practices that are democratic in their organization,administration, and communicative processes (e.g., participatory, egalitarian), as well as in their intendedeffects (e.g., enhancing freedom and equality).

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the failure of Vancouver Indymedia was due, in part, to the inability to estab-lish effective commons relations within the collective and over the website.After presenting this cautionary tale I consider some of the ways in which thecommons has been formulated within wider academic and activist literaturesas well as examining its more specific use as media commons.

COMMONS AND MEDIA COMMONS

I propose that the concept commons, and by extension media commons,be used to name a particular ensemble of social relations that is producedand continually reproduced through shared, often implicit ethicopoliticalcommitments between a more-or-less defined population of individuals.Commons are composed of four interconnected relations. First, the termcommons describes a relationship of a community to particular resources(that are always themselves socially constructed as such). Fundamentally,this is a relationship of regulation and limited rights of use. While suchregulations will always be culturally and historically specific, sustainabilityand fair rights of use seem to be crucial for commons relations to prevail.These points imply a second set of relationships entwined with the first,that is, relationships of community members with each other. Often theserelationships are informed by explicit comments to direct and democraticdecision-making, and egalitarian ethics in general.

Third, commons refers to the relationships established between a com-munity of users and other communities in proximity but external to thecommons. Such relationships are based on constant negotiation of thealways contingent and often porous boundary between an “us” and a“them.” Regulating the “us,” the community of users, necessarily impliesregulating and to varying extents excluding a “them” that is not includedwithin the physical and relational boundaries of the community of users.

Last, commons implies a particular relationship to self. Because allsocial relations are mutually constitutive with particular forms of subjectiv-ity, commons necessarily, though implicitly, describes a particular subjectivedisposition that we might refer to as commoner. That is, commons are bothproductive of and produced by commoners for whom dispositions such asmutual obligation and respect, sharing, democratic decision making and soon are part of their subjectivities. As De Angelis (2006) put it, no commonerswithout commons, no commons without commoners. Yet, these constitutiverelations must always be produced and renewed; they do not spring fromsome innate human tendency toward democratic cooperation. Moreover, ascan be seen in the example I subsequently present, these relations are oftenfragile and easily disrupted by relations of domination prevalent in widersocial life. In short, the commons relation then defines the manner in whichthe community acts with respect to particular resources, to each other, and

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to themselves. It is thus not a narrowly economic relation in the formalsense, but also a cultural and political relation. As such, it is always the siteof contestation and struggle—a power relation.

THE SAD DECLINE OF INDYMEDIA

To better illustrate my understanding of the commons, and media commonsin particular, I offer a cautionary tale emerging out of the IMC network.The movement has been the subject of numerous scholarly articles thathighlight, for instance, its history, novelty, structure, and contributions tocontemporary social movements (in the global North in particular; e.g.,Downing, 2003; Kidd, 2003a; Milioni, 2009; Pickard, 2006). It has also beensubjected to numerous analyses that consider the movement’s micropoliticaldimensions, especially with respect to regulation of individual sites and col-lectives. Brooten and Hadl (2010) and Jones and Martin (2010), for instance,have examined the ways in which forms of oppression such as sexismor monopolies of knowledge and skill have created conflict within indi-vidual Indymedia collectives and placed limits on Indymedia’s democraticaspirations. Beckerman (2003) and Langlois (2005) have recounted waysin which collectives have struggled to regulate open-publishing newswiresagainst willful disruption or to ensure that democratic principles were notundermined by posted material (e.g., racism). In addition to exploring theregulatory issues noted above, Pickerill (2007) also noted issues of exclu-sion in Australian Indymedia collectives that attempted to maintain openand nonhierarchical collectives.

It is not my purpose here to attempt another sustained analysis of themovement. Rather, I offer a micropolitical analysis of one (now defunct)node in the Indymedia network through the conceptual lens of media com-mons. By briefly relating some of my experiences as an Indymedia activistand researcher, I hope to demonstrate the utility of the concept mediacommons in thinking and practicing democratic media.

Briefly summarized, this network of grassroots activists first appearedduring the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meetings inSeattle and then grew in tandem with the global justice movement. At mas-sive demonstrations against the institutions of neoliberal globalization2 inPrague, London, Washington, and Quebec City, for example, activists estab-lished an innovative network of websites and democratically organizedactivist collectives. The websites are based on the principle of open pub-lishing, meaning that anyone with an Internet connection and a modest

2 For example, institutions of governance such as the International Monetary Fund or tradeliberalization agreements such as the Free Trade Area of the Americas.

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amount of skill in using a computer can instantly upload content (text, pho-tographs, audio, or video) to the newswire component of the site. Moreover,the sites emphasize dialogue and debate by allowing for commentary on anyposted item. During many of these protests, the “Center” aspect of the namereferred both to the aforementioned website and to a physical space forgrassroots media production and organizing. My involvement in the move-ment began in 2000 when I helped to establish and maintain an independentmedia center in Vancouver for the next 2 years.3

At the height of the movement, more than 150 centers existed in dozensof countries around the world. While the network continues to exist andsome centers continue to thrive and act as important resources for activists,many of them have fallen into decline or have disappeared altogether.Although early obituaries written for the network (e.g., ChuckO, 2002)clearly were premature, the vibrancy and importance of the network andmany of the individual sites to progressive and radical politics has waned,including the Vancouver site, which lingered for several years and finallycame to an end in 2006.

While the purpose of this article is somewhat different, there seemsto be several productive lines of inquiry into the waning of the Indymediamovement that might be pursued (see also Skinner, Uzelman, Langlois, &Dubois, 2010). Most obviously, the decline of the anticapitalist movementin the global North has meant a drastic decline in energy for the kindsof politics to which the centers were linked. A particularly interesting arti-cle could be written on the parallels between the decline of IMC and thegeneralization of the logics and ethics that made the sites unique—in par-ticular, the participatory and dialogic aspects that now are so much a partof commercial social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace,and YouTube, not to mention blogging in general. These logics have alsobeen taken up by for-profit news agencies such as OhMyNews or NowPublic that encourage ordinary people to report on events in their commu-nities. While undoubtedly participatory, these businesses have found a wayto secure cheap and even free labor while producing content that very muchresembles mainstream journalism (Hamilton, 2008).

Certainly these macropolitical forces must be accounted for in thedecline of the network but micropolitical dimensions also must be con-sidered. Some of these will be familiar to anyone who has been involvedin grassroots or nonprofit organizations: burnout, entropy, the stresses andstrains of funding and running physical work spaces, juggling volunteerlabor with paid work, family obligations, leisure, life, and so forth. My focus,however, will be on our failure to adequately regulate the open publishing

3 This participatory action research and activism subsequently became the focus of my master’s work(Uzelman, 2002).

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newswire and our collective of media activists. I will argue that estab-lishing commons relations would have helped to mitigate the problemswe encountered.

ENCLOSURE OF VANCOUVER INDYMEDIA

The open publishing function of its websites was crucial in makingIndymedia unique and exciting. It was based on the simple yet radicalpremise that anyone could report and comment upon issues of commonconcern. Yet, the openness and democratic nature of the newswire even-tually made monitoring and regulating it a particularly time consumingand stressful task for Vancouver Indymedia. Like most collectives in theIndymedia network, ours operated according to the principles of consensus-based decision making. During the early stages the consensus within thecollective was to adopt a laissez faire approach to regulating the newswire.The idea was that the newswire would act as a resource for local activiststo report on local issues, share ideas, and discuss important matters. If thesefunctions were disturbed by people unsympathetic to the global justicemovement, proponents of an unregulated newswire argued that Indymediausers would confront them and marginalize them through the strength oftheir arguments.

Implicit in this position is a commonly held understanding of freespeech, which ignores power differences between individuals and groups.It furthermore privileges the individual’s right to speak over a collective’sneed to hear and to be heard. In the case of IMC newswires, such an under-standing of free speech clearly ignores the possibility that individuals orgroups bent on causing disruption, especially those with regular and high-speed access to the Internet, could drown out others. It is also clear that theanonymity built into IMC websites can encourage impersonal and aggres-sive behavior that contributes to an inhospitable and exclusive environment,especially with regards to abusive and hateful speech. Also, implicit in thelaissez-faire approach to newswire regulation is the idea that the nature ofthe newswire (i.e., that it was accessible, in principle, to anyone) madeit a democratic tool. In other words, some activists reified the newswire,assuming that its essential characteristics produce specific relations of power.

As the popularity of the newswire grew, reaching a height of approxi-mately 3,000 unique visits daily in 2001, like other IMCs, we experiencedcontinual problems with trolls, individuals who spent seemingly endlessamounts of time, energy, and bile to disrupt the usability of the site eitherthrough repeated nuisance posts (e.g., porn); automated spamming attacksto slow the site down; or simply to make it a decidedly unfriendly place tovisit through repeated insults, unsubstantiated claims, and so on. The sitewas also subject to occasional hacking attacks that attempted to bring down

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the website altogether. These attacks no doubt were carried out by individu-als ideologically opposed to the movement but there is also some evidencethat they were committed by government agencies as well as private publicrelations companies.4

During discussions regarding the best way to deal with trolls, somemembers of the collective argued against what they termed censorship.However, it became clear that the Vancouver Indymedia collective had to putlimits on the ways in which the newswire was being used so that it could notbe willfully enclosed by trolls. To this end, we eventually agreed to adopt aneditorial policy, one that specifically dealt with these issues. Nevertheless,by that point the abuse of the newswire’s open publishing function madeIndymedia’s usefulness suspect to many within the local activist commu-nity. The collective was frequently subjected to strong critiques from otheractivists on its email listserv or at public events for not removing offensivepostings in a timely manner.

Like other centers in the movement, Vancouver Indymedia also expe-rienced crises within the collective brought about by internal oppressions.The most damaging crisis we faced was brought on by the attempt of anindividual with a long and disturbing history of aggressive behavior towardwomen to join the collective in the fall of 2001. In particular, two long-term members of the collective voiced their concerns regarding this manand related their past experiences of verbal abuse and physical aggression.These opinions were further corroborated by activists, both women andmen, in the wider community. Despite repeated attempts by women withinthe collective to have this individual banned, and also to engage in frankdiscussions about sexism, several men resisted their efforts arguing that thecollective should be open to everyone. One of Vancouver Indymedia mem-bers even suggested that it was unfair to ban the problematic person becausethe member had not himself witnessed these aggressive tendencies. The endresult was that two women resigned in protest, others quit quietly withoutproviding an explanation, and morale among the remaining members wasirreparably damaged.

In both instances, the failure to exclude problematic subjects and behav-ior had the effect of damaging the democratic media project we wereattempting to build. The unwillingness or inability to exclude users whowould flood the newswire with abusive posts had the effect of makingthe resource less usable to activists and the public in general. In failing toexclude the problematic individual from the collective, the trust and friend-ship on which it was founded soon evaporated, resulting in a decompositionfrom which the collective never fully recovered. Similarly, the assumption

4 For example, Advantage Consultants offered paid trolling services to attack left-wing bloggers andno doubt left-wing sites that allow for open publishing and commentary. For details, see http://www.politicsandtechnology.com/2007/07/make-no-mistake.html.

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that the software generating the website necessarily produces democraticeffects regardless of the ways in which users related to it also resultedin deterioration of the newswire’s usefulness. In both instances, it was aninsistence on accessibility and openness that worked to enclose collectivelymanaged resources, both of the electronic and community kind.

In the remainder of this article, I argue that these problems may havebeen averted had the Vancouver Indymedia collective been able to establishcommons relations over both the newswire and the collective. Some mem-bers of the collective made two crucial erroneous assumptions regardingthe nature of democratically regulated resources: First, they confused openaccess regimes with democratically regulated resources (i.e., commons); sec-ond, some within the collective reified the technologies we used. In theend, these assumptions contributed to the enclosure of both the electronicresource Vancouver Indymedia sought to manage, and indeed, the demise ofthe collective itself. As I show in the following sections, these assumptionsalso occur frequently in academic and activist literature on commons.

REVIEW OF THE COMMONS CONCEPT

Commons, like other concepts frequently used in political discourse suchas democracy and community, is something of an empty signifier. That is,it has been articulated to numerous discourses and political projects to thepoint where its meaning has become fuzzy and imprecise. This emptiness isperhaps at least partially to blame for the range of phenomena and practicesthat have been labeled commons. Not only does the signification of com-mons vary, so too does the political valence of the discourses in which theconcept appears. The commons has been taken up by anticapitalist Marxistsand anarchists, by critics of development, deep ecologists, reformist liberals,and World Bank economists. Critics of neoliberalism (e.g., Barlow & Clarke,2002; Klein, 2001) have used the commons as a way of seeing the resourcesupon which everyone depends but are under threat from pollution, priva-tization, and overuse (e.g., fresh water, oceanic fisheries, the broadcastingspectrum). For common-pool resource theorists (e.g., Berkes, 1989; Feeny,Berkes, McCay, & Acheson, 1990; Ostrom, 1990), the commons function as athird way of regulating resources that are difficult to privatize such fisheriesor aquifers; thus, commons are situated between state and market regulation.Commons have even been used as technocratic palliatives for the problemsproduced by the project of neoliberal development (World Bank, 1992).

However, judging by how frequently it is invoked, the commons con-tinues to be a prominent part of the leftist imaginary, providing inspirationas more sustainable and equitable alternatives to privatization and enclo-sure under neoliberalism. For instance, the commons has proved attractiveto deep ecologists both as a rhetorical device in advocating for bulwarks

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against the destructive tendencies of the market and as an analytic tool inconstructing mechanisms for protecting the natural world from pollution andoveruse (e.g., The Ecologist, 1993). Similarly, opponents of neoliberal priva-tization often use the term to refer to that which was or should be publiclyowned (e.g., utilities, industries), administered by the state for the publicgood (e.g., social programs, national resources), or that which traditionallyhas not been commodified (e.g., genetic material, water).

For many on the anticapitalist left, the commons of medieval and earlymodern Europe—lands and resources regulated by and for communities incapital’s prehistory—act as powerful and compelling symbols of egalitarianethics and even examples of noncapitalist possibility (e.g., De Angelis, 2003).On the one hand, the commons here refers specifically to various resourcesthat formed the basis of many peasant economies. On the other hand, theconcept also refers to a specific social relation to these resources—a modeof regulating and relating to resources. For the system of common fieldsin England, for instance, to be used sustainably and fairly for agriculture,pasture, and recreation, careful regulation by the community was neces-sary to ensure rules were followed and boundaries respected. The sameis true of forests, wetlands, and waterways and wastelands that togetheracted as invaluable sources of fuel, fertilizer, food, building materials, andpasture for animals. Thus, the historic commons were not open to every-one; access to and activities within the commons was limited according tocustom and tradition (Humphries, 1990; Neeson, 1993; Thompson, 1991).These rights, regulations, and social relations are extinguished or marginal-ized through formal enclosure movements (e.g., 18th-century England) orinformal processes of enclosure (e.g., dispossession, theft, privatization andcommodification through colonialism or neoliberal reforms; Midnight NotesCollective, 2001).

Many Marxists have taken up this understanding of commons in theircritiques of capitalism and their visions of a more socially just and sustain-able future. In particular, the commons has been a central focal point ofstudy for writers working with the autonomist or open Marxist traditions.5

While the concept is not used uniformly, it tends to be associated with non-capitalist forms of life on the basis of direct access to the means of existence(e.g., P.M., 2006; De Angelis, 2003) rather than as a third way between thestate and the market. The concept then is constructed as a means of seeingparticular relations between human communities, community members andof community members to themselves.

5 The Commoner is an online publication routinely featuring writers loosely associated with theautonomist tradition like Massimo De Angelis (editor), George Caffentizs, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, andNick Dyer-Witheford; it provides a useful point of entry into debates within the autonomist traditionregarding the commons.

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The commons, and the common in particular, figures prominently inthe work of Hardt and Negri, perhaps the most well known and influentialwriters associated with the autonomist tradition (2000, 2004, 2009). InCommonwealth (2009), the final volume of their sweeping trilogy, they sug-gest the common has two aspects. First, it names “the common wealth ofthe material world—the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’sbounty” (p. viii) often understood as humanity’s inheritance. More important,they suggest, the common also captures “those results of social produc-tion that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such asknowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth” (p. viii).This biopolitical conception of the common thus offers us a wide-angle lens,drawing attention to the ways in which the cooperative production of theconstitutive elements of human society could form the basis for a globalcommonwealth.

Given the immense volume of work on the commons, it is not possibleto survey all of its formulations. However, it is possible to discern at leasttwo tendencies in its contemporary usage. On the one hand, commons isoften used to indicate resources to which everyone has or should haveaccess. On the other hand, the term is used more specifically to refer tocollectively owned and regulated resources rather than open, nonregulatedresources. The manner in which the concept has been formulated has hadprofound political consequences with regard to the management of all sortsof resources.

For example, the more open formulation of commons has been usedrhetorically to indicate resources upon which everyone depends but areoften under threat from pollution, privatization, and overuse (e.g., freshwater, oceanic fisheries, the atmosphere, the broadcasting spectrum, socialprograms; McMurty, 1999). The commons then, as a form of commonwealth,are in need of regulation and protection from the enclosing effects of mar-kets, industrial overload, greed, or excessive demand. At the same time,this open access formulation has inspired a longstanding critique of com-mons most forcefully and memorably articulated by Garret Hardin (1968).In the “Tragedy of the Commons” parable, the openness of commons leadsto inevitable social, economic, and environmental ruin. Consequently, theparable, while subject to numerous devastating critiques (e.g., Feeny et al.,1990), has been used by neoliberal thinkers to justify privatization of allmanner of public goods.

By contrast, the definition of commons that stresses collective owner-ship and regulation emphasizes their relational nature. However, here wealso see two divergent tendencies with associated political effects. On theone hand, many authors, especially those studying common pool resources,define commons in terms of the characteristics of resources, in particu-lar those that are subtractable and difficult to privatize (e.g., aquifers, fishstocks, wildlife and game; Ostrom, 1990). That is, in many accounts of the

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commons, the characteristics of specific resources provoke a certain wayof relating to them. On the other hand, for many authors, especially Marxisttheorists and historians, the term refers less to specific resources than sociallyinstituted ways of relating to resources (and thus to specific forms of commu-nity). I will argue below that these relational formulations of commons haveconsiderable utility in thinking about some forms of democratic and partici-patory media, in particular because it stresses the contingent and constructednature of commons relations.

COMMONS IN COMMUNICATION AND CULTURAL STUDIES

Activists and scholars studying various forms of media and media practiceshave also found the commons attractive as a concept. While the litera-ture is voluminous, it is possible to note some general tendencies in theways in which the concept is formulated and used. I subsequently lookat its application to the Internet, intellectual and cultural creations, andalternative media.

A wide range of authors suggest that the Internet, because of its open-ness and potential availability to anyone, is a commons (Bettig, 1997;Greco & Floridi, 2004; Lindenschmidt, 2004). Some authors, Holman andMcGregor (2005) for example, are more specific in their definition of theInternet as a commons. They suggest the Internet’s essential characteristics—its architecture and capabilities (as currently configured)—make it widelyaccessible to large publics and allow for the possibility of the free exchangeof information. Accordingly, they argue that government policy should beenacted to extend and strengthen the Internet commons. Likewise, Bettig(1997), Lessig (2001), and Lindenschmidt (2004) each stress the contingentand fragile nature of the Internet commons; they argue that it is under immi-nent threat of enclosure carried out by states and corporations seeking toextend intellectual property rights and develop infrastructures of centralizedcontrol. By contrast, Greco and Floridi (2004) invoked Hardin’s Tragedy tosuggest that unregulated users of the Internet will act like the cowherds inthe infamous parable resulting in destruction of the commons (bandwidthsaturation). For the most part, however, the tendency is to regard the Internetor information as a commons threatened by external forces (McCann, 2005).

Others reserve the term for more limited phenomena such as specificforms of software and intellectual property. Lessig, for instance, suggestedthat the Internet as a commons of innovation is constituted by two under-lying commons that act as its technical foundation. On the one hand is acommons of code, the software that built the Internet and many of the appli-cations running on it (p. 50). On the other hand is a commons of knowledge,a culture in which the free exchange of ideas and information about thefunctioning of the Internet is promoted as a general ethic (p. 49). He also

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identified a commons of content, which rests on the commons of code.Content commons here refers to freely shared, open source software madeavailable by a global network of software developers that continually modifyand improve a wide variety of applications and operating systems.

Lessig is also well known as one of the creators of a related project,Creative Commons, that attempts to challenge the hegemony of absoluteprivate property in the realm of creative work. Briefly, Creative Commonsconstructs a continuum of property rights over intellectual and cultural cre-ations that extends from full copyright with all rights of use restricted topublic domain creations that are freely available without restrictions of use.Between these two poles, the legal tools provided by Creative Commonsallow for creators to fine-tune and regulate the ways in which their creationscan be used by reserving some rights and uses (http://creativecommons.org). Implicit then in Creative Commons licensing is an understanding ofcommons that involves regulation and specific and shifting rights of usecontingent on the decisions and interests of individuals and communities.

Other authors have similarly argued that the widespread ethic of shar-ing manifest in the free or open-source software movement is indicative ofthe formation of commons (Lindenschmidt, 2004). Similarly, some authorshave used the concept to describe specific online practices such as hacking(Milberry & Anderson, 2009). Likewise, for Coleman and Dyer-Witheford(2007), online commons can also be seen in more diffuse practices of shar-ing and collective innovation associated with gaming. They argue that analternative commons economy can be seen in gamers’ activities such as“copying, re-purposing and collective production” (p. 935). Such activities“tend towards commons models of digital play—in which games are goodsshared rather than owned” (2007, pp. 935–936).

A number of authors have also applied the commons concept to variousforms of alternative and community media. Again, as with other formulationsof the commons, the term is used with various degrees of precision. Writingfrom an implicit liberal-pluralist perspective, Rennie (2006), for example,suggested that the commons can be used to understand struggles to cre-ate and sustain community media. For her, commons are understood as amode of access to defined and often limited resources. Unlike private prop-erty, which is accessible only through the market and is legitimated via thepursuit of individual gain, the commons, she argued, is “essentially a util-itarian concept, meaning that it is intended to provide the best possibleoutcome for the most number of people” (Rennie, 2006, p. 176).6 Thus, in

6 Rennie neglects to include a sustained political analysis in her assessment of commons. That is,she neglects to ask questions such as the following: Who gets to decide what best outcomes are? Howare these decisions made? And by what measures? How are minority interests reconciled? Aside from thedemocratic justifications for commons regimes (i.e., increasing public participation), she also asserts thatcommons regimes are also legitimate because they can be used to stimulate innovation. Again, crucial

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this formulation the commons stand between (but not against) state and pri-vate control as a third way of regulating access to resources. Commons hereare defined primarily in terms of their openness and accessibility. Appliedto community broadcasting then, these media commons exist as “a mediaplatform in which anyone can take part” (p. 177).

By contrast to Rennie’s liberal pluralist perspective, other authorshave offered more politically nuanced understandings of media commons.In her doctoral work on democratic use of radio by grassroots communi-ties (1998) and more recent analysis of the Indymedia movement (2003b),Kidd has used the commons concept to consider questions of access to andregulation of radical media projects. Kidd connects modern communicationcommons to the English commons of old. Like the common fields, forests,and fens of early modern England, modern commons are neither privateproperty nor “public resources administered by the state” (2003b, p. 53).They are also not tradable commodities. Kidd stressed that they are bestunderstood in terms of their constitutive relations, the “social and culturalorganizations” rather than in terms of their “domains” (1998, p. 57). That isto say, the commons concept denotes “a form of direct rule by individualsand groups rather than particular resources with specific characteristics” (i.e.,available to all; 2003b, p. 52).

Heavily influenced by autonomist Marxism, she explicitly opposes whatshe called “communication commons” to corporate- and state-controlledmedia. Where these dominant media forms are governed largely by logicsof accumulation and control, Kidd demonstrated that the Indymedia move-ment and many democratic grassroots radio projects emphasize free sharingof information, technology (i.e., hardware and software), techniques, skills,time, and virtual and physical spaces such that democratic control over peo-ple’s own lives is enhanced as is their relative autonomy from corporate orstate power (2003b, p. 59).

In an article on community radio in Australia, van Vuuren (2006)also suggested that community media organizations can be understood ascommons regimes. The term is used here to describe “a form of enclosureor property right that concerns a collectively owned asset” (p. 381). In thiscase, the asset in question is individual community radio stations and theHabermasian public sphere more generally. As with Kidd’s understanding ofcommons, van Vuuren emphasized sustainable, collective self-governanceof specific resources with an eye for fair distribution of benefits. Shealso stressed that commons are distinct from open access regimes (i.e.,unregulated resources to which everyone has access).

While her use of enclosure to describe the formation and mainte-nance of commons is problematic given the term’s articulation to processes

political questions are left unasked: What kinds of innovations and for what purposes? Who benefitsfrom them and who might be marginalized or even lose out?

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by which commons are destroyed, she is making the important but oftenignored point that commons regimes are necessarily exclusionary relation-ships. Although community media are often described by friendly termssuch as sharing, participation, association, and so forth, as with all collectiveprojects of community building and maintenance, terms such as exclu-sion, control, competition, conflict, and enmity also apply to communitymedia (2006, p. 379). This perspective stems from a conflictual and ago-nistic understanding of the concept community, one that emphasizes notonly cohesion and common interest but also difference, antagonism, andcompeting interests and values. For the cohesion of any community to bemaintained and for common purposes to be achieved, a process of exclu-sion must be continually enacted. The same is true of community mediaprojects that are always sites of conflict over scarce resources governed bycontending interests, values, and visions. Thus, thinking about communitymedia as commons highlights the manner in which all such projects are reg-ulated. van Vuuren provided specific examples of community radio whereparticipation “is premised on conforming to station rules, norms and values”(p. 383). Thus commons here are not understood as resources open andaccessible to all but rather as property rights that are necessarily exclusive.The following section draws on this brief survey of the commons conceptto offer a critique of some of the more problematic trends in its use beforeoffering a more precise formulation of the notion of media commons.

PROBLEMS WITH COMMONS

Despite only addressing a tiny portion of an enormous literature on com-mons, it is possible to discern several problematic tendencies in the wayin which the concept has been formulated. Some of the tendencies thatcannot be addressed here are directly relatable to theoretical assumptionsprevalent in mainstream economics: naturalization of capitalism, an ahis-torical outlook, methodological individualism, a reductive understanding ofsubjectivity, and so forth. Here I address two tendencies which can be seenin the literature on communication and media commons reviewed earlier.First is the frequent conflation of commons with open access regimes orpublic goods. Second, the commons relation is often reified; that is, it isunderstood not as the contingent and historical product of the decisions andactions of human communities but as a result of the specific characteristicsof the resource in question.

Although many authors define commons as resources to which every-one has access, there is no such thing as nonexclusionary, nonregulatedcommons. Instead, commons are always regulated by and for a definedcommunity of users. This is the case because the integrity of common rela-tions is conditional upon exclusivity. Even in situations where resources are

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nonsubtractable various forms of regulation and exclusion, however sub-tle, prevail.7 Unless we expand community to the point where the term isemptied of content (as it so often is) and extend use rights to this sameboundless community, then we have to recognize that commons, like pri-vate property, are based on constitutive exclusions—access is conditional onabidance with norms and rules of use, as well as inclusion in community.Unfortunately, as the aforementioned example suggests, Indymedia activistshave also conflated open access regimes with commons.

Connected to frequent failure to recognize the exclusive nature of com-mons is a propensity to romanticize the commons relation. Often commonsare presented as serenely democratic spaces of mutualism and cooperationthat are free of antagonism and conflict. Instead, like all human relations,commons are always characterized by a wide range of unequal relations ofpower. Even forms of oppression such as sexism, racism, homophobia, andassorted petty fascisms exist in varying degrees of intensity. As a result, com-mons are also sites of continuous struggle. It is clear that when we speakof exclusions we must also be speaking of the necessity of mitigating andregulating these kinds of behaviors, beliefs, habits, dispositions, and so forthas they act as solvent forces to the relations of trust, respect, and mutualobligation necessary to collective regulation.

Commons are also often confused with public goods—necessities uni-versally accessible to the public or resources that are in principle areavailable to everyone.8 As noted earlier, the commons is frequently usedto refer to that which was or should be publicly owned (e.g., utilities,industries), administered by the state for the public good (e.g., streets andhighways, social programs, broadcasting spectrum), or that which tradition-ally has not been commodified (e.g., genetic material, water, parkland).In some instances, the public is specified (e.g., equated with citizenshipor residence). In others it is perceived as a community without limit. Thisuniversal community is frequently invoked in literature that presents theoceans or the atmosphere as commons but it is also implicit in the notion ofInternet or information commons.

Public goods and commons describe different sorts of social relations;conflating them obscures important dimensions of their constitutive rela-tions. For instance, public goods, especially those that are subtractable orexhaustible, tend to be regulated not by and for particular, localized com-munities but by the state and increasingly the market. Moreover, in the case

7 Nonsubtractable resources are those in which expanded use does not physically degrade resources(e.g., digitally and thus potentially infinitely reproducible resources like music) or even enhances theusefulness of the resource (e.g., information commons such as Wikipedia).8 In economics, public goods is used to define resources that are nonrivalrous (use by one user doesnot reduce availability to other users) and nonexcludable (it is not possible to exclude users). By contrast,I use public goods as a political concept rather than according to the characteristics of the resource inquestion.

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of most public goods we are speaking of an entirely mediated relationshipbetween experts, bureaucrats, managers, and service providers employedwithin state or corporate institutions on the one hand, and citizens posi-tioned as consumers on the other. Commons, by contrast, at least in thetraditional sense, describes a different relation, one that is often direct—that is, a relation between users and a way of relating to defined resources.Commons, in short, are based on the principle of self-regulation by and fordefined communities.

To be clear, it is not that I want to completely discount thinking aboutsocial programs, oceans, fresh water systems, the Internet, public domaincultural creations and the like as commons, or especially to claim ownershipof the term. It is clear that the concept has rhetorical utility in the defenseof public goods from the ravages of neoliberal enclosure. Rather, I am argu-ing that it is necessary to pay close attention to the effects of the way inwhich we use concepts. All conceptual lenses help us to see in specificways. For instance, when we expand the commons concept to resourcesthat are national or global in scale (e.g., the oceans, the atmosphere, theInternet), the community of commoners also expands to similar proportions,and consequently, vast differences of power are lost in the warm glow ofsignifiers without specific content such as humanity or common heritage.While resources that are locally available may exhibit traits that are similarto those available globally, treating them both as commons has the effectof obscuring which groups have the capacity to act or impact on thesedifferent scales.

The notion of the Internet commons is illustrative of these points. First,it is often characterized as a resource to which everyone has access. It almostgoes without saying that this is not the case for the overwhelming majorityof the Earth’s human population.9 Moreover, even if this fantasy were real-ized, it ignores the question of whether inclusion and access are necessarilydesirable; for all the good intentions of Internet boosters, ethnocentric andculturally specific attitudes are often hidden within universalistic discoursesof cyber democracy. Second, even for those with the desire and capacitiesto access the Internet, clearly it remains a regulated resource and not thespace of free possibility it is often made out to be. Open access does notdescribe a lack of regulation but rather regulation according to specific prin-ciples and relations of power (e.g., wealth, political influence, knowledge).Third, the commons concept when applied to the Internet tends to obscurevast differences of power between a wide range of actors with differentinterests and visions. Treating the Internet as a commons and its users ascommoners can mask sharp differences in the capacities of individual users,

9 The International Telecommunications Union estimates that only 30% of people worldwide haveInternet access, with Europe (65%) and the Americas (55%) leading the way (http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics).

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grassroots activist organizations, corporations, states, or transnational orga-nizations such as the World Trade Organization in determining the Internet’sfuture configurations. Last, although we do see commons-like relationshipsdeveloping within it, clearly much of the Internet, its physical infrastructureand its virtual spaces, is de jure or de facto private property and has beenfor some time. This being the case, the Internet is better thought of as a con-tingently constructed resource with a range of property rights active withincyberspace and over its physical infrastructure.

The second problematic tendency in the literature reviewed in the pre-vious section is to define the concept in terms of the characteristics of aparticular resource. This is particularly the case in the work of commonpool resource theorists. Eleanor Ostrom (1990), one of the most influen-tial researchers writing on the commons, suggested that these resources arecharacterized by two traits: (a) exclusion of others is costly or impossiblemaking privatization unfeasible, and (b) resources appropriated by one usermakes them unavailable to others. In other words, the specific characteris-tics of a particular resource, and the problems they provoke, encourages theemergence of a particular relationship to that resource. However, empha-sizing the characteristics of particular resources, rather than the political,economic and cultural context in which historically specific relations areconstructed, serves to reify the resource and the community.10 Institutionsare the product of struggle, of human decisions made within complex,historically, and culturally specific situations.

This is not to argue that we should ignore the qualities of particularresources when we study the ways in which relations to those resourceshave been institutionalized. For instance, easily divisible resources such asland lend themselves more straightforwardly to privatization than do thosefor which exclusion of others is difficult or impossible (e.g., oceans). Yet,we can see de facto and de jure privatization of subtractable resources forwhich exclusion is difficult. For example, the right to pollute the atmosphericcommons can be bought and sold through emissions trading systems. Thesesystems effectively make clean air a legal right from which millions of peoplein particular areas can be effectively excluded. The right to pollute is also ade facto right of those with the wealth to engage in polluting production, flyin airplanes, drive automobiles, and so forth. In short, this resource-focusedconceptualization of the commons has the effect of obscuring the historical,political economic and cultural conditions in which these social relationsare constructed. Even open access situations, as McCay (1987) argued,are socially instituted. That is, open access regimes, such as commons or

10 We can also see this as a form of commodity fetishism where the resource (commodity) has withinit special powers to determine social relations.

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private property, are social relations with a specific history deriving out ofpolitical struggle.

It is also worth noting that it is not even the case that the constructionof a particular social relation to a resource results in predictable outcomes.Many authors contend that open access inevitably leads to over-exploitationof resources. It is clear that we must examine the cultural and historicalcontext in which the regime is implemented (Ferguson, 1997). For exam-ple, ecological degradation is specifically related to a culture’s capacity andwillingness to exploit a resource. To suggest otherwise is to appeal to a uni-versally acquisitive human nature expressed uniformly across cultures andhistory, and to ignore other historically specific factors such as technology,population density, and cultural prohibitions.

The tendency to define the commons in terms of the characteristics of aresource rather than in terms of contingently instituted relations to resources(defined as such) is also evident in many discussions of “Internet commons.”Authors applying the commons concept to alternative and independentmedia have been better at recognizing that the nature of the resource inquestion does not determine the nature of the way it is managed. In the con-cluding section I develop this relational understanding of the commons withregard to media and communication. I propose that making our understand-ing of the concept more limited and specific can have important positiveeffects on how we practice democratic and participatory media.

CONCLUDING REMARKS ON MEDIA COMMONS

By way of conclusion, I offer a few clarifying comments regarding the natureof commons. As I have shown, the concept is often used as a name toindicate resources that are collectively owned or managed, in democratic,egalitarian, and sustainable ways. However, we should be cautious aboutapplying the term to particular resources or at least implying that there issomething innate to a resource that makes communities relate to it in acertain way. In the case of Vancouver Indymedia, this assumption was afactor in the declining usability of its newswire. By contrast, a more sophisti-cated understanding of commons needs to emphasize the historical, culturaland political contingency of these social relations. The same goes for pub-lic goods as anyone living in neoliberal times should well know. Similarly,the example of Vancouver Indymedia suggests we should also be cautiousabout using commons to denote resources open to everyone, regardless ofthe effects individuals and groups have on the resource in question or thecohesiveness of the community of users.

As relations based on constitutive exclusions and limited rights of use,commons always involve the regulation of commoners and noncommoners,but also continuous attempts to ward off particular social logics, relations,

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and forms of power. More concretely stated, commons require that thosebehaviors, desires, beliefs, and habits that would disrupt sustainable formsof regulation be limited or excluded such that commoner subjective disposi-tions might prevail. As the Vancouver Indymedia example illustrates, failureto do so means running the risk of replacing commons relations with anopen access regime and a tragedy of enclosure becomes a real possibility.

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