It's Important to Think Like a Commoner

It will take massive organizing to stop the sabotage of American institutions and democratic norms now underway. While current and proposed disruptions are chaotic and even horrific, we have entered a new moment that makes a return to a pre-pandemic, pre-MAGA world impossible. So besides resistance, Americans must also step up to a neglected challenge: How to imagine and bring about a socio-economic order that is actually climate-friendly, democratic, fair, effective, and inclusive?

This globe-spanning Commonsverse is demonstrating how commons — for land, water, agriculture, food systems, energy, digital collaboration, mutual aid, alternative currencies, and more — are flourishing, outside the control of the capitalist market/state and beyond the gaze of mainstream politics. The appeal of this ancient but newly rediscovered social form? It lets people enjoy freedom without repressing others….enact fairness without bureaucratic control…..foster togetherness without compulsion…..and assert popular sovereignty without nationalism.

David Bollier, a long-time activist / scholar with the Schumacher Center for a New Economics, will talk about the great promise of the commons in reinventing governance, provisioning, and social practice. Drawing on his just-published book Think Like a Commoner, Second Edition, Bollier will describe how commoners are creating horizontally connected, open-source style networks of mutual care, collaboration, and autonomous provisioning. From 1984 to 2010, Bollier worked with American television writer/producer Norman Lear on a variety of non-television, public affairs projects. For many years, also, he was Senior Fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and co-founder and board member (2001-2011) of Public Knowledge, a Washington policy advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the information commons.

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