What Lies in the Path of the Revolution - Antranig Basman

Partial Excerpts (antilibrary)

Abstract Increasingly, the rights and capabilities to own technological artefacts, where they exist at all, are re served to corporations and not to citizens.

following the fate of various concrete examples, analysed into five categories of ownable elements. These categories are those of ownable function, ownable expression, ownable data, ownable installations  and ownable economies

describing a set of revolutionary goals in each category, and tracing ways we could reach them.

1. Introduction

One of the principal effects and aims of the 1789 French Revolution was the dismantling of France’s feudal system, under which some citizens (nobles, officers of the church, etc.) enjoyed special rights, protections and income, while others (serfs, peasants) faced special taxes and in some cases were   prohibited  from holding personal property at all. We argue that a form of “digital serfdom” has rapidly grown up around us, where various important classes of artefacts, increasingly essential for everyday life, including participation in political and economic life, cannot be effectively owned by ordinary individuals

2.2. A large-scale example — iNaturalist

2.2. A large-scale example — iNaturalist

a platform which is free for use by any citizens wanting to contribute their observations of living things, which are categorised by species, confirmed by expert enthusiasts, and plotted on a geographical database. This is an open source application written mostly in the Ruby language

6. Ownable Economies

Citizens should also be able to own the institutions and mechanisms that organise their labour and its products, and which are responsible for supplying them the means of life

Our running large-scale example, iNaturalist, is a less good fit to our discussion here because of the way it is funded and operated, but it is largely because it has been able to sidestep these issues that it has likely had the space to create such a vibrant and healthy set of communities. It began life as a grant-funded project, and while its current funding model is not clear, it enjoys such an obvious “public good” mission, and its running costs supporting the current rate of about 10 observations per minute are likely to remain modest

Other communities with a less obvious “public good” mission will have to bite the bullet of issues such as monetization, governance and how ownership of the platform and its technology actually enacts itself in their lives

Many so-called “disruptive” platforms have promised to disintermediate the process of organising labour, but the majority of them, such as Uber, AirBnB, and the like have been found to be punishingly extractive

Rather than vehicles for equity, these platforms merely function to channel value away from communities and centralise it in the pockets of distant founders and backers

A growing movement of “co-operative platforms” seeks to find ways in which these means of organising  labour and work can be truly owned by the participants. The authors are involved in a recently funded project to produce a “Platform Cooperative Development Kit” 11 to produce some freely ownable infrastructure and blueprints that can assist communities like these.