Global Culture

Must read: “The Commons Rising”. A report from the Tomales Bay Institute.

THE COMMONS, n., gifts of nature and society; the wealth we inherit or create together and must pass on, undiminished or enhanced, to our children; a sector of the economy that complements the corporate sector.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably already involved or at least aware of most of the issues discussed in the report. You may or may not be aware of the number of activists doing something about it. The sheer volume of people protecting the commons is their core message. Once you’re done with the report, you’ll want to spend some time going through their blog OntheCommons.org, which contains plenty of additional cases and references well organized in a clever taxonomy.
In the spirit of the CC license under which the report is distributed, I wanted to elaborate further on their pages dedicated to culture in the commons (pp 14-17).

The commons of knowledge and culture are as old as humanity, and almost as vital to us as air. They rest on the fact that free exchange of ideas is indispensable to creativity. As Isaac Newton put it, ‘If I have seen further, it is because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants.’

But our creative commons are under siege. Entertainment companies want to encrypt their content to prevent sharing. Drug companies want to lock up research. And media oligopolies want to charge tolls on the Information Highway.

As I’ve mentioned in the “commodification of global culture”, global corporations are mining our local cultures, systematically taking shortcuts in their creative processes and repacking, rebranding, redistributing globally its by-products at a profit. These cultural “enterpreneurs”, not content with their share, are also creating all kinds of mechanisms to ensure that only their rebranded products are reaching the consumers, eroding any possibility for the original performers to have a fair chance to compete.

But the commons are in the rise. Through methodic documentation of our global culture, it is possible to create boundaries around the space of what we are and what belongs to us. The tools exist already in the form of social networks, blogs, forums for us to become organized, enlist ourselves as observers of our local cultures, diligently taking notes of its transformation as people converge into them and move on to other places, transferring deserving cultural expressions to remote places. Culture transfer is fundamental to the evolution of our global culture. We need culture to spread, in all directions. It is important to consider, though, that in the age of diasporas induced by globalization it is more likely that this transfer will be executed by the migrants, usually flowing into the large economic hubs. This is why, we must enable mechanisms for their cultural learning (typically augmentation of their traditional knowledge with a cosmopolitan view) to flow back into their original communities so in time they find ways to take advantage of it.