The Real Tragedy of the Electronic Commons

Posted on May 30, 2007 in Commons Theft Net Neutrality

[[Howard Rheingold]] may be the most overrated and undereducated commentator on the Internet. A few years ago, he wrote an article called “The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons” in which he cited a conservative fairy tale called “The Tragedy of the Commons” by [[Garrett Hardin]] which proposed that what destroyed the English Village Commons was the greed of the villagers:

For hundreds of years, herders grazed their cattle and sheep on common land. As long as no individual tried to graze too many cattle, everybody benefitted from the common resource. When too many people asserted their self-interest above the interest of the commons, overgrazing destroyed the value of the common land.

Hardin looked at history with the eyes of a [[Herbert Spencer|Spencerian]]. The import of his article and of Reingold’s was that it was important to build fences because you can’t trust the hoi polloi. The trouble with both of their theses was that history did not happen quite like they presented it. Instead, what killed the English Commons was a different kind of greed in the form of a dastardly bit of legislation called the [[Enclosure Act]].

It worked like this: you put a fence around the land you wanted. It didn’t matter if that land included a piece of the local commons. If you got there first with the fences, you owned the land for crops or for large estates on which you could stroll at your leisure even if that land was being used for pasturage. It meant the end of the village-controlled commons because the chief beneficiaries were the local nobles who, having lost or never having had their feudal privileges in the first place, put fences around land which wasn’t theirs, which by the definition of the law (because it was not planted with crops) was free for the taking. A few villages got wind of the acts and enclosed their lands before the lords could steal it, but for the most part, the economically livelihood and independence of the English peasantry was destroyed, leading to situations such as described in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, a superior text for describing the “tragedy of the commons”. (See E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class for an account of this arrant land grab which ranks with the stealing of the American West from its native peoples.

A similar mythology is being invoked for the purpose of carving up the Net for ownership by big corporations. Conservatives point the finger at pornographers, scam artists, and others when they make public statements, but in private, they are after small businesspeople and people who have used the free speech of the net to attack their agenda. That more people read liberal blogs than conservative ones upsets them. They want to force deserted villages.

They are all talk about Big Government, but Big Government is behind their newest netspace grab just as it was behind the Enclosures Act. They are primed to drive you and me out of the Electronics Commons, claiming that they are wreaking good on our behalf.

There is no overgrazing happening on the web. What fences are needed have been created through private initiative and we, a free people, can choose among them. We can glide to whatever site pleases us without the interference of our providers or their routers. If the conservatives have their way, you will lose your power to voice dissent, to sell your product, to meet new people free of their governance and interference. There is a tragedy of the electronic commons on the horizon, but Reingold has been silent so far. What with his talk of “Amish style” interaction on the web, we have cause to wonder whether he understands what is happening right now with the campaign to abolish net neutrality and make it very, very partisan.

[tags]howard rheingold,commons theft,class,www,wild wild web[/tags]