History and Evolution of the Commons - P2P Foundation
▻https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/History_and_Evolution_of_the_Commons
Draft by Michel Bauwens, 28/7/2017:
"Is it possible to historicise the commons, to describe the evolution of the commons over time ?
This is our first draft and preliminary attempt to do so.
But we should not forget that knowledge is a representation of material reality, and thus, the emergence of knowledge commons is bound to have an important effect on the modes of production and distribution.
I would then emit the hypothesis that this is the phase we have reached, i.e. the ‘phygital’ phase in which the we see the increased intertwining of ‘digital’ (i.e. knowledge) and the physical.
The first location of this inter-twining are the urban commons. I have had the opportunity to spend four months in the belgian city of Ghent, where we identified nearly 500 urban commons in every area of human provisioning (food. Shelter, transportation).
Our great discovery was that these urban commons function in essentially the same way as the digital commons communities that operate in the context of ‘commons-based peer production’..
Therefore, current urban and productive commons are also the seed forms of the new system which solves the problems of the current system, which combines a pseudo-abundance in material production which endangers the planet, and an artificial scarcity in knowledge exchange, which hinders the spread of solutions.
The knowledge commons of cognitive capitalism are but a transition to the productive commons of the post-capitalist era.