Abstract

The essence of the public commons can be traced from the ancient agora or forum which were physical places through technological transformations to digital spaces that have no” there” there but may exist in the “cloud” or exist as part of global outreach of ever-expanding media capabilities that are able to bring millions together all at once with no one ever having to leave home.  This paper traces the evolution of these physical places into conceptual places and looks at how  human-machine connections have forever changed our communication patterns and require us to examine their impact now and into the future as we look at a commons that might be as big as the earth, as far-reaching as outer space, and as interior as the brain’s own neural networks. 

Keywords

Public Commons, Agora, Forum, Creative Commons, Theories of Communication, The Technium, AI Changing the Commons, Human-Machine Connection

Humans are communicative beings and our history is marked by the creation of central physical places of gathering where the voices of the people could be heard in formal or informal ways.  This may be a marketplace, where many cultures interact through the trading of goods and services; or a place where philosophers and teachers gather (like Buddha under the Bodhi tree); or universities with campuses (and gates) where designated scholars assemble to share wisdom to a wider public or a chosen few; or a public square where debates among candidates for leadership occur; or a place of religious or spiritual ritual. Not all commons are places of enlightened exchange. Across cultures and history, there have been spaces accorded to  public punishment like floggings or hangings where shame would be visited upon some for all to see as a warning. Where commons for the expression of the popular will do not exist in repressive cultures, the need to express can go underground in order  not to be silenced. Many lives have been risked because of the imperative to continue to speak and act particularly as an act of resistance or for the “greater good.”

The Agora in ancient Athens was such a place.  Its purpose was to accommodate “the social and political order of the polis or city/state and become the center of the athletic, artistic, business, social, spiritual and political life of the city.”  The Agora was the lifeline for ancient democracy.  The Greek word “demos” meaning “the people,” is resonant of the American Constitution, which begins with the indelible words, “we the people.” The foundations of democracy required physical spaces where ordinary citizens could gather to learn, teach and expound on important matters of the day in peaceful but active engagement.

The ancient Romans created Forums for similar purposes. Though infused with militarism and spectacle, they were often the center of day-to-day life in Rome: the site of triumphal processions and elections; the venue for public speeches, criminal trials and gladiatorial matches; and the nucleus of commercial affairs.  Shrines and temples surrounded the assembly area of the Roman Senate and the Republican government and its tribunals.  During the height of the Roman Empire, the Forum was the culminating venue for the celebratory military processions known as “Triumphs.” Victorious generals circumnavigated the city, entered the Forum with great display and arranged lavish public banquets to celebrate their victories.  The Imperial power of the Romans was enforced with strong dictates but leaders knew that to keep the people from rebellion in these spaces, they needed to be given public spectacle or “bread and circuses.” 

Other Types of Commons:

Over time, other types of Commons emerged often depending on the geography of a given community.  The International Association for the Study of the Commons (https://iasc-commons.org) has identified several categories of public gathering places.  One they call “Common Land.”  This is owned and governed collectively by a number of persons or institutions entitled to allow their livestock to graze or to cut firewood, grow crops or reside communally in places with a common ideological ethos.  These have diminished but are still alive in some parts of Europe and around the world. Another type of commons they mention is the Urban Commons ranging from local streets with public amenities to public parks.  These are usually managed by municipal governments to facilitate public interaction or events away from traffic such as New York City’s Open Streets Initiative or street fairs  where vendors can market their wares in the open air. There are urban coalitions such as neighborhood councils that monitor community gardens or playgrounds and sports facilities open to the public.  People who abuse the public trust or the laws governing use of these spaces are often mandated to receive fines ( in dog parks, for example, for not cleaning up after pets) or, depending on the infraction, may have to interact with police or the courts. The Commons works as long as it is not abused. It requires a sense of shared responsibility and a willingness to respect, if not love, “thy neighbor as thyself.”

The newest kind of Commons, however, that the IASC has been studying is based on the development of new media particularly those of the past thirty to fifty years.  This is known as the Knowledge Commons and refers to “information, data, and content that is collectively owned and managed by a community of users, particularly over the Internet, such as Wikipedia. What distinguishes a Knowledge Commons from a Commons of physical resources is that “digital resources are non-subtractable, that is, multiple users can access the same digital resources with no effect on their quality or quantity.”  There is also a governing principle in many of this type of commons called “the Creative Commons.”  The Creative Commons is defined as “a global movement built on a belief in the power of open access to knowledge and creativity” involving sharing billions of historic images, scientific articles, cultural artifacts, music, educational resources and more.  A main principle of the knowledge economy that the Creative Commons embraces is that traditional copyright is abandoned: no permission is required and no license has to be acquired to study, use, change and redistribute an “improved” work again.  The only condition is that all future works building on these earlier resources are kept in the Commons.  Libraries also might be seen as an extension of the Knowledge Commons.  They are repositories of human creativity and wisdom which are meant to be publicly shared.  That is why book banning that occurred in regimes such as Nazi Germany and has reappeared in America in recent years is seen as a heinous crime.  The public library system is meant to be a type of Commons.

The Human-Machine Connection:  A New Concept of the Commons

In all of the examples above, the presumption is that the common spaces, even those that are digital, will be governed by human beings communicating in classical human ways, either directly face to face or through technologies such as film, video, book, audio, radio, telephone, television, computers—basically the media of the 20^th century to which everyone is accustomed (though each of these have been modified and upgraded in recent years with digital capabilities.)  While the intermediary technologies carrying the information are “machines,” they are governed by human to human interaction.  Let us look briefly at the theories of communication that began to document these changes:

In 1964, Marshall Mc Luhan, in his seminal book, “Understanding Media,” called our media an external nervous system allowing us to communicate with each other globally and often instantaneously.  At the time, this insight that our media allowed us to extend our sensory awareness far beyond ourselves was revolutionary.  The medium is the message, he declared.  No matter what content we conveyed, we had revolutionized our creative possibilities, expanded our sensorium.  We had already begun to create a “global village,” a paradoxical term which incorporated the intimacy of a village with the reach of a global entity.  We have lived in this “village” for at least 60 years since McLuhan wrote.  The global village was, one might say, a global agora.  There was no longer one central meeting place, though, of course, there could be locally.  This is the time that the phrase “think globally, act locally” came into usage because both encompassed the power of the space that is a meeting place.  The global agora was a new place that existed every time you turned on your TV or received a report or a satellite feed from a distance. Around the time of the Vietnam War, for example, in the years when McLuhan wrote, other theorists, expanding on McLuhan, called that war “the living room war.” The Commons could now be described by letters—CBS, ABC, NBC, and later PBS.  He wrote before the advent of cable TV when “the Commons” became larger than the basic TV networks and certainly before the Internet and social media.  Nevertheless, it was his brilliant analysis that helped us truly understand that the entire idea of the Commons as physical space had changed.  It had morphed into the “airwaves” of our growing mediated society. Today we can even say that much of our data that sustains the Commons might be in “the cloud,” a term we take for granted though none of us has been there.  

Even as prescient and technologically optimistic as McLuhan was, he did not foresee how new inventions like the Internet and new brain research were coming on the scene to transform us.  His was not a fearful or negative rendering of a mediated future.  But he did intuit that we had reached a communications crossroads of no return.  However, not everyone saw the transformation as a boon.  Theorists of that period such as Neil Postman warned against “the Faustian bargain” that technology forced upon us.  A few years before the new millennium, Postman, a scholar and prolific writer, railed against the establishment of a “technopoly,” a sacrifice of our culture for technological advancement without attention to key questions of losses to our human, literate, interpersonal, and private lives.  Postman posited seven questions including these in a speech on the topic of “technopoly”:  What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?  Suppose we solve the problem and solve it decisively, what new problems will be created by this solution?  He particularly referred to the loss of Community and Conversation and felt the diversions and the diversity of options that new technologies bring exacerbate the strain on our capacity for focus, negotiation and tolerance. 

Thirty years on from Postman and sixty from McLuhan, an investigation of our ever-evolving technological spaces, reveals the challenges of the 21^st century writ large—the potential for a new global and digital commons has been achieved but one could not say it has brought us closer together.  We are more divided than ever on political matters and one of our biggest social dilemmas is loneliness. The extreme commodification of our media, particularly the Internet with its overt and insidious marketing and constantly targeted customer bases, including to the very young, have changed our culture, particularly as social media platforms have become a quasi-Commons for all sorts of communication, from the serious to the salacious.    We have become accustomed to being victimized by a constant series of scams, falsifications and media messages that are meant to harm us, cheat us, expose us.  Cybercrime is rampant.  Hacking (gaining unauthorized access to information in databases that are meant to be private including banking, health care, Social Security, even most recently our DNA in storage with gene searching companies, to name a few) has made everyone’s privacy vulnerable. These are terms about actions that never appeared in earlier definitions of the Commons.  They are totally contemporary and show the vast extent of our media landscape and the potential for damage.  What has become, seemingly, irrevocably, altered is our sense of trust.  The idea of “fake news” is a given and a term, “alternative facts” has entered our lexicon. Postman anticipated the diversions and distractions of our media and how their ubiquity could contribute to the coarsening and fragmentation of our culture.  He called it, in an unforgettable phrase, “amusing ourselves to death.”

In addition, the rise of what have been called “intelligent machines” or their expansive cousin, “artificial intelligence,” are now posing questions about one of the greatest “Faustian bargains” ever raised.  The development of the technology known as AI may lead our human species to a complete loss of our humanity and our agency.  Our machines may come to rule us.  This has been prophesied by people who themselves are developing the technology.  They are too numerous to mention.  One of them is Sam Altman, a young man, now a billionaire, who is in the position to turn his company, Open AI, from a non-profit with a strong governing board to a for-profit entity without the same guardrails that have been in place.  What do these new, ubiquitous, and untamed elements add to our expectations of the function of the Commons? 

The Advent of the Age of AI:  Moving From Scientific Exploration to Public Dissemination– Cementing the Human-Machine Connection

Beginning in 2022, the advent of artificial intelligence on a global scale through “chatbots,” especially Chat GPT and its spinoffs, altered forever our communication patterns and capacities.  An AI is “trained” by humans on innumerable sets of data (often the entire internet or other vast databases) and programmed by them.  Then, by “prompting” the chatbot to answer questions, create or edit documents, research and process data more quickly than any human possibly can, we have created a tool that rivals our own intelligence.  

Ray Kurzweil, a pioneer of AI, a futurist and technological optimist (like McLuhan was but with even more at stake) puts it this way in explaining the breadth, depth and capacity that AI brings:   He posits Six Epochs. The first three include the birth of the laws of physics with the Big Bang, molecules complex enough to create living creatures with DNA, and animals forming brains which gave evolutionary advantages.   The Fourth Epoch is the rise of humans who have used their brains to create technologies “that augmented our brains’ abilities to perceive, recall and evaluate information patterns.”  In the Fifth Epoch which he predicts will happen by 2029, “we will directly merge biological human cognition with the speed and power of our digital technology.  These are brain-computer interfaces.  In addition to speed and memory size, augmenting our brains with non-biological computers will allow us to add many more layers to our neocortices—unlocking vastly more complex and abstract cognition than we can currently imagine.”  Finally, he says, “the Sixth Epoch,” (around the year 2045, a span within the lifetime of many now on this earth), “is where our intelligence spreads throughout the universe, turning ordinary matter into computronium, which is matter organized at the ultimate density of computation.”  By 2030 AI, rather than being a competitor of human intelligence will become “an extension of ourselves.”  This is not the external nervous system of the media that McLuhan spoke of.  This is a merger of human brain and machine.  

Imagine this next prompt appearing when you scroll an academic article:

To proceed reading this paper, you must fill in a Captcha puzzle and check off a box that says You are Not a Robot.  What! Yes!  We are entering new territory—far from the elegance of Greece, Rome and the Washington Mall.  How many times have you had to check that box as you enter new electronic spaces?   If you have to prove you are not a robot, then what do you have to prove you are?? 

This is a question we never before had to answer.  Are we human or machine? Nor have we ever explored this IRL, in real life (and never have we had to have to make this distinction between “real life” and new embodiments with machines and new “realities” that have come to be accepted in our world such as “virtual reality”, “augmented reality”, and even “reality TV” that is blatantly fake.  These did not exist even when McLuhan or Postman wrote except in science fiction, folklore or myth.)  The mythic is now becoming real and humanity will have to make a choice.  To say that you are NOT a robot has a lot of implications since more and more, in fiction, and in future professional scenarios, robots and AI are being developed to be our personal companions if they are not taking our jobs or reading our resumes when we apply for a job!

The New 21^st Century Commons

As for the new Commons that will emerge in the second quarter of the 21^st century, based on the work of scientists like Ray Kurzweil, the proliferation of AI and the desperate need for guardrails for its development, and the greed of potential bad actors of players such as Elon Musk or companies like Open AI that has, as of September, 2024 removed its nonprofit board’s control of its actions and given its leaders equity in a corporate move to make it more attractive to investors, we can only hypothesize.  However, suffice it to say that the world we will live in in 2050 may have an entirely different set of premises to govern the role of Commons.  There is still a question of whether Democracy which is built into the concept of the Commons will still hold sway.  Who will win power in the world and what types of controls on free speech, for example, will still be allowed?

A second question that may not have arisen before in light of the purpose of the Commons is whether climate change will so significantly alter our earth that the idea of a physical commons, which may never go away totally, will become harder and harder to achieve as conditions in different countries become extreme.  It may be that a digital commons may need to be more of a necessity than ever before.  It may be that we begin to see Planet Earth as our Commons!  As humans we must care for it together and this new conceptualization of the Earth as our Commons might well move us into preserving it.  

A third question concerns our ability and capacity to move into extensive space exploration.  Where is “home” when we are on the space station, the Moon and Mars?  However, our common status as “earthlings” may reunite us in new ways and with new communications technologies, satellites, and a sense of our common humanity, something that I believe we must cultivate in our educational institutions from now going forward.  I believe that the technological world we are entering so deeply must be counterbalanced by wisdom studies of the best of human thought throughout the ages—what have traditionally been called “The Liberal Arts” and/or “The Humanities.”  We must find our sense of Human Community and Human Purpose if we are to survive.  This is and has been the original purpose of the Commons.   

Fourth, we are beginning to explore the nature of consciousness and mind as never before, whether through research in psychedelics and exploration of the brain, sentience and how we comprehend and transmit messages in embodied ways and psychically.  This can profoundly alter how people speak to one another.  New processes and protocols, through inward and outward transformations, how to connect with each other.  A part of the Commons might be in our own brains and their rewiring for deeper relationships.  This is not far-fetched and avant-garde centers of research such as the Imperial College of London, University of California at San Diego and UC Berkeley, the Hadassah Brainlabs Center for Psychedelic Research in Jerusalem and the Mt. Sinai Center for Psychedelic Therapy partnering with the James J. Peters Veterans Administration Medical Center in New York, to name a few, show us a whole new way people are “meeting” and facilitating dialogue and connection in new ways and in new spaces.

Finally, I will end a quote from one of my favorite books on technology, the lyrical, philosophical book, What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly. Kelly defined  our interlocked technologies in 2010 as the “technium,” a unified entity comprised of all of our technologies which form deeply interconnected systems.  These are inextricably linked our humanness but also emerge as a separate entity from us creating its own realities  Kelly sensed in a deep way how these technologies “generate their own momentum.”  Here is what he  had to say well before the recent developments in AI:

To me, this is a description of a New Commons for the 21^st Century.  It can be full of peril.  It is no longer one physical place.  It is extending its reach into deeply unexpected territory.  But it is still responding to the human need to communicate, learn, teach, grow and connect to others of like mind, however that mind will be reconfigured.  The Commons has expanded; it has not ended.  We now are charged with redefining it for the complex decades ahead–an agora, a forum, and creative resource for the humans that we, our children and our grandchildren will become.

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