Digital collective ownership

Nothing in Commons: the end of digital collective ownership?

Cultural practices of collective ownership over natural resources have been around for quite some time. Do these ways of working have a digital counterpart? It may seem simple at first. To translate cultural practices of collective ownership into the digital realm, just use a Creative Commons license to allow others to make use of your work, share further modifications, and contribute to the wealth of the digital commons. That’s it.

Some stories are just too good to be true.

Illusions
The Creative Commons foundation, which introduces, maintains, and promotes the multitude of CC licenses allowing for the copying, reuse, and modification of cultural works, was founded in 2001 by American legal scholar Lawrence Lessig. It is undoubtedly the most known, used, and visible approach for engaging with the digital commons.

To understand its potentials and limits fully, it is important to consider the term free culture that Lessig coined a few years later in his 2004 book Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.¹ Lessig’s book is an elaborate collection of anecdotes that together form a critique of the increasing discrepancy between, on the one hand, the way people use computers and the internet to share, create, and transform media, and on the other hand, the laws that regulate and control such activities. His discussion mainly concerns the basic capacity of computers and networks to copy digital media files such as texts, music, and films, the circulation of which must be restricted through techno-legal artificial scarcity to emulate the economic value of physical goods. Lessig warns the reader about the negative impact of such restrictions on culture and creativity. He argues that the laws that regulate the intellectual property aspect of material production have become inadequate to the production and consumption of digital material on the internet. However, the free culture he attempts to define, is not a gratis culture. In his view, the concept of cultural freedom is tightly linked to liberal traditions, and in the preface of his essay he connects the notion of free culture with the ideas of free speech, free markets, free trade, free enterprise, free will, and free elections––both to honour the lineage this term aims to be associated with and also to defuse the linguistic misunderstanding that a term such as free could create. For him, free has nothing to do with gratuitousness or the lack of property.

In practice, this liberation is an attempt to more fairly balance the control over the production and publication of cultural expressions rather than entirely oppose copyright and other intellectual property laws.

In essence, his free culture generalisation is a form of interventionism. It assumes that digital culture is currently not free and needs to be liberated from those who use intellectual property laws to control it for their own benefit while simultaneously limiting its circulation as well as transformation. To be more precise, regardless of the underlying ideology at play here, in practice, this liberation is an attempt to more fairly balance the control over the production and publication of cultural expressions rather than entirely oppose copyright and other intellectual property laws. This balancing act is achieved by working with the very intellectual property laws identified as being the source of the problem and using them to reclaim the way works can be distributed, used, published, and transformed. In that sense, Creative Commons’ use of copyright is very much indebted to copyleft, a legal mechanism and the founding concept of free software, in which copyright is used to turn individual ownership of source code into a collective one. How does that work? In short, copyright, under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, with 181 ratifying states today, determines that the creator of an original and individual work has the right to decide how the work can be published, distributed, and modified. The work can optionally be accompanied by a document called a copyright statement or, more frequently for digital works, a license.

Licenses are legal documents that specify what can be done with the work and under which conditions. Today, when a digital good is commercially acquired, whether it is an audio file, software, a video stream, or else, the purchaser does not actually own the work; rather, they are given a license that allows them to consume, play, run, and use the work under very specific techno-legal restrictions. As an example, let’s consider a video game bought in the form of a digital download. Even though the video game is made of one or several files that could be shared and copied from device to device, by purchasing this digital work, the licensee agrees to not do so in exchange for exclusive individual access and usage. Failing to comply or attempting to bypass copy protection mechanisms added by the publisher can potentially expose the licensee to legal repercussions. In this case, it is clear that such techno-legal restrictions are used to emulate artificial scarcity in digital culture and allow the copyright owner to earn money and attach their name to the work. This form of licensing is not designed for collective ownership, nor is it meant to contribute to any form of commons.

As a workaround, copyleft licensing replaces the restrictive rules and terms with many counter permissions to allow and encourage as much circulation, modification, and reuse as possible, as long as all derivatives are shared under the same copyleft license. Following the previous example, a copyleft video game would still be copyrighted by its creators but would be published with a license allowing users to share it, modify it, and even contribute to the game development, joining its copyright ownership as a result. This approach has led to the creation of a rich global collection of free and open-source software that can freely circulate, be shared and modified, with the Linux project being a popular success story of this practice. For digital works other than software, Creative Commons licenses offer a similar mechanism––some with more, some with fewer restrictions. In effect, free culture—as a term that encompasses both software and non-software digital commons—does not liberate digital culture. Instead, it offers the illusion of digital collective ownership in the shape of a rather paradoxical form of cultural freedom: the development of new constraining copyright-based techno-legal frameworks so as to liberate cultural production from other constraining copyright-based techno-legal frameworks. In the context of collective ownership, digital solidarity, and mutual aid, contributing to the digital commons can be a very meaningful and appealing thing to do. For many, there is a strong appeal to abandon the traps of private property­––the myth of the individual genius––and instead collectively develop a digital culture based on sharing digital resources and building on each other’s work, helping to materialise a society of direct and indirect cooperation for the better.

Ultimately, behind the ideas of free culture, the digital commons, or global digital collective ownership lies a powerful vision of communal sharing and learning in the global village. Coined in the 1960s by Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Global village is a term used to describe how media and telecommunication blur the boundaries between singular and shared experiences in an increasingly interconnected world.² With the rise of the internet, the meaning of this term has evolved to become part of an overall informal and techno-positive vocabulary for those eager to witness the development of collective intelligence and cooperation in the age of digital networks, celebrating universality more than diversity. Global digital collective ownership cannot be decoupled from this idea of building a connected world and shared culture. In fact, free culture and the digital commons were arguably the first attempt to propose and deploy an international techno-legal framework for this. The concept and intention resonated strongly with anyone defending the idea that universal access to knowledge and information is a fundamental right. Consequently, at the turn of the century, free culture became central to the discourse of several social and political activist efforts. Lessig would eventually also describe free cultural efforts as inspired by the notion of cultural environmentalism, a term originally proposed by Scottish intellectual property scholar James Boyle, to illustrate how the model of environmentalist movements raising awareness of ecological disasters could be transposed to cultural activism raising awareness of cultural disasters, particularly the enclosure of the public domain.³

Notwithstanding this rich history of interconnected ideas, free culture and the digital commons have never articulated clear social and political ambitions—besides the obvious platitudes found in Creative Commons’ communication regarding the making of a better world. The politics of the digital commons are another illusion. The emphasis is always limited to the legal and economic vessels, and it is up to the digital commoner to contextualise their ambitions, dreams, and struggles. The digital commons are a land of opportunity, a product of liberal and libertarian thinking. This has never been a secret, and founding figures of both free software and open-source communities that predate and inspired the digital commons have a long track record of explicitly supporting these positions. As a result, for one group the digital commons may become a powerful public library that can help communities, collectives, and groups design their own media and tools that can enable new forms of care, support, autonomy, and ownership, situated in specific political and activist practices. For another group, it is an incredible cornucopia of non-rival goods and assets that can be exploited as part of an ever-regenerative and recursive free market of file sharing and digital content, through which new power structures and authorities can emerge. In a world dominated by capitalism, suffering from resulting inequalities, it is not far-fetched to argue that, from the start, one group was more likely to benefit from this system.

Disenchantment
A lot has been written already on free culture, open-source hardware, software, and non-software licensing. At a time when free and open-source software, as well as Creative Commons licenses, have found their way into many industries, sectors and fields, it is easy to get the impression that the subject has been exhausted both in terms of potential and limits. Is there anything left to be discussed besides the question of whether to deploy free and open-source practices more broadly; the eternal debate of closed versus open practices? Most certainly. I argue that everything needs to be questioned again and again because the right questions were never asked in the first place. Specifically, there has not been enough problematisation⁴ of the digital commons. This deficiency is mostly the result of tremendous hopes and excitement—still present today—that circulated around the turn of last century, in which the wonders of a global digital revolution and its new ways of giving access to knowledge and culture would positively impact everyone and everything. In retrospect, it is obvious that many of these feelings were driven by a form of techno-optimism so powerful that it overshadowed all the critiques it received at the time, and invisibilised those engaging, experimenting, and trying to make sense of the messiness and contradictions of these practices. While its revolutionary potential can be questioned, profound transformations took place nevertheless. Today, within techno-optimist communities theorising and practicing free and open-source modes of organisation and production, a sense of victory of open models over closed ones can be sensed. It is undeniable and factually accurate to say that systems relying on—or generative of—free culture, open design, digital commons, open-source software, open data, etc., in many ways became so ubiquitous and banal that they have long lost their radical and niche position.

But for others, this victory is a bittersweet one. Free and permissively licensed Unix-like projects such as Linux and FreeBSD have allowed Big Tech to monopolise the mobile phone industry with their Android and iOS operating systems. The Open Web has turned into an ever-growing and extractive data-centre industrial complex. The ICT industry has popularised hybrid for-profit/non-profit legal entities that, while mimicking cooperative structures, allow small groups to extract profit and maintain control over openly licensed project contributions.

Digital agency and autonomy discussions have been hijacked by nationalist digital sovereignty agendas.

More generally, Creative Commons has enabled the rise of new exploitative digital share-cropping profiting from user-generated content. Access to free and open licensed digital assets has been instrumental in the training and deployment of biometric surveillance technologies. Free culture has helped further deregulate the labour market by normalising free labour in the digital creative industries with the help of cultural organisations and institutions keen to contribute to the digital commons. Digital agency and autonomy discussions have been hijacked by nationalist digital sovereignty agendas. Diversity in computational cultural practices has been greatly damaged by the emergence of new toxic social classes loosely justified by meritocracy and one’s ability to contribute to the digital commons. The qualifiers open and free have been reduced to marketing ploys and virtue signaling. The web-based social coding platforms have empowered entitled users to demand more free labour from burned out developers, while at the other extreme have allowed the discourse amplification of a narcissistic cult of toxic project leaders. Publishing free and open-source software has, for some software engineers, become a means to temporarily showcase one’s proficiency and employability with projects they have no intention to pursue. ICT companies use the digital commons to quickly and cheaply put together an overplus of products and services that can later be abandoned or improved in closed source fashion. The economic fragility of less visible parts of the free and open-source ecosystem has created very unstable chains of dependency with fatal security loopholes. And then there are the novel digital currencies and contracts that, while liberating us from old dominant economic overlords, throw us into the hands of eager and entirely unregulated new ones. These are but a few examples of tensions that are now becoming increasingly visible within communities and networks that have historically been advocating principles of global digital collective ownership, freedom and openness in computational and net culture.

The cognitive dissonance present today in all the communities who have invested time and energy into systems of global and digital collective ownership is unprecedented. It is important to understand that the development of the issues mentioned has occurred in parallel to a usage of the digital commons that has enabled, with incontestable success, many forms of collective works with social and emancipatory goals in mind: alternative tools and platforms for social and political activists, artist-run and community servers, counter-hegemonic network infrastructure, radical open access practices, and the deployment of free and open-source software to delay the planned obsolescence of many computers and devices—all while occasionally succeeding in giving access to digital culture and tools to the most precarious groups.

This side of the digital commons would not exist without the other, and it would be naive or hypocritical to challenge this equation. Likewise, I think it is really important to point out that making a clear separation between, on the one hand, the world of closed and proprietary ICT and, on the other hand, a free and open counterpart, is simply not how ICT operates globally today, nor has it in the past decades, which have seen the emergence of Big Tech and the fast-growing ICT industry. No, all this is deeply interwoven. For as long as there was a balance between all the ideological projections and interpretations mixed into the shared, yet unclear, digital commons road map, this entanglement was not seen as a concern. At worst, it was an opportunity to reiterate endless discussions on artefacts, politics, and pharmakon. Now this balance has clearly tipped. What does that mean? That free culture and digital commons were always meant to converge towards this incredibly toxic chaos? Maybe, but it is not that simple.

Today’s situation shares many elements with a tedious déjà-vu. Privileges and capital—economic, social, or cultural—have allowed some groups and individuals to benefit the most from the digital commons, all while allowing for the emergence of increased control, surveillance, and authority to further amplify profit and inequalities. To be clear, I am not arguing that a conservative and restrictive approach would be de facto more beneficial than free cultural and public-domain-derived cooperation as a means to implement digital collective ownership. Instead, I want to point out that a license does not change the political economy nor the socio-economic circumstances in which it operates. If this took decades to become more obvious, it is because from the outside, and on the surface, the underlying gift economy of the digital commons has prevented extraction and exploitation from being easily and absolutely identifiable.

Free culture has neither protected nor liberated this new territory that is cyberspace; rather, it has effectively demonstrated its non-existence.

Similar to the supply chains of globalised markets that obfuscate or invisibilise harm in a world operating as a global factory for the wealthiest, exploitation within the digital commons is indirect and relative. It is hard to notice because it operates within a broader transaction system in which contributions and extractions seem to auto-balance themselves with the consensual mediation of free culture licenses. This gives the illusion that the digital commons remain generative and emancipatory with no apparent side effects and no apparent main benefactor. This illusion was sustained by the fact that the digital commons existed in an entirely different realm in which none of the laws governing everyday life seemed to apply: cyberspace—yet another leftover from the 1990s digital culture optimism. From online communities to digital natives, social networks and dark forests, a plethora of terms and research have contributed to an understanding of cyberspace as more than a fictional concept, more than a third space, as a space of a unique kind. In truth, the extraordinary success of the digital commons lies in how it managed to extend to the digital the same logic, circuits, and dynamics of multi-polar geopolitics, global supply chains, social classes, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic dynamics, invisibilised labour, as well as corporate- and state-driven forms of colonialism and extractivism. Free culture has neither protected nor liberated this new territory that is cyberspace; rather, it has effectively demonstrated its non-existence.

End?
The promise of the global village is falling apart in the midst of the violence of its hegemonic implementation, in which there is no room for diversity. The singular and the universal are not so easy to bridge after all. Resolving this conundrum has been the obsession of active supporters of the digital commons. From activism to piracy, it is important to note that during the 90s proto-free culture era, experimenting with scale, opacity, networks, and governance was fairly common for groups trying to figure out what digital collective ownership could look like. In retrospect, I argue that these forms of digital collective ownership were essentially experiments in agonistic⁵ and archipelagic⁶ modes of organisation and production. Moreover, for those specifically inspired by copyleft licensing, the proliferation of a wide diversity of bespoke incompatible licenses was not particularly seen as problematic because it was the manifestation of a situated practice and not a tool to create a universal transaction system. When supporters of free software and open-source licensing, as well as Creative Commons, introduced their unified definition of free culture and the handful set of licenses that would qualify for the future of the digital commons, they effectively started a process of monoculture transformation that erased from history a much more diverse digital landscape. Who remembers today the License Association des Bibliophiles Universels, the IDGB Open Book Open Content License, the Ethymonics Free Music Licence, the Freedom CPU Charter, or the Trackers Public License?

Limiting digital collective ownership to a universal system and a handful of large clusters of compatible licenses has the obvious advantage of expanding the pool of the digital commons and multiplying the opportunities for anyone to make use of it. As mentioned previously, for this to be possible, it is therefore essential to remove any contextual elements from these usages. Sharing is caring, caring is sharing, the means become the end. Consequently, bringing back diversity and intention in digital collective ownership, when everyone uses the same few free culture approved licenses, can only be done through various forms of social engineering, as well as extra-legal and non-legal paratextual tricks. For instance, contributor agreements, codes of conduct, community management, and active moderation can be used to both shape the computational and digital culture of a project in a specific way, and signal to the outside world the values of its community to attract like-minded groups and individuals. In a now classic tactic to weaponise free speech, the vocal, explicit, and sometimes aggressive, refusal to make use of such strategies has also been a way for other groups to frame a much more conservative position. Of course, all this does not affect in any way the publishing and circulation of digital commons because all these groups keep using the same set of free culture licenses. This is why at some point, for some, it became once again relevant to create incompatible licenses, this time to address the universalism promoted by the digital commons.

This revival of incompatible licenses began notably around the 2010s, with a strategy that felt like an attempt to turn the digital commons against themselves. The tactic was simple: pick a popular license and encode the divergence in the legal apparatus itself in the form of extra conditions and terms. For instance, the famous free software GNU General Public License (GPL) was re-published as the eGPL, the Exception GPL, which allowed the exclusion of certain groups or organisations from using the licensed work. Another example is the Peer Production License (PPL), derived from the Creative Commons’ BY-NC-SA license. The PPL privileges certain types of worker-owned cooperatives and collectives over other legal entities. These attempts have not been well received. Nobody likes a party pooper, especially when the incompatibility introduced, promoted and theorised by these efforts clearly demonstrates the refusal of these individuals to play the universal game of the digital commons, and also shows, by extension, their total lack of appreciation for the grand design of free culture. And yet today, triggered by the many flaws of this grand design—especially highlighted with all the issues discussed earlier—a new generation of hackers, developers, artists, activists, designers and scholars are contributing to new software projects and digital culture by going one step further, and have started writing new licenses again­. These new licenses are not only completely incompatible with traditional free and open-source ones, they also attempt to define more explicitly their politics and position⁷ within the global village turned global factory. Do No Harm License, Anti 996 License, the Anti-Capitalist Software License, the Climate Strike Software, the CC4r Collective Conditions for Re-Use, the Non-Violent Public license, the Conditions d’Utilisations Typographiques Engageantes, the Hippocratic License, etc. The list is long. This new development offers to rethink digital collective ownership, in which a universal understanding of freedom and openness is the foundation, into one where questions of ethics, gender, ecology, and harm are central.

The life expectancy of such licenses is always difficult to predict. They are arguably a minor literature within the post-free culture corpus. Their value, however, goes well beyond their capacity to scale and create any kind of industry standard, and that is precisely the point. In fact, their existence proves the possibility of challenging, and in some cases consciously sabotaging the digital commons assembly line. At the same time, they help gather like-minded individuals, the potential collective action of which has been paradoxically lost in the multitude of the global village. It is not necessarily a perfect solution. Notably, the lack of opacity in this approach—incompatible licenses with a political discourse are still meant to be attached to publicly circulating works, after all—can be a risk for minorities and activists who may suddenly expose themselves openly in an environment that can be hostile to their ideas and their very existence. At this point, it is unclear if we are slowly entering a new phase of post-open-source, post-free culture, post-digital commons, or reverting to the more diverse, agonistic and archipelagic pluralism of the proto-free culture era, so as to express and materialise an opposition to the current dominant implementation of the digital commons. But does it matter? How relevant is this question today? Could it be that during all this time the frontline of these struggles has moved entirely elsewhere, and that debates on the digital commons have already reached an existential dead-end?

At this point, it is unclear if we are slowly entering a new phase of post-open-source, post-free culture, post-digital commons, or reverting to the more diverse, agonistic and archipelagic pluralism of the proto-free culture era.

It is clearly visible––from ex-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt’s mainstream digital new age8 to the more recent obscure concept of network state from American entrepreneur Balaji S. Srinivasan9––that the dominant leaders and investors in the ICT industry have contributed to and helped shape, for two decades, a family of political ideologies and roadmaps, in which computer and network technology is deployed for the complete transformation of society and its governance, under the guiding hand of a few self-proclaimed enlightened tech entrepreneurs. The digital realm is once again painted as a land of freedom and opportunity waiting to be claimed by pioneers who will create independent and autonomous platforms and networks on a self-assigned mission to counter centralised authoritarianism. To convince everyone to support and join this effort, deceptive analogies have been made between the post-war open society critique of authoritarian regimes and the free spirit of the private sector currently oppressed by public safeguarding structures. The purpose is to slowly but surely seed the idea that it is necessary to dismantle welfare systems and get rid of environmental and social justice.

In this explicitly individualistic, meritocratic, conservative and competitive narrative, principles of digital collective ownership, including open-source and decentralised practices, are not seen as an obstacle. On the contrary, they have been integrated and used as the necessary building blocks that can support a new class of anti-democratic and regulation evading supranational illiberal, fascist and authoritarian techno-optimist organisations for the wealthiest and the most privileged. In the past, the most virulent critiques of the proliferation of incompatible licenses argued that while it was admitted that ill-intentioned groups and individuals could and would abuse the system of global digital collective ownership, the positive effects would by far outweigh the damages. This argument was defensible two decades ago, it is however an incredibly naive and dangerous one to maintain now that the digital commons multiverse has collapsed into one sad timeline.

A possible aggravating factor for this collapse has been the mediating power given to organisations and corporations over digital culture. Their role was thought to be the one of neutral caretakers, but they quickly became greedy landlords. During the EU copyright reform of 2018 that saw public outrage around a campaign warning users that memes could become illegal with the implementation of upload filters, it became apparent that this internet scandal was in fact hiding a battle of interests, profit and economic survival between two classes of landlords, one coming from the old, dying world of traditional publishers and copyright collecting societies, and the other represented by the new world of the ICT industry. However, the new world landlords were not just represented by the usual Big Tech suspects such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, they were also joined by long-time digital commons supporters like Wikimedia and Mozilla. What followed was a sad theatre play. On both sides—the new and the old world—unprecedented lobbying and manipulation of public opinion was orchestrated: cultural practitioners, politicians, scholars, activists and knowledge workers became the defenders of their respective landlord, while several astroturfing campaigns and protests were planned by the leading industries and businesses of each camp to bring media and mainstream attention. The digital commoners have, in truth, very little agency. In the end, their contribution is not different from any other form of user-generated content. Their claim to fame is to have involuntarily helped normalise the surrender of all cultural expressions in the name of the digital downward spiral of indexing, scraping, extracting, scanning, parsing, sorting, tokenizing, analysing, assisting, recommending, filtering, training, prioritising, predicting, manipulating, controlling, and dictating. Today, the ICT industry does not even bother to hide any more of its indecent claims over everything digital. If it’s on the internet, it’s theirs. Copyright does not matter, the digital commons do not matter, incompatible licenses do not matter, nothing matters.

The digital commons are dead. Or perhaps they have become zombie commons, kept in a neither-living-nor-dead state by the lobbies, think tanks, corporations, and organisations that have developed their business around a concept they cannot let go of. This is particularly visible in the shape-shifting discourse these groups desperately adopt, trying to stay relevant in times of debates around the environmental footprint of ICT, digital sovereignty, Web3, and GenAI. They have quickly eclipsed their old arguments, then articulated around education, knowledge sharing and creativity. What is more problematic, the digital commons are also kept in this zombie state by the incapacity for many to think about digital collaboration and cooperation outside of free culture licensing, despite all its shortcomings and failures. Producing digital commons, be it software or non-software, has essentially turned into a collective action tar pit, sustained more by muscle memory than by a conscious tactical choice.

Maybe it did not have to turn out like this. It is easy today to retro-rationalise this collective failure by arguing the digital commons were defective to start with or biased towards certain ideologies. It is not that simple, especially when weighted against all the things it achieved nonetheless, especially in the realm of community servers.[10] What is sure is that a mistake was made in accepting the digital commons as a neutral regenerative open-ended multiverse that could simply sustain itself through the sheer power of digital freedom and openness, as opposed to seeing it as a site of struggle. Ultimately, it does not matter what kind of slow end will terminate the ambition of global digital collective ownership: death by a thousand cuts from an explosion of incompatible licenses, or death by toxic transmutation of the digital commons into fool’s gold to support tech billionaires’ projects.

To be sure, whatever happens is not a sad thing. The end of the digital commons is something to be celebrated as it can only encourage a complete rethinking of digital collective ownership and most importantly start discussing again a question that has long been fading away: what is its purpose? When is it relevant, and when is it not, who does it help and how. In the process, divesting from Big Tech remains a priority, as long as it is understood that the digital commons cannot serve their role of alternative, especially when such an alternative is aligned with or unwilling to dissociate itself from harm and oppression. In that sense, free and open-source software should stop being seen as morally and ethically superior tools simply because they are part of the digital commons. New forms of computational culture seem to have understood this as they have stopped using the digital commons as foundation of their ideas, and are trying instead to shape their use of ICT and digital culture based on their political, social and environmental beliefs.[11]

Tomorrow’s digital collective ownership could manifest itself as a composite of free software, cracked software, bootleg devices, samizdat source code, modded appliances, sneakernets, invite-only bespoke networks, squatted game servers, and all sorts of computational apparatus strategically and knowingly used in relation to their limits and potentials to build infrastructures with a specific purpose at the service of a clearly articulated political ambition. The biggest challenge to achieve this will be to overcome the highly unsettling realisation that there might not be a clear alternative to the digital commons. It is crucial to move forward with new strategies. The earlier the grieving process starts, the earlier new forms of organisation and mobilisation can start.

Rather than continuing to fuel the dumpster fire, join efforts that rethink digital collective ownership going against a universal understanding of freedom and openness. Join efforts that centre questions of ethics, gender, ecology, decoloniality and harm. Join efforts that approach computational culture as a subversive subcultural bricolage at the service of small communities. Their incapacity to scale and create any kind of industry standard sabotages the digital commons assembly line, and that is their absolute strength.

Thanks to Marloes de Valk for all the good feedback and discussions that took during the writing of this text.

Illustration: Pyramid of Universal Openness by Marloes de Valk, based on Pyramid of Capitalist System, issued by Nedeljkovich, Brashich, and Kuharich in 1911, itself inspired by 1901 Nikolai Nikolaevich Lokhoff’s Social Pyramid, that was probably derived from Pyramide à Renverser from Parti ouvrier belge (POB) in 1900. And so on. CC4r Collective Conditions for reuse. Created as part of ‘Prompt 8: Never yours to begin with’ during Revisit Reuse, organised by Femke Snelting and Eva Weinmayr at Constant, 1 - 4 May 2024.

[1] Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture, Penguin Books, 2005
[2] Marcshal McLuhan, The gutenberg galaxy: the making of typographical man, University of Toronto Press, 1962
[3] James Boyle, A Politics of Intellectual Property, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto, 1996
[4] Isabelle Stengers, Putting Problematization to the Test of Our Present, in Theory, Culture & Society, 38(2), 2019
[5] Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking The World Politically, Verso, 2013
[6] Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde (Poétique IV), Gallimard, 1997
[7] See for instance Femke Snelting and Eva Weinmayr, Committing to decolonial feminist practices of reuse, in Culture Machine journal of culture and theory, 23, 2024
[8] Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, Hachette UK, 2013
[9] Balaji S. Srinivasan, The Network State: How To Start a New Country, Amazon, 2022
[10] Monoskop, Community Servers, https://monoskop.org/Community_servers, 2025
[11] Marloes de Valk, A pluriverse of local worlds: A review of Computing within Limits related terminology and practices in LIMITS, Workshop on Computing within Limits, PubPub, 2021