Commons – Page 3 – Jonathan Rowe

Buzzsawed in Berkeley (and What I Should Have Said)

Berkeley, California is a place of great originality but also of an accusatory and tendentious certitude that could drive you to the political Right if the same thing didn’t flourish over there. (Some go anyway.) The originality is found especially in architecture and design, and in a culture of common spaces. The grim certitude has strongholds in the precincts of gender, ethnicity and race. Both were on display at a conference on the Crisis of the California Commons sponsored by the California Studies Association this past weekend.

The positive energies prevailed by a pretty wide margin. But there was enough of the other to provide a cautionary note. There is a tendency on the political Left to turn the concept of the commons into a projection screen for every pet cause and belief, and to attack those who do not do the same. A friend recalled afterwards something Wendell Berry once wrote: “Once we allow our language to mean anything that anybody wants it to mean, it becomes impossible to mean what we say.” (That was in an essay called “Distrust of Movements.”)

The Original Intent of the Postal Service

Before the internet there was the postal service; and nothing showed with such clarity the views of the Founders on the importance of a free flow of information than the way they conceived and developed it. The postal system they inherited was concentrated on the Eastern seaboard. At the time of the Revolution there were 67 post offices, all in major towns. By 1831 there were 8,700 post offices, spread through the hinterlands. It was the largest postal system by far in the entire world. Great Britain had 17 post offices per 100,000 population, France had 4; and the new United States had 74.

The Americans dropped early on the Old World notion that each post office should pay for itself. France closed any office that couldn’t generate $200 in revenue, by which standard 90% of the post offices in the U.S. would have closed too. In America, by contrast, the established offices subsidized the newer ones and the whole system grew. People had access to newspapers, which the system carried at a nominal rate. The subsidy was especially important to smaller papers, many of whose subscribers lived out of town. George Washington among others argued that all papers should go free.

Social Ecology: Prozac or Park Benches

There is an empty lot on the main street in my town, next to the bakery, a local hang-out. For years, people have talked about buying it to create a space for people to come and gather. But recently a friend and I said, ‘Why wait?’ We fixed up a couple of old benches and set them away from the street, under a tree, which seemed vaguely park-like. Within a week, people had moved the benches right up to the pavement, which is where they have stayed ever since.

Not long after the bench-moving, I happened upon a book called The Social Life of Public Spaces by William H Whyte {1}. Whyte spent much of his life studying how people use such spaces. He found that there are recurring patterns, a kind of economy of human interaction. Among other things, people like to sit near the flow of life, rather than in secluded corners – which is exactly what had happened in our commons.

The Cosmic Cop-Out of “the Market” (with a Nod to Henry George)

Stephen Schwarzman is the chief executive of the Blackstone Group, which is one of those Wall Street operations that is described as a “private equity firm.” He was on the cover ofFortune magazine in February, which means he’s a pretty big cheese right now. He’s definitely big in my corner of the world. Blackstone recently bought up 14% of the office space in Marin County, California, through a leveraged buy-out of the owner. Leverage is debt. Leveraged buy-outs involve tons of it.

To get out from under this load, Blackstone is going to have to sell off quickly – ie “flip” — the office buildings here. That means more debt, more taxes – and most likely, higher rents. Blackstone will have built nothing and improved nothing. It simply will have taken existing assets and used debt to conjure money out of them. But don’t blame the Big Cheese for the higher rents in prospect, “Rents are only what the market will bear,” a local real estate man said. That’s what they always say, when something bad happens at least. “We didn’t do it. The market did.”

The Vanishing Commons

The Vanishing Commons, a chapter from Inequality Matters: The Growing Economic Divide in America and Its Poisonous Consequences Edited by James Lardner and David A. Smith The New Press, spring … More

Commons Language: Provide the Words and They Will Speak

Language is a silent commisar in our political and economic life. What we can say – what we even can think about – is a function largely of the words that are available for us to use. “It is hard to focus the attention upon the nameless,” is how William James, the psychologist-philosopher, once put it. One big reason that the discourse of the commons is so deficient in our public life – and why there is so little awareness of the thing itself – lies here. Where are the words that we would use?

The vocabulary of the market is beyond extensive. It exists in such profusion that it is hard to tell where it stops and the rest of the language begins. Such basic terms as value, benefit, wealth, good, are suffused with market meaning and the astigmatism this includes. (Is the “value” of a tree or of a life really what an economist says it is?) It is a good question whether economics as we know it could have evolved without the English language to serve as host.

Space Waste: As Below, So Above

We humans tend to think that things would be better if only we could be some place else. The alcoholic would stop drinking if only he could move to California, the laggard would be more productive if only he could be in another job. Perhaps the ultimate projection screen for this particular tendency is what is called “outer space.” If only we could be out there, things would be different – ethereal, romantic. Even war would be dramatic and archetypal, not the hell that it is down here.

But usually we find that we take ourselves with us, wherever we go. The desk in the new office becomes as messy as the desk in the old one. Some of the same issues arise in the second marriage as in the first (though perhaps we deal with them a little better.) Once up there, we find to our surprise that we are the same people we were down here. Thus the headline in our local paper this week, “Space Junk May Spell Doom For Pricey Satellites.” We are turning the heavens into a dump just as we did the earth. Who would have thought?

Steve Jobs, Encloser

There are numerous ways to enclose a commons. You can expropriate it, such as by selling off the national parks. You can despoil it, such as by dumping crap into the sky. Or, in the case of a social commons, you can suck the life out of it by seducing or compelling people to attend to something else. Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Inc, has gotten two out of three.

Jobs generally is seen as the mercurial product genius, in contrast to Bill Gates the impresario of patent monopoly and closed code. There is a bit of truth to that portrayal; but Jobs and Gates actually are brothers under the corporate skin. They share the fatuous technophile belief that any new gizmo they offer for sale is a great step for human kind. They share as well an apparent deficit in low self-esteem; and neither seems to think deeply about the impacts of their technologies upon the people who use them or on society at large.

The Second Death of Great American Cities (and How the Commons Can Help Bring Them Back)

America’s cities are dying, but not the way they were a generation or two ago. Some still contend with poverty and decay. But many now have the opposite problem — an excess of money, rather than a lack of it. Too much can be almost as bad as too little. It can suffocate a city even as, by conventional (ie money-based) measures the place is doing well.

The pathology starts with real estate prices and rents. A city needs low-rent precincts, much the way nature needs wetlands and breeding grounds. These are where creativity flourishes and the future is born. Poetry slams took root on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, not on Park Avenue; Apple Computer was born in a garage. It was a suburban garage, yes; but that’s a different version of the same thing. Countless enterprises were born in the lofts of Tribeca and Soho when the rents there still were low.

Rural Post Offices and the Hidden Productivity of Common Space

One of the great allies of the canny dictator is the human tendency to forget. Bring about a new normal with sufficient skill, and people gradually forget that things ever were any different. The corporate economy makes use of this fact of human nature as well. When it seizes upon a life process and turns it into a commodity – that is, when it sucks out the the natural or social content and leaves the dead husk of stuff — we soon lose track of that as well.

Tomatoes used to taste better? People hung out with neighbors on side porches and front stoops? You could take the kids to a ball game without being barraged by electronic ads? When was that? We are left with vague yearnings, hungers that do not have names, and so are easily re-channeled back into the commodity culture, which depends on chronic appetite for its “growth”. There must be something we can buy to make us feel better. Our kids have not a clue that anything else ever existed.