Delegating Management, Augmenting the Mind: What could be the role for technology in commoning practices?

Abstract

In 1974, French feminist writer Françoise D' Eaubonne identified two threats to humanity: the destruction of the environment and overpopulation (d’Eaubonne, 1974). “Feminism or death”, she proclaimed alarmingly. The oil crisis of the 1970s heightened the awareness of the finiteness of resources (even though their scarcity was artificially generated in this particular case) and fuelled a plethora of thoughts about alternatives to the capitalist economic system that was perceived as consumptive of the very energy and human resources it attempted to manage. Even though such counterculture ideas did not gain mainstream recognition, and precisely because they failed to cause deeper changes to the system, similar claims are being made today. The Global Footprint Network estimates that the pace of using resources is alarmingly faster than their regeneration capacity1: in eight months we use twelve months worth of resources. Climate change activists as young as teenagers address political and business leaders at World Economic Forums2. Commons-based economy and commoning are proposed by many as more stable, resilient forms of governance (Bollier & Helfrich, 2015; Gibson-Graham, Cameron, & Healy, 2013). It is not a surprise that Elinor Ostrom was given Nobel Prize in Economics for her work on the on governing the commons (Ostrom, 1990) right after the biggest financial crisis we experience in recent times (2008). This discourse is often characterized by inflammatory statements. With the current text, I propose to think calmly about burning topics such as resource sharing, collective decision making and the role of technology in these processes. The relationship between commoning and technology is explored here in the scope of the research project Thinking Toys for Commoning3, looking into the ways media-based tools – such as computer-based models – can make complex commoning processes not only visible but also comprehensible. A multidisciplinary team gathers around questions raised by both lived experience of commoning in a community of individuals, and the experimental approach to computer modelling. We explore, expose and make explicit different phenomena related to common living. We collaborate with three Swiss housing cooperatives, probing organizational and communication challenges they face.