David Bollier: Viral Spiral
David Bollier of Onthecommons.org has a new book, Viral Spiral, which is downloadable under a Creative Commons license.
The story of the commons is, in this sense, the story of a series of public-spirited individuals who are determined to build new vehicles for protecting shared wealth and social energies. It is the story of Richard Stallman fighting the privatization of software and the disenfranchisement of the hacker community. It is the story of Eric Eldred's determination to go to jail if necessary to defend his ability to build a Web site for great American literature. The viral spiral, as I have called it, truly gained momentum when Lawrence Lessig, as a boundary-breaking law professor, decided to mount a constitutional test case and then to assemble a larger effort to imagine and build a new licensing scheme for sharing.
The viral spiral then spins off in dozens of directions as newly empowered people discover the freedoms and satisfactions that can accrue to them through this ancient yet now rediscovered and refurbished social vessel.Taken together, countless commons projects are validating some new models of human aspiration. Instead of presuming that a society must revolve around competitive individuals seeking private, material gain (the height of "rationality," economists tell us), the commons affirms a broader, more complex, and more enlightened paradigm of human self-interest. If the Invisible Hand presumes to align private interest and the public good, the commons has shown that cooperation and sharing can also serve this goal with great versatility and sophistication.
Source: Viral Spiral
