The internet may have been very quick to rest on its laurels after the successful opposition to SOPA. First there was the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, a highly restrictive, multi-national law that looked a lot like SOPA and covered everything from music downloads to crops. That bill saw much of the same opposition that SOPA, and eventually saw some its most controversial provisions watered down in the final draft.

But there doesn’t seem to be any end: now, the fight over piracy on the internet moves East. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, is the newest legislation being fought over in the increasingly heated war for the internet. It’s being negotiated in nine-country talks that include the U.S., Malaysia, Japan, Vietnam, Australia, Peru, Brunei, New Zealand and Singapore.

It’s a familiar story: supporters say that intellectual property provisions are necessary to fight piracy, and critics are calling them draconian, over-reaching and oppressive. And like ACTA, critics are decrying TPP for being negotiated behind closed doors — on Wednesday, negotiators met in a Hollywood restaurant veiled in secrecy. At Ars Technica, Nate Anderson writes about American University Professor Sean Flynn, who claims that a hotel near the negotiations had been explicitly asked not to allow public interest groups to hold meetings on the day of the negotiations.

He writes:

Last year, versions of the TPP’s US-written IP chapter leaked; its provisions went well beyond even ACTA, which was already the new high-water mark for IP enforcement. Where do things stand now? Are the other TPP countries on board with the US approach? Who knows! It’s all secret.

While ACTA at least claimed not to exceed US law, Flynn and other professors allege that the leaked TPP IP chapter does go beyond what’s in US law, doing things like extending copyright protection even to temporary “buffer” copies so crucial to digital devices.

Some of the strongest opposition is coalescing around the IP provisions, but the TPP is a broad agreement that will stretch into all aspects of international trade — and groups have already raised their concerns about some other industries. In Tokyo, hundreds of Japanese citizens protested in Tokyo, saying that cheap Us imports could hamstring Japan’s already weak agricultural sector, and a number of U.S. congresspeople have also expressed deep concerns over what effect the agreement might have on generic brands of prescription drugs.

What’s becoming clear is that Intellectual Property provisions are becoming a part of the basic negotiations of international trade, and neither lawmakers nor free-internet advocates are going to let this one drop. TPP may be the battleground now, but this question isn’t going to go away.

File-sharing website The Pirate Bay called 2012 “The Year of the Storm,” referring to the growing tension between  internet activists and lawmakers. It’s started off hot, with the shutdown of Megaupload and the fight over SOPA, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to calm down any time soon.

“When I talked about a carbon bubble at the beginning of this essay, this is what I meant. Here are some of the relevant numbers, courtesy of the Capital Institute: we’re already seeing widespread climate disruption, but if we want to avoid utter, civilization-shaking disaster, many scientists have pointed to a two-degree rise in global temperatures as the most we could possibly deal with.

If we spew 565 gigatons more carbon into the atmosphere, we’ll quite possibly go right past that reddest of red lines. But the oil companies, private and state-owned, have current reserves on the books equivalent to 2,795 gigatons — five times more than we can ever safely burn. It has to stay in the ground.

Put another way, in ecological terms it would be extremely prudent to write off $20 trillion worth of those reserves. In economic terms, of course, it would be a disaster, first and foremost for shareholders and executives of companies like ExxonMobil (and people in places like Venezuela).

If you run an oil company, this sort of write-off is the disastrous future staring you in the face as soon as climate change is taken as seriously as it should be, and that’s far scarier than drought and flood. It’s why you’ll do anything — including fund an endless campaigns of lies — to avoid coming to terms with its reality. So instead, we simply charge ahead. To take just one example, last month the boss of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Thomas Donohue, called for burning all the country’s newly discovered coal, gas, and oil — believed to be 1,800 gigatons worth of carbon from our nation alone.

What he and the rest of the energy-industrial elite are denying, in other words, is that the business models at the center of our economy are in the deepest possible conflict with physics and chemistry. The carbon bubble that looms over our world needs to be deflated soon. As with our fiscal crisis, failure to do so will cause enormous pain — pain, in fact, almost beyond imagining. After all, if you think banks are too big to fail, consider the climate as a whole and imagine the nature of the bailout that would face us when that bubble finally bursts.

Unfortunately, it won’t burst by itself — not in time, anyway. The fossil-fuel companies, with their heavily funded denialism and their record campaign contributions, have been able to keep at bay even the tamest efforts at reining in carbon emissions. With each passing day, they’re leveraging us deeper into an unpayable carbon debt — and with each passing day, they’re raking in unimaginable returns. ExxonMobil last week reported its 2011 profits at $41 billion, the second highest of all time. Do you wonder who owns the record? That would be ExxonMobil in 2008 at $45 billion.

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. That’s why the fight is so pitched. That’s why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game. And it’s why that view from the satellites, however beautiful from a distance, is likely to become ever harder to recognize as our home planet.”

I’m surely not expert enough to answer such a request in the best way. This said, what I found more interesting among Mattei’s recent writings or interviews available online in Italian, is what he wrote about corporate personhood in Europa, occupiamo lo spazio comune (Europe, let’s occupy the common spaces). Here are some quotes from that piece that summarize (I hope!) his point of view:

The political outcomes of the process of European integration have been characterized by the gradual transfer of power in places farther away from the people, leading to dispossession of participatory democracy. It’s not too early to say that Europe has given and keeps giving a very strong ideological and political contribution to the transformation of citizens into consumers which results in passivity, consumerism, isolation and participation in the dominant rhetoric.

[at the same time], Europe has structured itself as an order based on the protection of private property as a fundamental right to the unlimited accumulation of finite resources, both for individuals and (which is much more serious) for legal persons. This choice unavoidably brings and implements a process, that may already be irreversible, of privatization of common goods and spaces.

Such a structure overwhelms the core of public sovereignty and political representation (which has been itself privatized) and subjects them to the ever more immense power of the corporation (legal person) who, being immortal, can exercise its right to accumulation infinitely, growing without any limit (when it wins the increasingly violent struggle against other corporations) in wealth and power.

Without breaking this legal and constitutional mechanism of privatization of sovereignty, it does not make sense to even speak of which route Europe should follow.

Michael Geist sez, “I’ve posted a video version of a recent talk on SOPA activism and what it means for the next generation of global copyright agreements such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Trans Pacific Partnership. The talk is about an hour as it also assesses the global strategies employed by the U.S. and copyright lobby groups of shifting away from WIPO toward closed negotiations (like ACTA) and domestic copyright pressure (like the Canada’s Bill C-11, which is a combination of DMCA + potentially SOPA).”

“Given the cir­cu­lar na­ture of gift flow, I was ex­cited to learn that one of the most promis­ing so­cial in­ven­tions that I’ve come across for build­ing com­mu­nity is called the Gift Cir­cle. De­vel­oped by Alpha Lo, co-au­thor of The Open Col­lab­o­ra­tion En­cy­clo­pe­dia, and his friends in Marin County, Cal­i­for­nia, it ex­em­pli­fies the dy­nam­ics of gift sys­tems and il­lu­mi­nates the broad ram­i­fi­ca­tions that gift economies por­tend for our econ­omy, psy­chol­ogy, and civ­i­liza­tion.

The ideal num­ber of par­tic­i­pants in a gift cir­cle is 10-20. Every­one sits in a cir­cle, and takes turns say­ing one or two needs they have. In the last cir­cle I fa­cil­i­tated, some of the needs shared were: “a ride to the air­port next week,” “some­one to help re­move a fence,” “used lum­ber to build a gar­den,” “a lad­der to clean my gut­ter,” “a bike,” and “of­fice fur­ni­ture for a com­mu­nity cen­ter.” As each per­son shares, oth­ers in the cir­cle can break in to offer to meet the stated need, or with sug­ges­tions of how to meet it.

When every­one has had their turn, we go around the cir­cle again, each per­son stat­ing some­thing he or she would like to give. Some ex­am­ples last week were “Graphic de­sign skills,” “the use of my power tools,” “con­tacts in local gov­ern­ment to get things done,” and “a bike,” but it could be any­thing: time, skills, ma­te­r­ial things; the gift of some­thing out­right, or the gift of the use of some­thing (bor­row­ing). Again, as each per­son shares, any­one can speak up and say, “I’d like that,” or “I know some­one who could use one of those.

Dur­ing both these rounds, it is use­ful to have some­one write every­thing down and send the notes out the next day to every­one via email, or on a web page, blog, etc. Oth­er­wise it is quite easy to for­get who needs and of­fers what. Also, I sug­gest writ­ing down, on the spot, the name and phone num­ber of some­one who wants to give or re­ceive some­thing to/from you. It is es­sen­tial to fol­low up, or the gift cir­cle will end up feed­ing cyn­i­cism rather than com­mu­nity.

Fi­nally, the cir­cle can do a third round in which peo­ple ex­press grat­i­tude for the things they re­ceived since the last meet­ing. This round is ex­tremely im­por­tant be­cause in com­mu­nity, the wit­ness­ing of oth­ers’ gen­eros­ity in­spires gen­eros­ity in those who wit­ness it. It con­firms that this group is giv­ing to each other, that gifts are rec­og­nized, and that my own gifts will be rec­og­nized, ap­pre­ci­ated, and rec­i­p­ro­cated as well.

It is just that sim­ple: needs, gifts, and grat­i­tude. But the ef­fects can be pro­found.

First, gift cir­cles (and any gift econ­omy, in fact) can re­duce our de­pen­dence on the tra­di­tional mar­ket. If peo­ple give us things we need, then we needn’t buy them. I won’t need to take a taxi to the air­port to­mor­row, and Rachel won’t have to buy lum­ber for her gar­den. The less we use money, the less time we need to spend earn­ing it, and the more time we have to con­tribute to the gift econ­omy, and then re­ceive from it. It is a vir­tu­ous cir­cle.

Sec­ondly, a gift cir­cle re­duces our pro­duc­tion of waste. It is ridicu­lous to pump oil, mine metal, man­u­fac­ture a table and ship it across the ocean when half the peo­ple in town have old ta­bles in their base­ments. It is ridicu­lous as well for each house­hold on my block to own a lawn­mower, which they use two hours a month, a leaf blower they use twice a year, power tools they use for an oc­ca­sional pro­ject, and so on. If we shared these things, we would suf­fer no loss of qual­ity of life. Our ma­te­r­ial lives would be just as rich, yet would re­quire less money and less waste.

In eco­nomic terms, a gift cir­cle re­duces gross do­mes­tic prod­uct, de­fined as the sum total of all goods and ser­vices ex­changed for money. By get­ting a gift ride from some­one in­stead of pay­ing a taxi, I am re­duc­ing GDP by $20. When my friend drops off her son at my house in­stead of pay­ing for day care, GDP falls by an­other $30. The same is true when some­one bor­rows a bike from an­other per­son’s base­ment in­stead of buy­ing a new one. (Of course, GDP won’t fall if the money saved is then spent on some­thing else. Stan­dard eco­nom­ics, draw­ing on a deep as­sump­tion about the in­fi­nite up­ward elas­tic­ity of human wants, as­sumes this is nearly al­ways the case. A cri­tique of this deeply flawed as­sump­tion is be­yond the scope of the pre­sent essay.)”

Does the Gift Economy undermine economic growth?

“Why don’t we need each other? It is be­cause all the gift re­la­tion­ships upon which we once de­pended are now paid ser­vices. They have been con­verted into ser­vice work which the mar­ket con­verts into cash. What is there left to con­vert? Whether fos­sil fuels, top­soil, aquifers, the at­mos­phere’s ca­pac­ity to ab­sorb waste; whether it is food, cloth­ing, shel­ter, med­i­cine, music, or our col­lec­tive cul­tural be­quest of sto­ries and ideas, nearly all have be­come com­modi­ties. Un­less we can find yet new realms of na­ture to con­vert into good, un­less we can find even more func­tions of human life to com­modi­tize, our days of eco­nomic growth are num­bered. What room for growth re­mains—for ex­am­ple in today’s ane­mic eco­nomic re­cov­ery— comes only at an in­creas­ing cost to na­ture and so­ci­ety.

From this per­spec­tive, a third con­se­quence of the gift cir­cle and other forms of gift econ­omy be­comes ap­par­ent. Not only does gift-based cir­cu­la­tion sub­tract from GDP, it also has­tens the demise of the pre­sent eco­nomic sys­tem. Any bit of na­ture or human re­la­tion­ship that we pre­serve or re­claim from the com­mod­ity world is one bit less that is avail­able to sell, or to use as the basis for new in­ter­est-bear­ing loans. With­out con­stant cre­ation of new debt, ex­ist­ing debt can­not be re­paid. Lend­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties only occur in a con­text of eco­nomic growth, in which the mar­ginal re­turn on cap­i­tal in­vest­ment ex­ceeds the in­ter­est rate. To sim­plify: no growth, less lend­ing; less lend­ing, more trans­fer of as­sets to cred­i­tors; more trans­fer of as­sets, more con­cen­tra­tion of wealth; more con­cen­tra­tion of wealth, less con­sumer spend­ing; less con­sumer spend­ing, less growth. This is the vi­cious cir­cle de­scribed by econ­o­mists going back to Karl Marx. It has been de­ferred for two cen­turies by the cease­less open­ing up, through tech­nol­ogy and col­o­niza­tion, of new realms of na­ture and re­la­tion­ship to the mar­ket. Today, not only are these realms nearly ex­hausted, but a shift of con­scious­ness mo­ti­vates grow­ing ef­forts to re­claim them for the com­mons and for the gift. Today, we di­rect huge ef­forts to­ward pro­tect­ing the forests, whereas the most bril­liant minds of two gen­er­a­tions ago de­voted them­selves to their more ef­fi­cient clearcut­ting. Sim­i­larly, so many of us today seek to limit pol­lu­tion not ex­pand pro­duc­tion, to pro­tect the wa­ters not in­crease the fish catch, to pre­serve the wet­lands—not build larger hous­ing de­vel­op­ments. These ef­forts, while not al­ways suc­cess­ful, put a brake on eco­nomic growth be­yond the nat­ural limit the en­vi­ron­ment poses. From the gift per­spec­tive, what is hap­pen­ing is that we no longer seek merely to take from the planet, but to give back as well. This cor­re­sponds to the com­ing of age of hu­man­ity, tran­si­tion­ing from a mother-child re­la­tion­ship to earth, to a co-cre­ative part­ner­ship in which giv­ing and re­ceiv­ing find bal­ance.

The same tran­si­tion to the gift is un­der­way in the so­cial realm. Many of us no longer as­pire to fi­nan­cial in­de­pen­dence, the state in which we have so much money we needn’t de­pend on any­one for any­thing. Today, in­creas­ingly, we yearn in­stead for com­mu­nity. We don’t want to live in a com­mod­ity world, where every­thing we have ex­ists for the pri­mary goal of profit. We want things cre­ated for love and beauty, things that con­nect us more deeply to the peo­ple around us. We de­sire to be in­ter­de­pen­dent, not in­de­pen­dent. The gift cir­cle, and the many new forms of gift econ­omy that are emerg­ing on the In­ter­net, are ways of re­claim­ing human re­la­tion­ships from the mar­ket.

Whether nat­ural or so­cial, the recla­ma­tion of the gift-based com­mon­wealth not only has­tens the col­lapse of a growth-de­pen­dent money sys­tem, it also mit­i­gates its sever­ity. At the pre­sent mo­ment, the mar­ket faces a cri­sis, merely one of a mul­ti­plic­ity of crises (eco­log­i­cal, so­cial) that are con­verg­ing upon us. Through the tur­bu­lent time that is upon us, the sur­vival of hu­man­ity, and our ca­pac­ity to build a new kind of civ­i­liza­tion em­body­ing a new re­la­tion­ship to earth and a new, more con­nected, human iden­tity, de­pends on these scraps of the com­mon­wealth that we are able to pre­serve or re­claim. Al­though we have done griev­ous dam­age to earth, vast wealth still re­mains. There is still rich­ness in the soil, water, cul­tures and bio­mes of this planet. The longer we per­sist under the sta­tus quo, the less of that rich­ness will re­main and the more calami­tous the tran­si­tion will be.

On a less tan­gi­ble level, any gifts we give con­tribute to an­other kind of com­mon wealth – a reser­voir of grat­i­tude that will see us through times of tur­moil, when the con­ven­tions and sto­ries that hold civic so­ci­ety to­gether fall apart. Gifts in­spire grat­i­tude, and gen­eros­ity is in­fec­tious. In­creas­ingly, I read and hear sto­ries of gen­eros­ity, self­less­ness, even mag­na­nim­ity that take my breath away. When I wit­ness gen­eros­ity, I want to be gen­er­ous too. In the com­ing times, we will need the gen­eros­ity, the self­less­ness, and the mag­na­nim­ity of many peo­ple. If every­one seeks merely their own sur­vival, then there is no hope for a new kind of civ­i­liza­tion. We need each oth­ers’ gifts as we need each oth­ers’ gen­eros­ity to in­vite us into the realm of the gift our­selves. In con­trast to the age of money where we can pay for any­thing and need no gifts, soon it will be abun­dantly clear: we need each other.”

Commons are the enabler for all other social goals, including environmental ones, which in essence are social.

This document was prepared by the Steering Committee of the International Commons Conference “Constructing a Commons (ICC) based policy platform organized by the Commons Strategies Group and the Heinrich Böll Foundation, which took place in Berlin/Germany in November 2012. The ICC and was a major gathering of commoners from about 35 countries, representatives of social movements, political decision makers and commons research among them. (Michel Bauwens, David Bollier, Beatriz Busaniche, Silke Helfrich, Julio Lambing, Heike Löschmann)

A. The commons will not succeed in challenging contemporary economics and conventional institutional design unless it:

· challenges the core beliefs of underlying conventional economics and the behavioral correlations induced by prevailing institutional designs;

· reinterprets the meaning of property from private ownership to collective stewardship; and

· develops coherent concepts that are also empirically provable and convincing alternatives to the conventional numerical “bottom lines”.

B. The inherent features of the commons are abundance and diversity.

· If we respect diversity and engineer for abundance, the commons continuously (re)-produce enough for all.

· Wherever we can – in case of nonrival resources and generosity – the product of the commons should be universally available; where we cannot – in case of rival resources – the product of the commons should be equitably distributed.

C. A viable society is based on cooperation and co-production rather than the classical division of labor that separates resource producers and providers from resource users, which treats nature, community and culture as exploitable externalities.

D. Markets are not the only source of wealth creation. The commons, which are responsive to popular, democratic voices and to the pressure on our biotic resources, can function as parallel economies to the cash economy, including subsistence and gift economies. Another promising way to do this is by developing community-based software platforms. Over time, such communication platforms can extend to new types of social exchange, for instance digital currencies, outside of national currencies and conventional markets. Such processes would strengthen resilient rural and urban communities and enable them to take the reproduction of their livelihoods into their own hands.

E. The whole economic system in modern societies deeply depends on the state, which creates entire industries and provides regulative structures. The demand for goods and services by the state is another example. In fact, public procurement and infrastructure development constitute the lion’s share of our economies. Therefore a shift towards commons-based public procurement is urgently needed. That includes, e.g., tax privileges for freely generated knowledge, information and infrastructures or bidding processes based on stipulated criteria that strengthen the participation of affected communities.

F. There is a need to clearly identify and communicate the “success criteria” of the commons and/or a loose taxonomy of successful commons. But developing indicators for creative and productive commoning is notoriously difficult. It is therefore essential to contribute to the development of inclusive metrics that recognize key criteria for broader wealth creation.

The Commons Challenges the Market/State Duopoly

A. The commons is the third element, beyond market and state, which needs structural and intellectual support.

B. The commons offers a rich set of governance models, and its constituting nature strives for a new style of social appropriation and participation. Despite its diversity and its dependency on certain laws or state support, the commons tend to be stable and to facilitate social autonomy and effective resource management. Nontheless, a successful commons is always the product of a continuous effort and struggle.

C. “The commons beyond market and state” does not necessarily mean without market and state, if we consider their rich history, enormous diversity and geographic dispersion. But it necessarily means that the people and their commons, supported by a partner state, become the core of wealth creation. It aims to create a vibrant ethical economy of new market forms that do not ignore natural and social externalities, but include them in their functioning logic.

D. Commoners transcend nation-state based citizenship and national civil societies. And their identity goes beyond that of passive consumer to responsible co-producer. Commoners are rooted in an enormous variety of mutually dependent communities. One of the core beliefs of the commons is the idea that the protection and creation of common wealth are not just beneficial to the commoners themselves, but to the local and global societies to which they also belong. A core belief in the commons is: I need others and others need me.

E: What we need is not just regulation by the state but greater responsibility of and accountability to affected communities regarding the criteria of human well-being. This is key. Instead of downsizing the state by strengthening the logic of the market, a commons-based policy campaigns for downsizing the scale and scope of the market by strengthening ‘commons institutions’. That means establishing institutions designed for acting as trustees for the commons and enablers of the commons. New social technologies and distributed networks – which must be based on sustainable energy use – can spur this process.

F. Global commons entail a new kind of multilateralism which empowers local people as global citizens and enables nation-states to collaborate more effectively to overcome global collective-action problems.

The Generative Logic of the Commons

A. For building commons we have to build resilient communities, which in turn need cooperative and deliberative forms of communication and decision making. The communities also serve as learning arenas for the unfolding of skills and the underlying attitudes and mindsets for commoning.

B. The commons as a self-organized form of peer-to-peer production follows its own logic. Peer-to-peer production assumes equipotency of its participants, is based on free cooperation, aims to the creation of common goods and seeks to serve the greatest good for everyone. We believe this mode of production can be at least as productive as models that ignore the commons. And in terms of addressing social wealth and the reproduction of diversity, commons-based production models can even be more successful than those based on command, control and/or selling.

C. Productivity cannot be simply an artificial measure of an enterprise’s performance; it must take into account all costs, including hidden subsidies, damages to the environment and other sorts of non quantifiable, non-market value that the commons routinely provides.

D. The commons is about taking one’s life into one’s own hands. Knowledge is key to do so, but knowledge is more than access to knowledge; and access to knowledge is something more than building technical infrastructure.

Rapid diffusion of knowledge and innovation to all who need it requires:

· the sharing of information, code, skills and design through universally accessible or community based platforms

· the skills for understanding and reflection and

· their appropriation for shaping our social habitats.

Conceiving knowledge as a commons guarantees a fair share of innovation, without the friction and suppression of sharing caused through excessive intellectual property regulations.

E. Institutional structures can articulate and make possible new commons, but they can also undermine the social connections and ethics that are indispensable to the commons. Therefore, a key challenge in devising effective commonsbased policies is to balance these two concerns properly. The bureaucratization of the commons is not a commons, but a paradox to which we must be attentive.

For the success of a commons oriented politics, an alliance and an earnest exchange of experiences and know how between all those who work on the social, ecological, cultural and digital commons, is imperative.

Throughline with Mindful Maps presents Collaborative Consumption: An RSA/Nominet Film Competition Short Film from Kate Hammer on Vimeo.

“Anonymous has been a direct link between the Arab Spring and the global Occupy movement, with a visible presence in camps and protests as well as online. But they are only part of a plurality of currents that echo the English Dissenters of the Interregnum. It was the Diggers who most famously ‘occupied’ St. George’s Hill in 1649 the name of “making the Earth a Common Treasury for All”, and it was the Levellers call in the Putney debates for democratic accountability and financial transparency from government that finds common ground with the discourse of the Occupy movement. Even the tension between the different currents of digital culture finds parallels in the 1640?s – Digger spokesman Gerard Winstanley’s distaste for the Ranters (“Ranting principles”, according to Gerrard Winstanley, denoted a general lack of moral values or restrain in worldly pleasures) speaks to the differences between Creative Commons and hacktivism.

As with antinomianism, any social movement deploying the affordances of General Computation and the Internet will tend towards heresy in the eyes of the Establishment (see the transcript of Cory Doctorow’s talk ‘The Coming War on General Computation’ at 28c3). This modern heresy finds it’s practice in hacking, “the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations” and “a tactic for transforming pre-existing elements to evoke meanings not originally intended in the raw material”. As Otto von Busch says in Abstract Hacktivism: “Hacking and Heresy can be seen as two practices of distributed reinterpretation of systems and political protocols, especially in relation to organic networked systems where the hacker or heretic claims the right to be co-author and co-designer”

The small group who started the catalytic pre-Occupy camp in Madrid in May 2011 included hackers. It was a moment that blended technical and abstract hacktivism:

“In the early hours of 16 May something unexpected happened. A group of some forty protesters decided to set camp at Madrid’s main square, Puerta del Sol, instead of returning to their homes. One of them, a member of the hacker group Isaac Hacksimov, explained later: ‘All we did was a gesture that broke the collective mental block’. Fearing that the authorities may evict them, they sent out calls for support via the internet. The first person to join them learned about their action on Twitter.”

Taken together, these developments become epochal when they raise the curtain on forgotten social forms outside the framework of capitalist globalisation. Commenting on the fluid dynamics of the new politics, the Virtual Policy Network makes an explicit link to the pre-industrial: “A new politics has emerged from the affordances of the internet, and agile movements are continually emerging from the underlying flow of micro-political acts…If we look inside these movements we see complexity, and we can detect a core of deeply rooted pre-industrial human behaviours mediated through a digitally interconnected global society.”

So what can we expect from an antiomian atmosphere of dissent that blows across the internet and condenses in the squares? If our English Dissenters are any guide, it will involve commons-based innovation; as Charlie Leadbeater points out in ‘Digging for the Future’ “the Levellers wanted to raise food production through mutual ownership of underused land that would allow new technologies like manuring to take hold” and they believed “ that knowledge, even of the word of God, came from within rather than being handed down by the clergy. A productive, cooperative community would share and create knowledge rather than be ruled by the dogma of a narrow elite.”

As Nicolas Mendoza concludes about 4chan & Wikileaks: “Rather than being the result of a violent class struggle, the end of capitalist hegemony might be the result of a slow Internet-enabled process of migration, a dripping (to abuse once more the WikiLeaks logo) towards societies that organize around commons”ii. It wouldn’t be the first time there’s been an exodus; as David Graeber highlights in ‘Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology’ there are historical examples of withdrawal, as there are of societies that have resisted hierarchy & accumulation altogether. Even micro-examples like Crop Mob show how the affordances of the net can support pre-industrial modes of agriculture and the Foundation for P2P Alternatives relentlessly catalogues the worldwide prototyping of peer-to-peer alternatives, “a relational dynamic in which people exchange not with each other as individuals, but with a commons…on a global scale, enabled by internet technologies”.

In these times, in the streets and squares blown by the digital winds, there occur liminal moments of the kind anthropologist John Postill experienced with Spain’s Indignados:

“Many participants later reported a range of psychosomatic reactions such as goose bumps (carne de gallina) or tears of joy. I felt as if a switch had been turned on, a gestalt switch, and I had now awakened to a new political reality. I was no longer merely a participant observer of the movement, I was the movement. From that moment onwards, virals such as #takethesquare or #Iam15M (#yosoy15M) acquired for me – and countless other ‘converts’ – a very different meaning; they became integral to the new paradigm that now organises my emic understanding of the movement”.

Gabriella Coleman has identified the resonance of Anonymous with the horizontal network forms and decentralized, non-hierarchical consensus democracy, a pattern clearly parallelled in Occupy. But rather than focus on organisational form we can open ourselves to their circulations, their tempos and their transmutations. By tuning instead into their textures and densities we may see them both as accretions of what Kathleen Stewart describes as an atmosphere: “An atmosphere is not an inert context but a force field in which people find themselves. It is not an effect of other forces but a lived affect – a capacity to affect and to be affected that pushes a present into a composition, an expressivity, the sense of potentiality and event. It is an attunement of the senses, of labors, and imaginaries to potential ways of living in or living through things. A living through that shows up in the generative precarity of ordinary sensibilities of not knowing what compels, not being able to sit still, being exhausted, being left behind or being ahead of the curve, being in love with some form or life that comes along, being ready for something – anything – to happen”.

The restless antecedents of the Ranters were the Brethren of the Free Spirit, an antinomian and egalitarian heresy that ranged across Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries, challenging earthly powers and refusing to be repressed. By drawing parallels between the Antinomians of 1649 and the spirit of Anonymous I am suggesting, perhaps, the emergence of a Brethren of the Free Internet.”

“Black Bloc anarchists are an example of what Theodore Roszak in “The Making of a Counter Culture” called the “progressive adolescentization” of the American left.

In Zerzan’s now defunct magazine Green Anarchy (which survives as a website) he published an article by someone named “Venomous Butterfly” that excoriated the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN). The essay declared that “not only are those [the Zapatistas’] aims not anarchist; they are not even revolutionary.” It also denounced the indigenous movement for “nationalist language,” for asserting the right of people to “alter or modify their form of government” and for having the goals of “work, land, housing, health care, education, independence, freedom, democracy, justice and peace.” The movement, the article stated, was not worthy of support because it called for “nothing concrete that could not be provided by capitalism.”

“Of course,” the article went on, “the social struggles of exploited and oppressed people cannot be expected to conform to some abstract anarchist ideal. These struggles arise in particular situations, sparked by specific events. The question of revolutionary solidarity in these struggles is, therefore, the question of how to intervene in a way that is fitting with one’s aims, in a way that moves one’s revolutionary anarchist project forward.”

Solidarity becomes the hijacking or destruction of competing movements, which is exactly what the Black Bloc contingents are attempting to do with the Occupy movement.

“The Black Bloc can say they are attacking cops, but what they are really doing is destroying the Occupy movement,” the writer and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I reached him by phone in California. “If their real target actually was the cops and not the Occupy movement, the Black Bloc would make their actions completely separate from Occupy, instead of effectively using these others as a human shield. Their attacks on cops are simply a means to an end, which is to destroy a movement that doesn’t fit their ideological standard.”

“I don’t have a problem with escalating tactics to some sort of militant resistance if it is appropriate morally, strategically and tactically,” Jensen continued. “This is true if one is going to pick up a sign, a rock or a gun. But you need to have thought it through. The Black Bloc spends more time attempting to destroy movements than they do attacking those in power. They hate the left more than they hate capitalists.”

“Their thinking is not only nonstrategic, but actively opposed to strategy,” said Jensen, author of several books, including “The Culture of Make Believe.” “They are unwilling to think critically about whether one is acting appropriately in the moment. I have no problem with someone violating boundaries [when] that violation is the smart, appropriate thing to do. I have a huge problem with people violating boundaries for the sake of violating boundaries. It is a lot easier to pick up a rock and throw it through the nearest window than it is to organize, or at least figure out which window you should throw a rock through if you are going to throw a rock. A lot of it is laziness.”

Groups of Black Bloc protesters, for example, smashed the windows of a locally owned coffee shop in November in Oakland and looted it. It was not, as Jensen points out, a strategic, moral or tactical act. It was done for its own sake. Random acts of violence, looting and vandalism are justified, in the jargon of the movement, as components of “feral” or “spontaneous insurrection.” These acts, the movement argues, can never be organized. Organization, in the thinking of the movement, implies hierarchy, which must always be opposed. There can be no restraints on “feral” or “spontaneous” acts of insurrection. Whoever gets hurt gets hurt. Whatever gets destroyed gets destroyed.

There is a word for this—“criminal.”

The Black Bloc movement is infected with a deeply disturbing hypermasculinity. This hypermasculinity, I expect, is its primary appeal. It taps into the lust that lurks within us to destroy, not only things but human beings. It offers the godlike power that comes with mob violence. Marching as a uniformed mass, all dressed in black to become part of an anonymous bloc, faces covered, temporarily overcomes alienation, feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness and loneliness. It imparts to those in the mob a sense of comradeship. It permits an inchoate rage to be unleashed on any target. Pity, compassion and tenderness are banished for the intoxication of power. It is the same sickness that fuels the swarms of police who pepper-spray and beat peaceful demonstrators. It is the sickness of soldiers in war. It turns human beings into beasts.”

“There are two main schools of thought on this: that the internet’s inherently democratic potential is yet to be realised (cosmopolis theory or the cosmopolitan interpretation), or that its innate undemocratic nature is taking effect (the citadel theory or the citadellian interpretation). A third, less frequently argued position on the internet and democracy removes technological essentialism from the previous two theories that assign innate attributes to the web. Proponents of this third way, here described as the causeway that separates and connects the cosmopolis and the citadel, believe that the internet is inherently something only in its decentralisation, vastness and complexity.

The challenge for digital activists is and always will be transferring online protests offline. For example, it is easy to inspire a Twitter user to use the hashtag #occupy or tint his profile image green, but getting the same user to camp out in St Paul’s or to brave militia in Tehran is an entirely different matter. The term slacktivist was coined for such problematic situations.

In the online world there are two main approaches towards achieving different strands of internet democracy: mass action and digitally-correct action. Internet activism originated from the belief that any inbuilt determination in computer software was to be contested, manifesting itself in an unlikely marriage of libertarian and anarchic thought. Mass action activists attempt to replicate offline protests online via non-violent direct actions such as overloading website servers (denial-of-service or DoS) in a similar vein to an occupation of a building in the real world. Meanwhile, digitally-correct activists decry the limiting of virtual powers in favour of making flow of information and human rights sacrosanct. So while mass action is populist it is also destructive, while digitally-correct activists’ more principled stand is elitist as a result.”

The Wikipedia anti-SOPA blackout as example:

“It is against these interpretations of the internet and online democracy that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and senior Wikipedians decided to stage a 24-hour blackout in protest against two pieces of legislation before the US Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and the Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa).

While both bills have been attacked, it is Sopa that is the most deserving of criticism as it would grant the US government powers to shut down websites that provide information about circumventing internet censorship – effectively a pre-emptive strike. In this way Sopa would effectively destroy any sites with user-generated content (ie Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc) while open source software would also cease to exist.

Both bills would allow service providers to indiscriminately close websites to avoid court orders from the US authorities, removing judicial oversight from the process. Another outcome of the bills would be the outlawing of internet users attempting to help people living in countries where internet censorship is high, such as China, from circumventing restrictions. Finally, the bills would grant the US attorney general powers to block domain services and de-list websites from search engines.

Wikipedia’s blackout decision has been dismissed as “silly” by the CEO of Twitter and has been criticised as overblown given the White House’s strong hint that it would veto any legislation that impedes freedom of expression. In fact, Wikipedia’s stance, which has inspired copycat actions among other websites, reveals very sophisticated democratic politics.

For critics who say the website has effectively censored itself in anti-censorship protest, the blackout itself does not even really exist; it applies only to English language pages on the online encyclopedia and can be easily avoided via using a mobile device or disabling JavaScript.

More importantly, a statement accessible via the ‘censored’ version of the Wikipedia English-language homepage states that while Wikipedia’s content would always strive to be neutral, its existence never would be; a clear acceptance of the causeway model where the technology of the internet itself does not embody future democratic polities but the relationship between the technology and its users does.

The crucial fact overlooked by the vast majority of coverage of the Wikipedia blackout is the call for internet users in and outside the US to contact their elected representatives to register their opposition to Sopa, Pipa and overzealous internet censorship; a clear example of online protests moving offline. The essence of Wikipedia’s blackout lies somewhere between interpretations of mass and digitally-correct actions – more similar to a strike in the offline world than the occupy movement. There are strains of digitally-correct influences in the blackout as well, however, in allowing Wikipedia to still be accessed by those with access to smartphones or sufficient knowledge of JavaScript.”