Commons
The information age began with dreams of a common language. The internet would let any network speak to any other. It has since been described as many kinds of places to gather: a public square, a mall, a street, a garden, or utopia, which is another way of saying no (real) place at all.
In this issue we explore shared standards and protocols that make possible new forms of civic life, ownership, aid, and their opposites, at the same time that they differentiate us ever more precisely. Online, you are unique like everybody else."
0212 via fb
s.a.
"Commons" is an Old English word.
According to my Japanese friends, it is quite close to the meaning
that iriai still has in Japanese "Commons," like iriai, is a word
which, in preindustrial times, was used to designate certain aspects
of the environment. People called commons those parts of the
environment for which customary law exacted specific forms of
community respect. People called commons that part of the environment
which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own
possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage,
not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their
households. The customary law which humanized the environment by
establishing the commons was usually unwritten. It was unwritten law
not only because people did not care to write it down, but because
what it protected was a reality much too complex to fit into
paragraphs. The law of the commons regulates the right of way, the
right to fish and to hunt, to graze, and to collect wood or medicinal
plants in the forest.
Ivan Illich: Silence is a Commons -
http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Silence.html
