Ours and Mine

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I use roads that I don’t own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.

The web is also a social common good. The web is not the same as public roads, which are “owned” by the public, but in terms of public access and use, the web is a type of community good. The good of the web serves me as if I owned it. I can summon it in full, anytime, with the snap of a finger. Libraries share some of these qualities. The content of the books are not public domain, but their displays (the books) grant public access to their knowledge and information, which is in some ways better than owning them.

Kevin Kelly, The Technium, Better than Owning

I continue to be fascinated by the ways in which the economic impasse is eating away at older property forms and creating the possibility for new forms. The textbook industry is a good example. Suddenly, materially privileged professors and administrators are ‘discovering’ that textbooks are expensive.

“We can fix it,” they say, as if they were not, in part, responsible for this inaccessibility. Still, whatever the origins, online textbooks are going to kill off the textbook industry– of course, something equally awful might arise in its place. In any case, this might be one of those silver linings in the dark recession clouds.

These musings and potentials are complicated and unpredictable. The CD may disappear but the LP seems to be back, complete with free digital download of the music so you can play it on your MP3 player as well as your turntable. Some of the musing, however, doesn’t make much sense.

I like the way Kevin Kelly mulls over the things he, personally, does not own but uses daily. These are our collective wealth: the highways, much of the internet, and so on. He’s less persuasive when he linke these forms of ownership and rent-to-own schemes or leasing. These are mostly confidence games.

The root problem, I think, lies in the lack of a critical economics in popular culture. Economics as commonly discussed, is business economics, that is, discussions of how to make capitalism work better. You have to venture fairly far out to the periphery to find anti-capitalist economics.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Online Places, War

Depression, Recession

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The March employment numbers, out this morning, are bleak: 8.5 percent of Americans officially unemployed, 663,000 more jobs lost. But if you include people who are out of work and have given up trying to find a job, the real unemployment rate is 9 percent. And if you include people working part time who’d rather be working full time, it’s now up to 15.6 percent. One in every six workers in America is now either unemployed or underemployed.

Every lost job has a multiplier effect throughout the economy. For every person who no longer has a job and can’t find another, or is trying to enter the job market and can’t find one, there are at least three job holders who become more anxious that they may lose their job. Almost every American right now is within two degrees of separation of someone who is out of work. This broader anxiety expresses itself as less willingness to spend money on anything other than necessities. And this reluctance to spend further contracts the economy, leading to more job losses.

It’s a Depression, Robert Reich, Friday, April 03, 2009,

It’s hard to get a handle on what the economy is doing. I work in a sector–proprietary education– that is tailor-made for economic troubles, so I don’t have that feeling that things are going downhill. I am used to hearing about the travails of the working class, too, either from my family or from my students. So I can’t say that I have been hearing more of that sort of thing, either.

I don’t mean in any way to question his integrity, but Reich is a mainstream, liberal economist, and so has something like a vested interest in promoting the largest stimulus package possible. It’s not surprising that he favors the term depression. And, of course, the unemployment numbers are probably the best measure, as he suggests, of how poorly we are doing.

On the other hand, Doug Henwood, who is a very careful observer of the numbers, has a nuanced, if still bad, notion of the state what he calls “that abstraction The Economy.” He sees some signs of hope, although he seems to have little patience with the idea that the recovery is coming sooner rather than later; the stimulus money is not yet spent, after all.

What is a depression? According to Kimberly Amadeo on About.com we have a long way to go before we get to Great Depression levels: “unemployment was 25% and wages… fell 42%. …U.S. economic output fell from $103 to $55 billion and world trade plummeted 65%.” We are not there yet, but I don’t think the worst is over yet.

Posted in: Writing

Photography as Pedagogy

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The Extreme Ice Survey is the most wide-ranging glacier study ever conducted using ground-based, real-time photography. EIS uses time-lapse photography, conventional photography, and video to document the rapid changes now occuring on the Earth’s glacial ice. The EIS team has installed 27 time-lapse cameras at 15 sites in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, and the Rocky Mountains. EIS supplements this ongoing record with annual repeat photography in Iceland, the Alps, and Bolivia.

What is the Extreme Ice Survey?

In the early 1960s the ‘big blue marble’ photos of Earth from space completely changed our view of our planet and its ecosystem. The “our” is meant to be as inclusive as possible because it was the image itself– translated everywhere into media as varied as films and t-shirts– that made the point. Our modern environmental consciousness began with that image.

It was a wonderfully effective, didactic image: we are all one world, we are a small corner of a very big universe. Since then, there have been an entire range of other images that might be said to be equally potent, or at least to reinforce the point. I’ve always loved the images of the Earth from the moon, and the deep space images from the Hubble Telescope are breathtaking.

The Extreme Ice images are more difficult, and too complex for easy translations, but I think they will play an equally important role in the maturation of human environmental awareness. They are complex because they are both utterly beautiful and, at the same time, a damning, even shocking indictment of myopia. This is the first clear vision we have of our future.

Posted in: Writing