ADJUSTING TO ATTENUATING RESOURCES

Attenuating resources drive capitalists to uncover new areas from which value can be extracted.

Commons are attractive for this reason as they can deliver both resources and populations to extract value from. Capitalism perpetuates the widely accepted (although incorrect) view that humans are only motivated by self-interest. From this perspective the market appears the most rational way to service and organise self-interested parties. Any dissolution of a commons activity in the face of attenuation because of capitalist pressure, appears to represent a general failure in commoning as a system. This idea of progress is both created by, and supports Hardin’s theory of the tragedy of commons (as discussed in Chapter one). Commoning is required to institute permanent and global change in order to be viewed as successful, as the individual examples any individual examples of functioning or sustained commoning are minimised as exceptions. The paradox is that any individual capitalist enterprise can fail without seeming to afflict the conception, or acceptance, of capitalism as a whole. The global financial crisis of 2008 demonstrated massive flaws in market logic and revealed the precariousness of even the largest capitalist institutions. Even in the face of that failure, the market and its regulators maintained a wilful blindness and forceful commitment to their ideologies, ensuring through bailouts and new regulations, the continuity and entrenchment of the same systems. Despite accumulating disasters, both economic and environmental, growth remains the main value and measure of success for business and politics.

32 Raj Patel, The Value of

35 This concept is different from the ‘Economics of Mutuality’.

36 Kevin Jackson. “Economy of Mutuality: Merging Financial

Irish Journal of Sociology 21, no. 2 (2013): 90-102.

48

Producing the magazine, distributing it at no cost and working remotely, were all only possible because of the internet, but also because the look, structure and use of the internet that we recognise today was still under development. Inside the culture of macro economics, users create and invent their own economic tactics. De Certeau describes these as ‘transgressions in a profit economy’³⁸ where diversions from the profit economy forge networks that require reciprocity. Small and many of the producers it supported were operating in this way. It was a period when there was a growing interest in handmade and small-scale art, craft and design. Etsy, the online market place for handmade products and supplies, started in 2005 and expanded rapidly and there was a hopeful sense that maybe the infrastructure the internet might be able to radically change the existing retail systems. Affordable software, websites and platforms like Etsy, offered people the ability to run small and independent business, have flexible hours, ethical manufacturing and personal satisfaction from dispersed geographical locations. Initially when Etsy was founded it was differentiated from the values of the existing market and proposed a viable alternative.

In their first few years Etsy seeded their website with makers through forming relationships with people who were running online craft forums, and also sponsoring craft fairs across America.

We also adopted a similar mix of online and real world connections to develop Small and the community involved with it. By 2007 Etsy had started a blog that showcased the successful sellers and sales and marketing tips. As regular guest editors we were able to promote the magazine and the designers we worked with, while Etsy could demonstrate to their client’s new media that could support and grow their businesses. From here we branched out into other mutually supportive relationships. We partnered with Renegade Craft Fair in Brooklyn, along with Etsy, in 2007, and were involved in many events with local retailers and gallery spaces over the next few years. We co-hosted or sponsored other venues, establishments and outlets that aligned with our values and supported the same community. At all these events we were able to make connections with wider audiences, potential contributors and supporters.

By 2011 there was a sense that the ideology behind the entity was changing. Rob Kalin, one of the founders of Etsy, was pushed out when he insisted on remaining committed to the original ethos behind the company. By 2013, crafters were told they were allowed to use manufacturers as long as their goods ‘were handmade in spirit’ which has resulted in large scale manufacturers violating the terms of the site and alienation of the sites original community.³⁹ A wider transition towards emphasising marketing rather than making began to emerge. At the Parallels symposium at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, 2015, the American key note speaker, Wava Carpenter, suggested to the Australian audience of makers and designers that crafting their own story was as essential as the actual craft work.⁴⁰ In her view, the work was subsidiary to the ability

38 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988), 26.

39 Terzis, Gillian. “The Market’s a Hard Art for Etsy.” The Business Review, January 14, 2016.

(accessed June 10, 2017).

Fig 3.9 Exhibition at the Chelsea Piers in Manhattan of photography and Illustration commissioned by Small from 2007-09.

40 https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/

event_series/parallels/

to market it. In illustration she presented two popular and easily ingested narratives that she believed would sell goods: the image of a happily crafting couple in an attractive studio with a dog or baby playing under the work table, or the symbiotic union of a design savvy westerner with some joyful indigenous people, encouraging them to use their traditional techniques to make universally saleable design objects. The original ethos of authenticity, craft skills, sustainability and potential freedom from corporate structures is subsumed as marketing merges craft with design and wraps them both in aspirational narratives. In 2015 Etsy was listed on the public market, observing quietly that they knew they would need to work hard to protect their market from predatory practice as the ‘authenticity’ they still retained was essential for their continued existence, and incidentally, also for their stock value.⁴¹ As the embodied sense of being situated within a community and activity, recedes, it is increasingly just an appearance of authenticity that remains.

Despite the trajectory from an idealistic to the free market for Etsy and many other companies that try to negotiate a new way of operating, this does not indicate that non capitalist values are always doomed. Commoning is made up of many interconnected and variable models and the eclipse of one does not indicate a terminal problem across all of them. The opposite may be more true. When a business fails it often leaves in its wake destitution, bankruptcy, shame and emotional damage. With commoning, a collective may terminate or the individuals move on, without a feeling of failure or a sense of scarcity. From a capitalists’ vantage of success, this is difficult to conceive and again demonstrates that the normative models of capitalism do not always provide a useful measure.

One reason that commoning can sustain such a different outlook is that people oriented towards commoning are usually participating in many modes of commons. It is impossible for any one form to meet all needs and usually the activities ‘nest together in different ways’.⁴² Before the participants become literate in commoning, these various experiences are not necessarily concatenated for either the individuals involved, or for external observers. Without the signifiers of success that capitalism recognises such as wealth, the many modes of commoning that accumulate over a lifetime, or over a community, may not register in broader society. The resources, energies and relations that had supported Small were not stable or perpetual, but as a project made through processes of commoning, Small did not need to continue forever in order to be of value. As Clare Doherty acknowledges, there are enduring legacies produced through temporary relationships enacted by creative projects.⁴³ The underlying approaches and values that maintained the magazine, which I now understand to be processes of commoning, were durable and have been sustained.

Sometimes resisting co-option means acknowledging that the territory has shifted and the original proposal or activity is no longer able to maintain resistance. Around the 15th issue of Small, Christine and I noticed that the composition of the fluid community that coalesced around the magazine, both supporting it and producing it, had started to change. As we became aware of this, we had to consider if we had also been repositioned by the shifting market, and now rather than supporting alternative practices to become self sufficient, we were instead staking out a new territory and the methods for future exploitation. When we began the magazine there was no similar type of publication, but over the next few years many more started up.⁴⁴ Some of these new publications were creative, ethical and well organised and they are mostly still operating, albeit in a more commercial incarnation; others, many of which have since closed, employed the same unscrupulous practices of the print magazine that had incensed us into starting Small. We were told that the new online publications often damaged or did not return stock they borrowed, and requested more items than they needed or could feature from companies that could not afford to lose inventory. They would not refund postage, expected free gifts, and undermined their credibility by offering paid ‘advertorials’ and product placement. These attitudes caused independent designers and artists to again become wary of involvement, as they had been with print magazines when we first began.

41 http://www.theaustralian.com.

42 Ryan, “The Transformative Capacity of the Commons and Commoning.”

43 Clare Doherty, “Art at Large,” (Paper presented at the Wheeler Centre June, 2016).

50

Although the reputation of Small meant our existing collaborations were stable, we noticed that the trust necessary for us to establish new relationships and continue to practice in the way we had initiated was already eroded in new contacts. Agents, writers and bloggers had begun to come up with ways to track their readership and monetise their influence, meaning relationships were now quantified and re-framed as transactions. Makers felt increasingly exploited, and the readers, always sensitive to inauthentic editing, 'advertorials' and product placement, had become more cynical. The systems of exchange that had previously seemed ‘thick’⁴⁵ and able to sustain complex dynamics, had thinned out and moved towards market-regulated exchanges.

Similar to the processes of urban gentrification that I had experienced in Brooklyn (discussed in Chapter 2), the structures of the internet at that time was increasingly being organised and shaped by capitalising entrepreneurs, big media, infrastructure and copyright law.⁴⁶ Felix Stadler calls for open systems and free access, arguing the repressive controls of cultural production and elimination of risk, destroys future innovation because ‘we need … time and freedom to experiment much more’.⁴⁷ This plea echoed resistance to foreclosure on artist occupied ‘dreaming devices’ and the ancillary social and creative innovation occurring in the face of gentrification in Brooklyn and other urban spaces.

Small was always a tremendous amount of work. When we began in 2006, operating in a new medium required an inventiveness that was engaging for both of us. In the first few years of production we were working it out as we went along which caused unknown and unforeseen results and relationships. Sometimes these were problematic but more often they were stimulating as the magazine functioned as a platform for testing new ideas rather than rolling out a planned and repeating format. As our skills and networks grew, slowly the outcomes became conceptually and aesthetically more predictable and over time the way we were working and the community stopped feeling dynamic and open. I had become aware that there is crossover between growing skills and knowledge and the innovative creativity that seeks to fill the gaps, resulting in high levels of engagement. As either the skill level or creative responses plateau, the level of engagement declines. In 2013 we had been working on the magazine for more than five years, I was back in Australia and had started teaching and researching and Christine was in Dallas working a new job full-time. We decided together that the 20th issue would conclude the publication.

As a project, Small had expanded the physical space that we were each living in, carving out a new terrain we could occupy and shape as we chose. Our surrounds and schedule were constrained by the requirements of caring for small children, where the joy and love in that work is tangled with the mundane routines and often isolated labour of undistributed care-taking. The dream resulted in processes that located and constructed the mental space for shared creative work in our separate lives, that we could then maintain between us. The project enabled us to transition into another space that took any shape we dreamed up. The systems by which diverse creative works that formed the magazine were initiated and produced, did not vanish when the magazine ended, but became the foundation for the project, Consumed, discussed in the next chapter.

46This trajectory has culminated with a repeal of the Net Neutrality Laws in the United States in 2017 that had ensured equal speed and access of all web content.

Recently the rapid expansion of distributed trust. They are a flattened hierarchy and can not be privatised. This is such a fundamentally different system to what exists (in capitalist systems more generally as well as in the internet) that it may soon present a credible challenge to the growing hegemony of tech monopolies, consequently changing the structure of the internet. See Steven Johnson

“Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble”

The New York Times Jan 16 2018 also ABC Radio Australia

“Nightlife- The Bitcoin Bubble”

with Philip Clark and Sarah Mcdonald.

47 Felix Stadler, “Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks,” The Note Book

Fig 3.10 Preparing sets on location in upstate New York for a commissioned film.

Fig 3.11 The resulting film was embedded in issue 10.

45Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce.

Fig 3.12. Twenty back issues of Small 2007-2011.

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A movement of commoning through participatory creative practice as a creative producer of Consumed.