The tragedy of the commons in new clothes

Call me Cassandra.

I am not optimistic today about the role of technology in politics.

My pal Howard says the commons is the source of wealth and innovation, and the new commons is the internet. The commons, in this case, being a reference to the halcyon days of New England, when the sheep roamed the town square, and livestock fed off the common ground without fences.

When the internet bloomed it was considered a vast, shared turf. Generosity was the attitude of choice. There was more than enough for everyone. It seemed.

That changed with the dotcom fiasco, in which "insiders" foreclosed on castles in the air for millions of investors.

Then came feral spam, and the escalation of viruses bred in the suburban bedrooms and dorms around the world. The clarion call of technical empowerment was a trumpeted with increasing bad breath.

On one level, the "commons" is becoming narrower, in terms of shared access to a common resource.

The real resource of the internet is the ability to connect in order to exchange. The illusory resource is the ability to see and be shown.

As the commons narrows down to the active, empowered few, however, the passive majority become a new commons: a new common resource of money, opinion, loyalty, interest, etc: the resources that politics is built from. The grass of the commons becomes the sheep that fed on it, and the sheep become the new commons. (Excuse the image, but Mighty Morphin Metaphors sold it as is, and has a no exchange policy.)

As the technical commons shrinks and becomes established turf among a minority defined by strength, the political commons becomes available through the new technology. We will see it shift away from the progressive agenda of 200 years of American history. And it will happen in radical, non-linear usurpations. Smart mobs. What moral tone? What values?

There is a fire sale in the history department. Kids are rummaging through the shopworn ideas, looking for new combinations that can energize them. It can't be long before they find the writings of the right wing thinkers from the early 20th century. Before they became radioactive comic villans.

They were the philosophers of minorities defined by strength. They called it fascism. It's seed are strewn in the turf.

If you want to read the history of our immediate future, read about the demise of Weimar, the rise of Primo de Rivera in Spain, Mussolini in Italy. Forget Stalin and Hitler, look to the farm teams where the ambivalent but authentic dilemmas of millions of "nobodies" got transformed into the annealed weapons-grade societies of the Axis.

History won't repeat itself. It spoke once, and if we weren't listening, that's too bad. But it starts the new movement, and the motifs are so familiar, so achingly familiar.