One is more experiential you know, to, do things. >> Mm-hm. >> I call this a performative approach. >> Yes. >> It is through doing. And in my study abroad courses in Peru as well as my course this spring, I will have this. I do things with the students. Here I will explore what they're open to. >> Yes. >> In Peru, we ins-, we, we work with indigenous people, so we accompany them when they do offering to spirits. >> Yes. >> Of the field, of agriculture. And I invite my students to do it if they are so moved. I don't force them. And I tell them why? I say, you cannot treat it as an it. It's a vow. It's alive. We're entangled with it. And then the other prongs of course, totally a head prong where I use the work, in particular the work of a quantum physicist, Karen Barad, who came to speak here last year. >> Oh yes, Karen Barad, I remember she was here last year. >> She's a dear friend and she taught me all this. We were colleagues. >> Uh-huh. >> She was at Mount Holyoke and I was at Smith. And, you know, an extraordinary piece of work that really opens. Makes a totally rational scientific argument that the world is actually material-discursive. And it's a little bit complicated but I pace the students through that. So, you know, this double-pronged approach. So it's not easy, but with the Wesleyan student, they get it. [LAUGH] >> Well, it's interesting. It's both experiential and intellectual. It's breaking down the borders between those things. >> Exactly. >> As it breaks down the border between the natural and the human. >> It's kind of an integrative approach. Or embedding the mind in, in everything. >> Yep. >> Not only our bodies but the greater body, the Earth body. Yes. >> How bout you, Barry? >> Well, yeah. The last thing I would focus on is for people to take some control and an experiential thing. And look for community gardens and. >> Mm-hm. Community gardens and local gardens can be extremely effective ways to produce ones own food and develop that relationship that Frederique's talking about. A brilliant example of this is in Cuba. What happened. >> Oh, yeah. >> And in Havana, is a place where community gardens behind apartment buildings and whatnot. This is taking hold throughout the United States and in other parts of the world. And here at Wesleyan, for example, we have an organic farm where now produce produced by student farmers, or farmer scholars as we call them. >> [LAUGH] >> Is now being served in our dining hall. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So that everybody can partake in the bounty from our own lands right here. >> It's so interesting, because I've talked with some people who are, you know, they're cynical about the possibilities for change. And, you know, they say, well, the community garden stuff was just this, you know, very elitist thing. And in fact, it's just the opposite. Not just the United States, and not just certainly not just in colleges. All around the world, people are taking control of what they eat. >> Exactly. >> And that becomes this experiential as well as intellectual route to understanding the ways in which other systems are poisoning what we eat or depriving other people of food even as they produce more food. So I'm hoping that as we learn in this class more about these major global issues, we will not just feel more depressed about how bad things are. But actually find ways where we can act to begin to make a positive difference. >> That's right. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks so much for this conversation today. >> Thank you, it's great. >> It's really a pleasure to talk with you and good luck with the work at the College of the Environment. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So Professor Ostrom, who worked in political science and economics, really made the strong argument that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided when people manage themselves. When people manage themselves and they have mutually agreed upon rules and that they have a, a culture of trust, a culture of trust. And this isn't, you know, this isn't just idealistic pie in the sky stuff. She found real life examples whether they were fishermen or farmers, she found real life examples of communities of trust and mutually agreed-upon rules that persisted for centuries. And so she studied these real-life examples to extract models from them, as an alternative to the tragedy of the commons. And the reading we gave you this week is from Yochai Benkler. He says, the point is that people more readily followed game norms when they saw these norms as self imposed, when they saw these norms as self imposed or freely cho, chosen. And social psychologists have done experiments on this. As have economists. People are more likely to follow rules when they believe that those, they've made up those rules. [LAUGH] Or when they've freely chosen them. Benkler gave us the example also of how how laws, how laws can help shape those norms. So, for example, ex, he, he gives us an anecdote of when he first came to New York. He said he was a chain smoker. And he was you know, very annoyed that all these people would you know, give him this, these dirty looks because he was smoking. And then over time New York City passed these laws that you couldn't smoke in almost every public space, smoking was prohibited. And at first people really, really grumbled, and thought this was awful, and the nanny state this and that. Over time, this just becomes the new norm. The new normal, right? And so that you now think that you have created these spaces, you yourself, not your mayor, or not your administration, you have yourself have created these spaces where you don't have to breathe in somebody else's smoke. And that becomes a mutually agreed upon norm. You don't need a policeman, you don't need an authority figure to tell somebody not to light up in your presence. Benkler writes, we not only accept our reality, we not only accept our reality, but we also seem to trick ourselves into thinking that whatever the reality is, is what we ourselves might have chosen. Isn't that nice? Whatever the reality is, is what we ourselves might have chosen, or what the right state of affairs should be. In other words, we have a tendency to accept the regulations and then think those are the regulations we give ourselves. So Benkler is interested in how rules can nudge people to more cooperation. And especially when they come to believe, as we tend to, that those rules are ones we would our, we would give ourselves, and perhaps we even think, we did give ourselves. One of his favorite examples is Wikipedia, actually. In which a self governing, very complex community that has some basic rules, like a neutral point of view, for the articles, but in which people can have extraordinarily civil and long discussions about details in the entries. But result most of the time in in decent solution that the community finds acceptable. They regulate themselves, they regulate themselves. So Benkler writes, and a lot of social psychologists have followed him in this regard, the more we practice cooperation, the more we believe in the virtue of being cooperative. Practicing cooperation creates its own form of social good. And one of the things we'll try to do in this class is to have opportunities for cooperation for you out there, watching these videos and participating in the discussion boards where you can link up to other Coursera mem, students in this class. To do joint assignments. To create joint products, or games, or or political actions. And that kind of cooperation, practicing cooperation, actually will itself make us more cooperative, according to Benkler. He writes finally, although there is enough evidence to suspect that, when it comes to cooperation, practice makes perfect; that by building and engaging in cooperative systems, we increase the baseline level of cooperation throughout society. We increase the baseline of cooperative systems of cooperation throughout the society. Cooperation is the way of coping with or even escaping from the tragedy of the commons. So a social good is produced through cooperation. A social good is what we can enjoy cooperatively. A cupcake is something I can enjoy myself. [COUGH] When I finish it, it's gone. If I eat it, you can't have it. I've already eaten it, right? But there are some things we can enjoy together, and the fact that more of us are enjoying those things does not diminish the quality of the thing we enjoy. It sounds very complicated. It's pretty simple, right? When we listen to a song, if I listen to the song by myself it's fine, I love it, I listen to my song, got my buds in, I'm listening to the song. But then I, say I take my ear buds out, I and I play it for you. I play for five friends around. And we all enjoy it. Do, does each of us have only a fifth of the, of the enjoyment? No. Not at all. Maybe our enjoyment is actually accentuated because we are enjoying it together. So I'm here with Louis Hyde. Here virtually with Louis Hyde. Professor Hyde and I were colleagues many years ago in Los Angeles at the Getty Research Institute. Sent him a note when I, when we were doing this class and asked him to, to help me out because we are talking about social goods this first week and the idea of the commons. And Louis was nice enough to take time out of his schedule to chat with me about his work on the commons and, and how it's threatened and what we might do about it. So, thank you, Louis Hyde for, for participating in our class here on how to change the world. >> Glad to be here. Let's get to work. >> So tell me, what, what is this from your perspective? What is this idea of the commons? >> Well a, a very general definition of a commons is that it's, it's a social regime for managing a collectively owned resource. So often we think of the commons as, as for example, a field in a city or park. And it could be that. But the point of this definition is to say, it's not so much the ob, the field itself, as it is the rules that govern how people use it. Our second example, instead of a concrete commons, like a field, or a pasture, might be the commons of scientific ideas. And here again you would have some rules of the road by which scientists treat their ideas and and share them in a way useful for conducting science. >> So, so when I take my, my dog out for a walk to what I think of as the, I don't know, the common area of the town the idea of the commons is not so much the, the, the grass that I, we, we walk across, but it's the rules of picking up after my dog or, you know, don't, don't go in certain places where they've just put down seed or don't. >> Yeah, yeah. Exactly. And and one reason to stress the rules part of this is that common ownership of this kind is not necessarily tragic. There's a famous critique of the commons which people say well, listen if you open up a field to everybody soon everybody will come and they'll ruin the field. What this misses is the fact that commons traditionally, and this is a category that goes back millennium in probably all societies, commons traditionally have been a place where people collectively figure out how to behave such that the commons will endure and not collapse. >> Aha. >> A simple example in Europe people would have common fields where they would allow, have their cows in the summertime. But one rule would be you can't put more cows on the field than you could have in your barn in the winter. That's, that's a stint. It's a limit. >> Yes. >> On the use and it means that the commons are protected from over use. And the commons as a real property of fields and forests and streams and so forth, did last for centuries, because they were cause there was a social set of customs and, and understood rules that governed them. >> So, so, it's not just this thing you, that everybody can use. That then is under duress or danger, let's say by overpopulation or something else. By stressing the rules, it's built into the thing everybody can use as a management of it. >> Yeah. So in a funny way you could think of the commons, for example a park in a big city, as the theater in which that community enacts its sense of how to behave with one another. And you know, my own interest in this, well, so they enact their own sense of how to behave with one another. And that sense is around any particular common, there's a bundle of rights. A whole set of things you're allowed to do and similarly, things that you're not allowed to do. So the commons is a bundle of rights by which a community manages its collectively owned resources. >> And so, how, how did you get interested in this? You, you worked on the arch, you've written poetry, you've, you've worked ideas of the gift. How, how did, how did you get interested in, in this structure of commons and the rules for using these, these, these areas or these terrains? >> Well, so my interest in the commons comes out of the work I did on on gift exchange and particularly gift exchange and creativity. So to say a bit about that, I mean classically there have been, cultures and societies, where most material property circulated from one person to another, not through purchase and sale, which is how we circulate material goods, but through gift exchange. And gift exchange has certain consequences that when you give gifts to people, and particularly when you get them back, it begins to form relationships. If they circulate in a wider sphere it begins to not just form but articulate how your community is structured. My own interest in this has to do though with taking this language of gift exchange, which comes mostly of out anthropology and some social policy and stuff, and applying it to artistic practice and creative practice. The assumption being that there are realms of art practice and creativity which can enter the marketplace, and very nice for you if they do. So this is not about being against the market, but it's saying that typically the background economy has to be some kind of gift exchange economy for the thing to thrive. So many kinds of creative practice require sort of low barriers to the circulation of knowledge. Such that people can converse with another. And this brings me then to the idea that you could, you could talk about this circulation as being about gifts, but you could also say that it is about treating the material of your art as a common property. So there's a cultural commons, as well as an embodied commons. So my interest in the commons comes out of my interest in gift exchange. >> So, so, this, these low barriers for participation, or for bringing the work into the commons have also, they've existed for a long time. But I know from your publications in this area, that you, you see that more recently, particularly in the United States, that these barriers have been changed. And that they the, the way we can participate in the commons has been, or the, has been restructured, or re-filtered. >> [LAUGH] Yes. So again now we're looking at cultural commons. And I think of the cultural commons as this vast store of ideas and works of art and inventions that we've inherited from the past. And that we'd still continue to contribute to if we could figure out ways to do it. It's probably always been the case that there's a sort of tension between individual and community, between private property and common property, but we see this marked in particular ways in the current period. I would say, so there, there're maybe three or four points to make about the tension that cultural commons are under at the moment. >> Yes. >> I mean, the, the broadest point is to say that we are living, I think, in an age of kind of market triumphalism. Particularly since the fall of the Soviet Union. You know, one thing that happened in the 1960s was that we in the United States felt ourselves in competition with the Soviets, and therefore in a funny way we were on good behavior in regard to our public presentation of ourselves. And the Soviet critique was always, well, they're just money-grubbing capitalists. That's all they care about. And so we kind of augmented the public presentation of our interests in art and culture. We had a sort of exporting art that Americans made to other countries and sort. When the Soviet Union fell, that part of our public sense of duty and sense of propaganda maybe, fell away. And there are many people who now believe, well, clearly the market is the single form by which we have to organize our social life. And there's been a push to see into what areas the market could go where it hadn't been before. Now I can say more specifically ways that this has encroached upon the cultural commons. >> Yeah, I mean because, here, here we are doing this online course that's going to be beamed for free to tens of thousands of people around the world. You know, low barrier to entry. There's some barrier. You need to get on the internet. You need you know, you, you need a machine. And I think that people in internet culture often talk about low barriers to entry. Like, I could start a new business, I could start a, I could publish my own poems. I could, you know. So on the one hand there seems to be this energizing of the commons, right, and everybody can blog and put their work out there, or some other form. On the other hand, you've described this market triumphalism where when something is commercially successful there is an attempt to immediately limit access to it so as to create greater profits. Is that fair enough? >> Yeah. And again, my own position is not to be against writers making money from their work or artists making money. It's it's a problem of balance. And yes, the Internet has fabulously opened up a kind of exchange which, has been a surprise and a delight to all of us. This class is, is a good example of something that is broadcast, as a common property as it were. The problem has been that particularly the old what are called content industries, the film industry, the recording industry, the movie industry and so forth. Which have properties that they own have had kind of a panic attack around the opening up the digital internet, and digital copying that the internet has caused. And you see this particularly in the copyright realm. This is a place where the cultural commons is, is threatened.