Here we develop a mapping of emergent digital infrastructure and its governance in a commons.
The purpose is the enabling of practical development of commons of digital infrastructure, as fundamental contributions in the radically transformative activist practice of Making a living economy.
Much of the challenge in this lies in the remarkable, emergent, unfamiliar, powerful and ‘un-natural’ dual nature of the digital.
On one hand, when coupled with other appropriate hardware machines (aka computers: input devices/transducers, output devices/actuators), constellations of digitally encoded software code and digital data can operate over very large extents: of geography, time, cultural space, material organisation. The digital constitutes a major, crucial field of the post-Fordist **§1 Material landscape**.
On the other hand, software - code, scripts, programs, encoded data - is **written**, and thus figures as a historically emergent and complex element in the **§2 Cultural landscape** of practice.
This hard-to-comprehend duality invites a description of digital means as ‘The Golemic’.
# Material landscape - The Golemic Digital means are very puzzling because, in them, writing becomes a material force, of an utterly flat-footed kind. Emotively, sensitively, indicatively, it may help to understand the field of the digital as *‘the Golemic’*.
In mythology, golems are beings of clay that are rendered animated and forceful, but muscle-headed, by placing in their mouth a scroll of religious text (classically, the Torah).
The challenge of creating tools of this kind *for conviviality* is a radically new one. An entire post-Fordist (and post-post-Fordist) repertoire of technics, structures of feeling and cultural formations is emergent here, and contested. It’s early days, the terrain is not well mapped.
Attempts are made to understand developments in this domain, like hugely wealthy and powerful, data-scraping platform corporations (Google (YouTube), Amazon (Kindle, Alexa), Facebook (WhatsApp, Messenger), WeChat), as such-and-such capitalism - eg cognitive capitalism. My sense is, though, that it’s most helpful - practically, most helpful - if the capitalism is understood as a historical frame distinct from ‘the digital’, even though recent phases of capitalist development - post- and post-post-Fordism - have digital technologies as an essential foundation.
On overlapping historical frames with differing temporality, see: Wild nature, domestic economy, digital means
Golemic and capitalist frames intersect, clashing and resonating, but the material relations underlying them need to be engaged and supplanted in different ways, through differing relations of production. The relations of production in the Golemic are not simply those of capital, and the framing and stewarding of a Living economy calls for more than alternatives to capital.
# Cultural landscape - Infrastructuring As a dimension of the cultural landscape, digital means derive from the long-standing, powerful and never-unproblematic practice of **formalising**: an extreme region of the ‘dance of knowing’, deliberately far from ‘ordinary’ understanding and description.
Coupled with the politically significant roles of the professional-managerial class in post-Fordism, infrastructuring has become an important field of contestation; especially the production, configuring and mobilising of digital infrastructure.
Participatory design of (digital) infrastructures and the construction of infrastructures of convivial tools are now on the agenda. Capability in the design - or perhaps the skilfully evolutionary, hands-on **configuring** - of infrastructures of digital means (and their protocols) is an urgent challenge for radical economies and civil-society movements.
# Stewarding - Governance of digital infrastructure If digital infrastructures are to be constituted as commons, the practices of governance - in commons, better referred to as **stewarding** - are historically underdeveloped. A number of large- and small-p political traditions need to be drawn on in determining how commons of digital infrastructure may be stewarded; what's called for is some kind of hybrid . .
- *P2P culture - Peer-to-peer production*: the culture of free-libre open-source software production, commons of FLOSS code.
- *Cooperative ownership traditions*: Workers' coops, consumer coops - and emergent, bleeding-edge practices of multistakeholder governance. *Sociocracy, boards, representation, general meetings and operations separated from debates on strategy.*
- *Dual power traditions* - Rank-&-file, civil-society and 'movement' organisations - systems of assemblies and Councils. *'Political' rather than 'economic', engaged in 'making decisions' as distinct from hands-on, mundane production and mobilising of means of subsistence and wellbeing.*
As practices in the 'democratic' tradition, both of the above have a separation of 'decision making' and production. Thus they reproduce - perhaps without awareness, probably without intention - the basic form of the bourgeois State. Commoning - and also P2P production, above - go beyond the State form in this regard.
- *Modern commoning as dual power* - Bollier & Helfrich rather than Ostrom, *Free, fair and alive - The insurgent power of the commons*. *At the centre in this production-centred operational mode are: the dyad of **contribution/livelihood**, machineries of **contribution accounting**, and feminist/labour-process economics of **care work** (organisational care work, personal care work, commons contribution); and then, the nature of the contribution of the ¿majority? who are passive consumers of commoned infrastructure.*
# See also: In the meet.coop community programme, this topic of digital infrastructure is closely connected with these others: - Learning space and toolstack - Shared leaning space
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