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https://github.com/runrig-coop/hedgerows

Concerning knowledge enclosures and how they may be truly leveled
https://github.com/runrig-coop/hedgerows

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Concerning knowledge enclosures and how they may be truly leveled

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README 

        
# Hedgerows in the Sky

___NOTE:__ This series is currently under draft. Large portions may be missing,

incomplete, or subject to change._



- [Latest Draft](https://github.com/jgaehring/hedgerows/blob/draft/index.md)

- [Bibliography](notes/outline-of-topics.md)

- [All Notes](notes/README.md)



## Series Outline

This series was originally intended to comprise a single essay, but the subject

matter proved far too expansive for a continuous piece and too impractical to

condense. The separate parts are listed below with their status and a link to

the most current material available for each.



|          | Status  | Subtitle                                                |

| -------: | :------ | :------------------------------------------------------ |

| [Part 1] | Draft   | __Concerning knowledge enclosures and how they may be truly leveled__ |

| [Part 2] | Outline | __The Market is No Place for the Commons__              |

| [Part 3] | Outline | __Towards the unified commons of food, land, and technology__ |



[Part 1]: https://github.com/jgaehring/hedgerows/blob/draft/index.md

[Part 2]: notes/outline-of-narrative.md#part-2-the-market-is-no-place-for-the-commons

[Part 3]: notes/outline-of-narrative.md#part-3-towards-the-unified-commons-of-food-land-and-technology



## Abstract

Today in 2023, the food sovereignty and data sovereignty movements are united in

the call for more cooperative production methods and a commitment to common-pool

resources. There is an increasing degree of interchange and direct collaboration

between their communities, and clear parallels can be drawn between their

respective practices. One can compare collectivized farm management to

cooperative data trusts; free fridges and other mutual aid food programs to the

communal administration of decentralized social media networks; sliding scale

food coops or CSA solidarity shares to software projects sponsored through

Liberapay, OpenCollective, donate buttons or some combination of crowdfunding

mechanisms.



Turn back the clock by ten or twenty years, however, and those correspondences

were not as conspicuous. While notions of collective autonomy can be insinuated

from the local food and free-culture movements of that era, and indeed many

practitioners were already formulating those concepts within their respective

disciplines, neither food sovereignty nor data sovereignty had yet gained much

popular recognition. Accordingly, there was very little dialogue between the two

movements, with few opportunities for their divergent fields to collaborate,

share resources or swap notes. The small farming and local food movements of

that era fixated on what was near-at-hand, low-tech, organic, provincial and

professedly slow. Meanwhile, the free-culture and open source movements set

their gaze on global streams of non-rivalrous information, liberated by their

abstractness and cutting-edge technology to travel across all borders,

effortlessly and instantaneously.



This article will examine the convergent evolution of these two movements by

surveying the relevant technological milestones and sociopolitical developments

of the intervening years. For a more subjective view, I offer the story of my

own encounters with each of these movements, while also situating them within

the longer history of agriculture, information technology and the Commons.

Finally, I'll reflect on the latest initiatives that have emerged through their

union and what synergies remain to be explored.