The Common
Linebaugh says he chose the verb to describe the commons because he wanted to make it a living activity, not just a resource or a concept.
The term common makes the element of commons dynamic. Common behavior is built on a network of relationships that expects each of us to work for something in common —— This is the essence of the commons. This reflects a shift in thinking from the Yo-Yo ethic of “you alone” to WITT (“we together”) which I see as a psychological shift in roles and a sense of coexistence.
There are people who are necessarily the trend, the core, who have a strong drive to transform the community and bring these people together to create the world they want to see. Not to wait, not to take the consequences, but to do it for that purpose.
Common ground has always been a way of being, and most of the time we only realize its importance when the commons is taken away from us. The absence of the commons deprives people of the initiative to meet their basic needs for livelihood, economic security and social relations. Therefore, the common ground is taking your life into your own hands, not just choosing a script forward that has long been in distress through outside forces.
The digital
Digital facilitates collaboration in two ways, first, by making it easier for like-minded people to find each other and unite around common interests, and second, by creating an infrastructure of differentiation. The digital commons, our lives are being influenced by digital tools and infrastructure as the various practices of digital culture geared toward the commons have become a powerful source of new imagination in online and offline practices.
The economic
Economists view the commons as a set of institutions that manage “public resources” – not private property. Resources are at the center of the commons, and the social institutions and cultural forms that develop through the commons have the purpose of reproducing them. It is cooperation under rationality.
The political
The commons perspective draws on the political science that conceptualizes the commons as a holistic social system. Commons are not just resources we share – first, all commons contain some pool of public resources, understood as non-commodified means of meeting people’s needs. Second, commons are necessarily created and maintained by communities – communities are sets of commons that share these resources and define for themselves rules for accessing and using them. Communities, however, do not have to be confined to one place; they can also operate through trans-local spaces. Nor do they need to be understood as “homogeneous” in terms of cultural and physical characteristics. In addition to these two elements – pools of resources and collections of communities – the third and most important element is the verb “to share” – to create and reproduce shared resources. -the social process of creating and reproducing a common resource
As part of the commons, “more importantly, those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledge, language, codes, information, emotions, etc.
The commons comes first, capitalist production comes second. To the extent that capitalism concentrates and closes off the commons, it cuts off an important source. Since social life, for its part, depends on shared language, codes and emotions, the commons cannot disappear completely, but forms part of an “alternative modernity”
1. our group is studying the cool kids commons with the aim of contributing to reducing the current stereotypes in China.
In the 2017 China Transgender Community Survival Survey Report, it was concluded that the cool kids community is influenced by four areas: work environment, campus environment, mental health, and political needs. We also obtained a data graph of the acceptance of sexual minorities by the four groups, with the most educated teachers being the most accepting and blood relatives being the least accepting. This data report served as the backbone of our research.
Our process of exploring cool spaces: As a first step we wanted to create a space for this group: a digital website, a physical reality gallery, and a space where they could soothe their emotions and find companionship and a sense of home.
We went from art theory to collective spirituality, which eventually came together to become the Cool Kids Commons.
The Cool Space is a dialogue between the queer community and the cool crowd.
The methodology used to build this space was 1. data support 2. misconceptions about cool kids in China 3. acceptance of the perception of cool kids and understanding of this group
4. setting of the media environment (don’t support cool kids development, innovative agenda, e.g. COVID-19 dynamic clearing)
The group’s art organization in China for reasons of the Chinese situation, for COVID-19 insists on dynamic clearing. Eventually each of them split up.
My contribution in the group is due to the fact that we have to relate from the cool kids culture in the West to the neglect of that group in China. Since I was a film major in my undergraduate degree. So I have less queer films that are representative of our country internationally indicating that in fact our artists are very much pioneering the awareness of the field. For example, Chen Kaige’s “Farewell My Concubine” Li An’s “The Wedding Banquet” Zhang Yuan’s “East Palace and West Palace”. To a certain extent, it also expresses the concern of Chinese language films for cool kids. In addition, the first generation of Chinese music cool kids: Zhang Guo Rong is also very famous. I summarized the original meaning of cooler is to tear off the original label. And then replace it with a question mark, it is a challenge to mainstream society
At first my idea for the commons was to make a 24-hour city library, and I thought reading could bring us progress in different areas. In the end, our group unanimously decided to use Cooler, and although we didn’t adopt it, we did participate in Beth’s workshop.The group PPT was completed by me and Wang Li Si Rui, in the process of making the PPT we nicely alienated our concept of the commons again.
This is my research in the group Miro.
Lu’s undergraduate background was a great help to our group in our data collection. In China (and indeed in Confucian societies as a whole, i.e. East Asian societies), sexual minorities are an area that is rather shunned by the mainstream media, which both exists openly and does not give equal attention and rights to them. The identity and psychological needs of this group have been ignored, which is why Farewell My Concubine, a film discussing transgender people in a time of social transition, has been a classic since 1997, a film that has been confronted and discussed, and which was re-released in South Korea again in 2020 (and even re-released five times in South Korea).
This is really a great blog! I really like the 24 hour library project that you best presented, in fact libraries can be seen as “cultural commons” in a way, your understanding of the commons is based on the research you did with the group, so some parts of it I didn’t understand very well, but everything you expressed flowed very well.
Very interesting idea, The blog shows about the digital and political commons. The author gives a clear perspective and draws on the political science that conceptualizes the commons as a holistic social system. After that, there can be seen vital structure group work, studying the cool kid’s commons with the aim of contributing to reducing the current stereotypes in China, which was a popular topic in this era’s china. The descriptions of experimental procedures, the presentation of the experimental results, and the discussions, are detailed.