As for global-scale players, yeah – I don’t want to hammer away at this, but “commons-based peer production” (we could wish for a shorter term) is global. It also kinda works in a local-barnraising regional way, but I suspect it works best in the framework of what some people (cue Jamais Cascio) call a “translocal community.”

Also, if you knock off work when your software project forks, the code just sits there. Whereas if you try that with an Amish barn the cows will freeze. Clearly is nice when the “commons” being constructed is abstract and sitting around in the dusty corners of a bunch of servers somewhere. Or when it can fit in your pocket.

*It is a new means of industrial production and potentially a different economic order; maybe there’s less to it than meets the eye, but it’s new, so, as a futurist, I’m necessarily interested. If I were a guy who was in earnest about “fighting market capitalism,” I don’t think I’d throw any bricks at the cops. I think I’d be devoting my efforts to removing the market price from goods and services, and the commons offers methods for that.

What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it.

With this diet metaphor in mind, I want to, if you like, start eating better. But, I also want to start growing a tastier tomato — regardless of how easy it is to pick, package, ship, or vend. The tomato is the story, my friend. This doesn’t mean I’ll be liveblogging a lot of ham-fisted attempts to turn “everything” off. But it does mean making mindful decisions about the quality of any input that I check repeatedly — as well as any “stuff” I produce. Everything. From news sources to entertainment programming, and from ephemeral web content down to each email message I decide to respond to. The shit has to go, inclusive.

To be honest, I don’t have a specific agenda for what I want to do all that differently, apart from what I’m already trying to do every day:
* identify and destroy small-return bullshit;
* shut off anything that’s noisier than it is useful;
* make brutally fast decisions about what I don’t need to be doing;
* avoid anything that feels like fake sincerity (esp. where it may touch money);
* demand personal focus on making good things;
* put a handful of real people near the center of everything.

All I know right now is that I want to do all of it better. Everything better. Better, better.