In Wendy Brown's brilliant book, "States of injury," she reserves her harshest criticisms against the left for abandoning the call for "freedom" in their struggles. Cowed by the anti-statism of the right proclaiming an ethnocentric and jingoistic "free" society, the left turned on the concept, emptying it of power and action.

I was at Sundance last week and the best of anything I saw while I was there was a panel discussion about Web 2.0. This being Sundance, a lot of big-up people were speaking on the panel, sponsored by "New Frontier" - the edgy, techy, interesting arm of the Festival.

Karen Swisher was moderating the panel and she was fantastic - very droll but well-equipped with a hyperactive bullshit-detector. She's a journalist with the Wall Street Journal and her take on Web 2.0 seemed to be: why are corporations such idiots, and why haven't they embraced this? As she put it: "If someone's going to eat your lunch, it might as well be you."

Michael Geist wrote an article in the Toronto Star today breaking down how Canada can become a leader in global broadbrand ranking, as well as take action to provide Canadians equal access to content it controls or helps to fund:

Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa, and Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce, is agitating for a national open-source network for all civil servants, including  City workers and academics.

Although Geist is addressing all civil servants he tends to save his harshest criticisms for the university and its industries. He points out in the linked interview that, “At the moment, we’ve got what strikes me as a ridiculous proposition where we fund the research and then spend thousands of dollars to purchase that research within our own institutions, and the public isn’t even granted broad access to it.”

He is among many others in Canada calling for an open-source repository where researchers, after publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals, would make it publicly accessible. John Willinsky, who directs the Public Knowledge Project at the University of British Columbia, is also a strong advocate of open-source, connecting it to a healthier public domain and political culture. Willinksy expands on these ideas in an excellent article where he highlights the convergence of open source, open access, and open science: underpinning these "open" movements is a shared understanding of freedom based on collective knowledge and mutual aid. Willinsky also touches on the relationship between the "information commons" and place-based political struggles, as well as providing a good introduction to "open" movements more generally.

UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission, encompassing hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos.

http://www.ubu.com/

It's true that Marx defined commodities not as things but as social relations, but it was Karl Polyani who depicted most graphically these precise social changes that occurred in the British countryside during the time of enclosures, famous calling this period "The Great Transformation."

Well, with the rhetoric of the "new enclosures" sweeping social and legal theory today, it is crucial to understand the concurrent and indeed constitutive social transformations that define these enclosures of the "intangible commons of the mind" (see James Boyle's "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain"). Intellectual property threatens the information commons, according to theorists and activists alike, but what is the relationship of these information commons to our changing social relations, or to political governance more generally?