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.First, it bears the principle of the civilcommons in pure form, with none of the difficulties of distribution amongdifferent persons or groups which we know well with space-occupyinggoods in proportion to their scarcity.The civil commons, we know, is thatwhich protects and enables the access of all members of a community to the vitalgoods of life.Language does this in the comprehensive ways we haveseen, and it does so on all the planes of life the more effectively and broadlyits wealth is open to all s use and enjoyment.The more radically individualtheir comprehension and communication of it, the more life s vital rangesare enabled to differentiate and extend.The other primary sense in which language is the model of the civilcommons is in its concealment as an inherently and universally sharedgood.Language is a community-based structure, and the more it is so thegreater its powers are for the individuals of a community.This is not,however, a property of language that is observed in the mountains of workswritten on language.This concealment of language s underlying natureTHE GREAT VEHICLE OF THE CIVIL COMMONS 209as communal and the basis of individuality at the same time is typical ofall the life goods of the civil commons.Their wealth for individuals ascommon property conflicts with the narrow metaphysic of global marketdoctrine because the latter s inherent logic is to privatize all that it canprivatize as priced goods for corporate shareholder profit, which is thenproclaimed as the necessary ground of  individualism.Language is a model of the civil commons, then, in the revealing sensethat its nature as a shared life good promoting individuation is systemicallyrepressed.What should be self-evident to the most everyday sensibilityrequires a dis-covery to reveal it.If you doubt this, identify a single placewhere this property of language is observed.This is one reason why thecivil commons has been so effectively invaded and occupied by the globalmarket and its programme of unbounded privatization.As with language,we do not see the civil commons underneath us that our lives stand on.Thatis why the most deeply excavating step of our condition and of the socialimmune competence to correct is on the level of language s commonground  the primary shared capacity for human resistance to thedisaggregating forces of the global market.But as every kind of expressionand denotation of language itself becomes the  intellectual property oftransnational corporations, we are slow to awake to this enclosure of thecivil commons at its most foundational level of all.As even those who livefrom language in the realm of higher education watch their words andconstructions privately appropriated by corporately owned journals whopay nothing to universities or authors for them, and still rejoice in their academic publication , we can see how the occupation proceeds with thecollaboration of the occupied.This is the invasion of humanity s consciouslyconstructed life-ground at the level of the mind itself.On the other hand, how far can this enclosure of the civil commons oflanguage proceed if its very concepts of masking the invasion   freedom , free market ,  capital ,  cost efficient ,  terrorism ,  competitiveness , and globalization  are understood by the community of language users tomean the opposite of their corporate assertion? How effectively can  theglue of ideology work if its every word is recognized as absurd, and as anattack on the common basis of humanity, its shared speech and meaning?Language moored in an awakened civil commons conscious of itselfprovides a site of battle over every word this carcinogenic system mustdisguise itself in to advance a step.It is not  words only at stake, but theunderlying deciding medium of society s struggle for its shared life.An extension of the civil commons of language that moves it across theglobe in seconds is the international electronic network that we nowknow as the Internet.Its technology began and continues as a civilcommons formation, as well, and is known as  shareware.Althoughgrounded in civil commons technology, and used as a civil commonsmedium open to all who choose to participate, it is represented in the globalmarket as a triumph of the global market, invented by its military-funded210 THE CANCER STAGE OF CAPITALISMcorporate researchers, and the next major medium of marketing in theworld.All this is predictable from the occupying forces of this systemwhich claims everything as properly market created, manufactured andsold for a profit.But, in reality, military contractors only pursued analready existing communications infrastructure developed by scientistsand universities  ARPANET.The advanced technology itself arose fromthe civil commons.The  shareware , as it is still now designated amongits non-commercial users, was structured as a civil commons resource that is, for the universal access of all members of the community who soughtits communicative life-good.As a civil commons invention,  sharewarelike most else of human-constructed value was created, regulated and usedwithout profit-driven money prices of the global market selecting as usersonly those who pay costs plus margin to private corporations.As DouglasRushkoff puts it,  the fact remains that every single major developmentin online technology and communication came as shareware.Since bigbusiness took the wheel, we haven t seen anything significant. 31The machines used to convey the universally accessible messages arenow priced, of course.Machine-made goods have long been the masterdomain of private corporations, the one important area in which theglobal market seems competent in its productions and control  if we leaveout the  external effects of this market production on workers, communitiesand environments by unhealthy working conditions, industrial pollutantsand unrecycled waste, which only effective regulation by public authority another civil commons formation  can control.But even here, evenwith the machine medium of the universally accessible goods of shareware,the global market  creates all sorts of compatibility problems as corporationsfight for dominance in the marketplace.It s harder to send attached filesto multiple recipients or create a Web site than it was five years ago.While shareware developers create problems to address universal needs,businesses develop programmes in order to create needs [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]