NOTE: This series is currently under draft. Large portions may be missing, incomplete, or subject to change.
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.
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 |