Negative Commons
Context
The Emergence of the Concept of Negative Commons
Translated from [1].
Alexandre Monnin:
"In 2015, I came across Sauver le monde (Saving the World), a book by Michel Bauwens with a preface by Bernard Stiegler. Saving the world — that's quite a claim! At the time, the commons seemed to be presented as the solution to all our problems. But can we really place that burden on the shoulders of people who contribute to commons in practical, everyday ways? It's wonderful what you're doing: you're saving the world. That seems a little complicated to me.
So I approached the question from the opposite direction. We should no longer see the commons as the solution to everything, let alone as the solution to the Anthropocene. I'm not particularly drawn to solutionist thinking.
Instead, the questions become: What happens to the commons in the Anthropocene? And what kinds of commons do we inherit in the Anthropocene?
I wasn't aware that the term negative commons already existed, but it was very rarely used, almost a one-off occurrence. Around the same time, Sabu Kohso used the expression in relation to nuclear waste. In 2017, I gave a presentation at the Saint-Étienne Design Biennale, where I spoke about it publicly for the first time.
The idea is that certain realities are problematic, nobody wants them, yet the burden of dealing with them risks becoming a collective responsibility. Rather than leaving those who happen to live nearby to take care of them, we need a genuine process of commoning these realities.
This connects with an understanding of the commons based on commoning: commons are not simply things that already exist and that we take care of. Rather, there are realities that we elevate to the status of commons and institute as such.
In the same way, there are problematic realities that we will need to turn into commons in order to manage them in the future: dried-up rivers, polluted land, and abandoned or deteriorating infrastructure."
Characteristics
Two Types of Negative Commons: Ruined Ruins and Ruinous Ruins
Translated from [2].
Alexandre Monnin:
"What I have just described are primarily what I call ruined ruins: ruins that look like ruins, things that we already recognize as problematic.
But there may also be things that undermine the conditions for habitability even while they are still functioning. These too are problematic, and perhaps we should treat them as negative commons to prevent their proliferation and further development.
Perhaps smartphones, given their production conditions and planned obsolescence. Perhaps generative AI. Perhaps digital technologies in general, which are highly problematic from an environmental perspective. These would belong to the category of negative commons, not as ruined ruins, but as ruinous ruins: things that actively produce ruin.
Their development is exponential, which is unsustainable over the long term. Moreover, it depends on labour conditions that are far from acceptable. Foxconn's production lines are hardly an example of corporate social responsibility or a good quality of working life."
The Material Characteristics of Digital Negative Commons
Translated from [3].
Alexandre Monnin:
Digital technologies are what José Halloy calls zombie technologies: technologies whose metabolism is fundamentally incompatible with what we have learned over recent decades about how the Earth system functions.
We can characterize them in several ways.
First, they rely on stocks of non-renewable materials — minerals, metals, and metalloids — that must be extracted from the Earth's subsurface. This is already difficult and is likely to become increasingly so. It is very difficult to determine precisely when extraction will become impossible, because exploration continually reveals new reserves. Reserves are depleted when we do not explore, while known reserves change with exploration and with the technical and economic conditions of extraction. But at some point, this process may become increasingly difficult. We should be relying more on renewable resources rather than finite stocks.
Second, these technologies have relatively short functional lifespans, despite requiring extraordinarily sophisticated technical processes to manufacture them. Producing semiconductor chips, for example, is an extremely high-tech activity. It has even become the subject of geopolitical conflict: the United States does not want the expertise of a Dutch company to be transferred to China. These devices are certainly not products of low technology.
Finally, these components are manufactured using gallium, germanium, indium, and many other metals from the periodic table that do not participate in the major biogeochemical cycles, such as the carbon cycle. They therefore persist as waste for years and years, especially because recycling remains very limited, particularly for metals dispersed throughout digital equipment.
We talk about recycling materials that are not entirely recyclable, or that require energy to recycle. This is a false circularity: circularity that is possible only by investing substantial amounts of energy. And when materials are used in a dispersed way, as metals are in digital devices, even more energy is needed. Otherwise, recycling simply does not work, and we do not do it.
Taking materials from beneath the Earth's surface, making them function for a very short period, and then returning them to the environment in a form that will persist for tens of thousands of years is the opposite of the cycle we ought to establish. It is the opposite of a cyclical metabolism. When this process is scaled up to an enormous level, it becomes problematic in every respect.
This is not viable at the civilizational scale of thousands of years — the timescale on which José Halloy tries to think, and one that is generally absent from our own thinking.
If our civilization becomes digital, while we know that we cannot realistically project the continued existence of digital technology over thousands of years, there is necessarily a contradiction somewhere."
6. The Civilizational Contradiction of Digital Dependence
This is the central question.
When I speak of attachment, I do not mean merely psychological attachment, although that dimension is important. We are becoming increasingly attached to these technologies in a material and infrastructural sense.
This civilization cannot last for thousands of years. And the development of these technologies undermines our ability to remain within planetary boundaries.
So what are we to do with this relatively recent inheritance — this shift towards a civilization that is so deeply connected to digital technology?
We can say that we should stop. We can say that we should abolish it. But once all our infrastructures depend on digital technology, such proposals do not work in material terms. We are bound hand and foot. I would also add that this does not necessarily require a moral condemnation of digital technologies, particularly a condemnation of computation itself. Heidegger's condemnation of calculation is entirely consistent with his Nazism. These are not the intellectual resources I would draw upon to criticize digital technology, even though this kind of argument frequently appears in technocritical thinking."