The Commons vs Creative Commons Conclusion: Commoner Is Not An Identity

This is the final part of an initial 5,000 word draft of a specially commissioned piece on the commons and Creative Commons. It’s for an open-access online glossary on the contemporary condition and near future that's being produced by the Chinese Academy of Art.

Contents:

I: Introduction * Conceptual Overview * Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons * Liberal Commons * Radical Left Commons * From Capitalism to Postcapitalism – and Back Again

II: The Undercommons * Latent Commons * Uncommons * The Unknown Common * Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-wing

III: Creative Commons * CC and AI * Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons * The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions * Alternatives to Creative Commons

IV: Conclusion: Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity * Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

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Conclusion 

Two further common misunderstandings about the commons are worth mentioning.

Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity

The Commons, for some, is actually a noun not a verb. The emphasis here is less on understanding the commons in terms of shared assets – or even as a particular kind of community, style of collective life, place or space – and more on conceiving the commons as a practice. This is why they prefer to think in terms of commoning rather than commons: to highlight its processual and performative nature. It is an approach evident in many accounts of the radical commons and the emphasis placed there on commoning: the ongoing generative social practices through which both the commons and the community of commoners are invented, constituted and sustained. Balser and de la Cadena’s description of the uncommons as “a commons that would be a continuous achievement” – not a fixed goal or final endpoint but a permanent becoming – also deserves to be highlighted in this context (2018, 19).

So, too, does the process-oriented account of the commons provided by Stavros Stavrides. When community formation is directed toward generating shared space and purpose – the common – it must be understood as open-ended and constantly evolving, Stavrides insists. This is because the commons does not exist as a stable, pre-existing reality to be seized and held on to. Nor are commoners defined by fixed identities that exist prior to their taking part in the living process that is commoning. On the contrary, both emerge through – and are only born in – the act of commoning. This orientation carries important implications. For one thing, it displaces the idea that community membership depends on a shared, pre-given identity held in common. Instead, the identities of the commoners are formed in and through the practices of sharing and participation in the commons. For another, belonging is understood as a matter of action rather than origin. Those who take part in commoning become members of a community that itself comes into existence through those very acts (Stavrides 2022, 26–27).

Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

Although many people refer to “the commons” as if its meaning were self-evident, without need of further clarification or explanation, there is no single, universally-agreed upon idea of the commons. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all model for how commons are organised or function. “Every instance of collaboration makes room for some and leaves out others,” Tsing says of the latent commons (255). Meanwhile, David Harvey notes how “good solutions at one scale (the ‘local,’ say) do not necessarily … make for good solutions at another scale (the global, for example).” As a result, issues concerning the commons are “contradictory and therefore always contested” (2012, 69-71). Even among advocates there is no shared understanding of the commons. Ironically, this is not something they have in common.

Moreover, commons themselves are not inherently harmonious or homogeneous. For all their mutual bonds, participants in a commons can differ in important ways. The relationships that connect them may be shaped as much by division and divergence as by solidarity and collective interest. These relationships, too, may be something commoners do not have in common.

Along with the difficulty of managing a participatory and non-hierarchical commons across a variety of scales, not just the small and local, this ultimate lack of cohesion and shared purpose may explain why a commons-based movement or collective political subject large enough to meaningfully challenge, let alone replace, capitalism and its methods of organising resources and labour has yet to emerge. At the same time, this may be just what the commons and commoning is. Rather than being a single, self-identical concept, “the commons” is better understood as a dynamic site where a rich diversity of individuals, groups, communities, movements, organizations, initiatives and practices – each with distinct needs and interests regarding the use, management, reproduction, exchange and distribution of natural and cultural resources – intersect, but remain in tension.

Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2nd edition, with a new Preface) by Timothy Morton: New Open Access Book

Open Humanities Press is pleased to announce the publication of Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (2nd edition, with a new Preface) by Timothy Morton.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Realist Magic is available open access (= it can be downloaded for free): 

https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/realist-magic-2nd-ed/

Book description

Object-oriented ontology offers a startlingly fresh way to think about causality that takes into account developments in physics since 1900. Causality, argues Object Oriented Ontology (OOO), is aesthetic. In this book, Timothy Morton explores what it means to say that a thing has come into being, that it is persisting, and that it has ended. Drawing from examples in physics, biology, ecology, art, literature and music, Morton demonstrates the counterintuitive yet elegant explanatory power of OOO for thinking causality. 

With a new Preface by Timothy Morton.

Author Bio

Morton is the author of the libretto Time, Time, Time (opera by Jennifer Walshe, 2019), and of numerous artworks including We Are the Asteroid (with Justin Guariglia, 2019); Come Fast from the Dark (with Andrew Melchior, 2024); and This Huge Sunlit Abyss From The Future Right There Next To You (with Björk, 2015). In 2018 Morton co-wrote and appeared with Jeff Bridges in Living in the Future’s Past, directed by Susan Kucera. Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair of English at Rice University.

Morton has written Hell: in Search of a Christian Ecology (Columbia, 2024); All Art Is Ecological (Penguin, 2021); Spacecraft (Bloomsbury, 2021); Being Ecological (Penguin, 2018); Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People (Verso, 2017); Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (Columbia, 2016); Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism (Chicago, 2015); Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minnesota, 2013); Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality (Open Humanities Press, 2013); The Ecological Thought (Harvard, 2010); Ecology without Nature (Harvard, 2007); 8 other books and 300+ essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, music, art, architecture, design and food. 
 
Series

The book is published as part of the New Metaphysics series: https://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/series/new-metaphysics/

Series Design

The New Metaphysics series design is by Katherine Gillieson with cover illustrations by Tammy Lu.

'Liquidate AI Art': 15 October Talk for Computer Arts Society

Liquidate AI Art 

Speaker: Gary Hall; Moderator: Sean Clark 18:00 BST, Wednesday, 15 October 2025 Other time zones here: https://www.timeanddate.com

This event is via Zoom only.  It is open to the public and  free but you need to book your place here: https://ComputerArtsSociety151025.eventbrite.co.uk

This talk expands on my recent book Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence. It argues for liquidating AI art, not out of a dismissal of artificial intelligence as techno-fascist (McQuillan), nihilist (Golumbia), parrot-like (Bender et al) synthetic shit (Crawford), but an insistence that art has always been created by assemblages of humans and nonhumans. There is no pure, authentic human creativity to distinguish from works generated with technologies like Stable Diffusion.  

The talk references the International Coalition for the Liquidation of Art – whose members included Gustav Metzger, first editor of the CAS bulletin PAGE – and especially Frieder Nake’s assertion in PAGE 18 that ‘there should be no computer art’. For Nake, art should not be divided into commodifiable styles based on the tools used, but should instead function as a radical force capable of disrupting the hierarchies of the bourgeois art world.  

Picking up on this challenge, ‘Liquidate AI Art’ shows how UK arts funding today overwhelmingly benefits upper- and middle-class, privately educated Oxbridge graduates. Efforts to promote inclusion through social mobility risk reinforcing this unjust system. What’s needed is a redistribution of resources – e.g. through the liquidation of the UK’s copyright regime – to support radically different artistic practices beyond the white, male, middle-class, liberal humanist norm. 

The event will be recorded and uploaded to the CAS YouTube Channel.

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The next CAS meeting will feature a talk by Anika Meier on Wednesday, 19 November 2025, via Zoom.
You can see our future programme here: https://computer-arts-society.com/events/index.html

Online event on Masked Media: 12 September, 2015

Above are details of an upcoming online 12 September event on my new book Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence (London: Open Humanities Press, 2025):

Co-organised by Culture Machine and 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos in Mexico city, the event is hosted by the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings / Laboratorio de Escrituras Contemporáneas, which is being launching with this discussion of Masked Media.

The idea for the Laboratory of Contemporary Writings emerged from a recent ACLA Seminar titled ‘Displacing Academic Practices in the Ruins of the Neoliberal University’. While linked to conversations around infrapolitics (e.g., https://culturemachine.net/vol-22-anthropocene-infrapolitics/), its focus is broader: on writing, subjectivity, students, ourselves, and how to respond to the conditions we’re living through today.

To join this event online, email: enlace@17edu.org

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On Masked Media: What It Means to be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence

If we want a more socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? 

It’s this question that Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, Radical Open Access Collective, and the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums have been testing some of the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge that are enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print through photography and video to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the masked black box that renders the anthropocentric, Euro-Western knowledge-making practices of the arts and humanities invisible – ensuring the human is kept ontologically separate from the nonhuman, be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no such thing as the human, the nonhuman already being in(the)human. 

Masked Media is one such experimental project. It is not a 'human-authored' work. Instead, the thinking within it has been generated by a radically relational inhuman assemblage that includes AI and more. Although the book appears under a real name –  ‘Gary Hall’ – which, like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual property of a singular human individual, and is published under a Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. Masked Media demonstrates how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital importance to our understanding of everything from identity politics and the decolonialisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene. 

The Commons vs Creative Commons III: Some Problems, Distinctions and Alternatives - Including Signals, CC's Response to AI

This is the third part of an initial 5,000 word draft of a specially commissioned piece on the commons and Creative Commons. It’s for an open-access online glossary on the contemporary condition and near future that's being produced by the Chinese Academy of Art.

Contents:

I: Introduction * Conceptual Overview * Elinor Ostrom and the Tragedy of the Commons * Liberal Commons * Radical Left Commons * From Capitalism to Postcapitalism – and Back Again

II: The Undercommons * Latent Commons * Uncommons * The Unknown Common * Common Misunderstanding No.1: The Commons is Not Inherently Left-wing

III: Creative Commons * CC and AI * Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons * The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions * Alternatives to Creative Commons

IV: Conclusion: Common Misunderstanding No.3: Commoner is Not an Identity * Common Misunderstanding No.4: There is Not One Commons

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Creative Commons (https://creativecommons.org/)

Creative Commons has been widely praised for fostering a culture of sharing, remixing and reuse within the framework of copyright law, while still preserving certain rights for creators and content owners. To this end it offers several types of licenses, ranging from the most restrictive (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives, or BY-NC-ND) to the least restrictive (Attribution, or CC-BY), as well as the CC0 public domain legal tool, which enables creators to waive their copyright entirely. These licenses and tools allow authors, artists and educators to share their work (and, importantly, to receive acknowledgment, recognition and respect for it), while granting others varying degrees of freedom over what they can and cannot do with it.

For all these contributions, Creative Commons has several notable limitations. It was founded and championed by liberals such as Lawrence Lessig (2004) and James Boyle (2008), whose goal was to reform IP law, not abolish or radically rethink it. CC was designed to make copyright more balanced and “reasonable” by providing a choice between what Lessig positions as either “property” or “anarchy” (Lessig 2004, 11, 13). With some rights and freedoms being controlled “but not all,” the idea was to ensure copyright does not stifle innovation, business or competition (10). And, without doubt, Creative Commons plays an important role in (digital) culture, with an estimated two and a half billion works now available under some form of CC-license. Yet these licenses and public domain tools remain firmly embedded within the existing structures of copyright regulation. Far from challenging intellectual property (IP) regimes – say, by the kind of illegal or semi-legal tactics adopted by shadow libraries such as Sci-Hub – Creative Commons offers a more flexible approach that protects creatives and users from some of copyright’s extremes, without disrupting its core underlying logic.

Another key limitation is that the decision to apply a CC license, and to select which specific one to use, continues to rest entirely with the “voluntary action” of the original copyright holder (Lessig 2004, 11). As such, Creative Commons may benefit both professional and amateur members of the creative class to which Lessig and Boyle belong – “the new Walt Disneys” (9): artists, academics, designers, film makers, software developers and so forth – whose entrepreneurial opportunities to “flourish” (13) and themselves “Disnify the culture” (10) in turn are otherwise constrained by corporate ownership and control of IP. But it does little to confront deeper, systemic problems around the commodification and marketisation of culture and knowledge.

CC and AI

Rather than helping to produce a common subject, the framework of Creative Commons also assumes an highly individualistic, humanist and liberal model of authorship – and, some argue, of use as well. One exception is the proposed CC Signals initiative that Creative Commons is, at the time of this writing, developing in response to the extraction of large volumes of data from across the public web to train consumer-facing generative AI. As Creative Commons notes, “large AI models are benefiting from the labor, money, and care that goes into creating and maintaining the commons” while also functioning to deplete these shared resources: for instance, by “reducing the need for people to visit the original sources of information” (Creative Commons 2025b, 11, 9). Each signal – described as a global tool designed to be both machine and human readable – enables the stewards of large collections of content and data to declare their preferences regarding how they should be “used for machine reuse,” and how the machines (and the companies behind them) should give back to the shared knowledge ecosystem (Creative Commons 2025a). The aim, grounded in CC’s conviction that “universal access to knowledge and culture is a human right,” is to encourage people to continue to contribute to that ecosystem of open knowledge in an era of exploitative LLM AI (2025b, 4). And to do so without forcing stewards to adopt the all-or-nothing position of either completely allowing or completely preventing such machine reuse, be it technologically or by expanding copyright to make it more restrictive of AI – precisely the kind of blunt binary choice Creative Commons was originally devised to avoid. CC is careful to emphasize that signals “is not about creating new property rights; it is more like defining manners for machines” and changing social norms that way through coordinated collective action (2025a; 2025b, 25). Yet this only serves to draw attention to another of the shortcomings of the existing Creative Commons licensing model (which is separate from CC signals): it fails to adequately account for collective and nonhuman contributions to creative production, rendering it incompatible with more ontologically radical and heterogenous approaches.

Common Misunderstanding No.2: Creative Commons is Not a Commons

Despite the impression given by its name – and despite its self-description as an “organization that empowers people to grow and sustain the thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture” as a means of benefiting humanity (Creative Commons 2025b, 3), not to forget its use by many proponents of the commons – Creative Commons does not, strictly speaking, function as a (creative) commons. A commons typically refers to a shared, non-proprietary resource or space that is collectively managed and governed, often without strict adherence to individual ownership models. By contrast, Creative Commons licenses grant rights to users on a case-by-case basis at the discretion of the individual copyright holders (or those designated content stewards acting in their stead such as companies).

The Commons and Creative Commons: Some Distinctions

Key differences between the commons and Creative Commons include:

• Shared access vs. ownership: The commons challenges notions of exclusive ownership, emphasising collective production, use and protection. Creative Commons recognises and prioritises the rights of the individual copyright holder, placing their control over the work before any consideration of potential users’ rights.
• Community management vs. individual choice: Commons governance involves social processes, negotiations, contracts and sometimes legal frameworks that establish, maintain and actively enforce community-based stewardship. Creative Commons provides a range of licenses and public domain tools for individual authors to select from according to what they consider to be most appropriate for them.
• Social relations vs. licensing framework: Commons involve community relationships, participation and reciprocity. Creative Commons licenses are legal instruments that do not inherently encourage such social dynamics, at least not in the same way, applying only when copyright applies, which is what gives them “bite” (Creative Commons 2025b, 22). (Creative Commons can however be considered part of the larger ecosystem of publicly shared knowledge that includes the likes of Wikipedia, open access, open data licenses and the Wayback Machine, the informal social contract of which is based on a certain degree of reciprocal trust and exchange – or was until advances in AI placed it at risk.)
• Capitalist and colonialist vs. Indigenous and collective: Creative Commons is ill-suited to forms of cultural production that do not align with Western modernist-liberal – some would insist capitalist and colonialist – conceptions of authorship and intellectual property. Many Indigenous populations create culture collectively, treating it precisely as common. This makes it difficult to designate a single copyright holder (or a representative entity able to act as one) as required to apply a Creative Commons license. As a result, CC is limited in its ability to protect Indigenous cultural expressions from appropriation and exploitation by global capital or otherwise avoid repeating the ongoing dynamics of settler colonialism.

Alternatives to Creative Commons

While they are less widely known – perhaps precisely because they present more of a challenge to the dominant intellectual property regime and Western modernist-liberal frameworks – there exists a range of alternatives to Creative Commons and its licenses that are better equipped to support the collective creation, stewardship and protection of the commons. These include: 

• Anti-Capitalist Software License (https://anticapitalist.software/) 

Oriented toward a post-capitalist future, the Anti-Capitalist Software License (ACSL) enables the sharing of software that supports individuals, collectives, worker-owned cooperatives and nonprofits. Use by entities that profit from exploitative labour practices is explicitly restricted, however. The ACSL draws a clear distinction between commerce and capitalism: commercial use of software is permitted, so long as the organisation concerned is not structured along capitalist lines. In this way the ACSL aims to give such non-capitalist actors a strategic “advantage so that they may survive under capitalism – and outlive it.”

• CopyFair License (https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/CopyFair_License) 

A license designed to allow sharing of resources within the commons while excluding extractive commercial use by private companies. Inspired by ideas of reciprocity and fairness, CopyFair permits use by communities, cooperatives, commons-based enterprises and nonprofit actors, but restricts access to corporations that do not give back to the commons in the required manner.

• Copyfarleft (https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Copyfarleft) 

As its name suggests, this is a radical left-oriented adaptation of copyleft and the latter’s aim to provide the users of a work with the freedom to copy, share and modify it, and the authors of a work the right to impose restrictions on its use (i.e., that any modified versions are released under similar, reciprocal, terms). Copyfarleft is designed to build counter-power within the commons by ensuring workers own the means of production. A copyfarleft license makes it “possible for producers to share freely and to retain the value of their labour product … but impossible for owners of private property to make money” by exploiting wage labour or accessing the common stock. Commercial use is therefore allowed, but only for worker-owned commons, collectives and cooperatives.

• CC4r: Collective Conditions for Re-Use (https://constantvzw.org/site/Collective-Conditions-for-Re-Use-CC4r,3483.html?w=https://constantvzw.org/wefts/cc4r.en.html)/; CC2r: Collective Commitment to Reuse

A collective, decolonial and trans-feminist commitment to reuse – rather than a license or legal tool – that understands authorship as a collaborative cultural practice, not the outcome of isolated individual creativity. CC4r/CC2r recognises the social and historical context in which creative work emerges and affirms that, in some cases, limiting or refusing reuse may be necessary. Instead of attaching finished permissions at the point of release, it encourages ongoing responsibility, experimentation, evaluation, contestation and revision. (Hence the transition from CC4r to CC2r.)  

• Peer Production License (PPL) (https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Peer_Production_License)

PPL aligns with the CopyFair approach, though its co-designer Dmytri Kleiner contends that it falls under the Copyfarleft category. It promotes commons-based production through a model grounded in reciprocity. Under the terms of the Peer Production License, only fellow commoners, cooperatives and nonprofit organisations are permitted to use and re-use the common stock – explicitly excluding extractive capitalist use that seeks to profit from the commons without offering something in return.

• Feminist Peer Production License (https://0xacab.org/labekka/f2f/-/blob/no-masters/license-f2f-en.md)

A feminist reworking of the Peer Production License, use for commercial purposes is restricted to cooperatives, non-profits, collectives and self-managed workers’ groups that operate according to feminist principles. Any profits or added value generated through the rights granted by the Feminist Peer Production License must be directed back into efforts aimed at challenging capitalism and dismantling patriarchy.

• Traditional Knowledge (TK) and Biocultural (BC) Labels (https://localcontexts.org/about/) 

Developed through the Local Contexts project, these labels provide Indigenous peoples, cultural institutions and researchers with practical tools to embed cultural meaning, historical depth and community-defined authority into the presentation and management of cultural heritage materials. These labels are designed to strengthen Indigenous governance and support community-led decision-making around questions of ownership, access and the culturally appropriate use of both historical and contemporary cultural content, as well as future collections of Indigenous culture and data.