v indicating free culture

 

"I’d been much affected by the writings of British economist E. F. Schumacher. In his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful, Schumacher argued that capitalism is dangerously out of sync with both nature and the human psyche. As an alternative, he envisioned an economy of small-scale enterprises, often employee-owned, using clean technologies."

 

"I saw the problem instead as a pair of tragedies: first a tragedy of the market, which has no way of curbing its own excesses, and second a tragedy of government, which fails to protect the atmosphere because polluting corporations are powerful and future generations don’t vote. This way of viewing the situation led to a hypothesis: if the commons is a victim of market and government failures, rather than the cause of its own destruction, the remedy might lie in strengthening the commons."

 

"The unifying theme of all these ventures was that they sought to earn a profit and improve the world at the same time."

 

"It occurred to me that 1 percent is an exceedingly small portion of sales for any business to return to the larger world, given that businesses take so much from the larger world without paying. How, for example, could we make any goods without nature’s many free gifts? And how could we sell them without society’s vast infrastructure of laws, roads, money, and so on?"

 

"Much as our Constitution sets forth the rules for government, so our economic operating system lays down the rules for commerce."

 

"Is capitalism a brilliant solution to the problem of scarcity, or is it itself modernity’s central problem?"

 

"When capitalism started, nature was abundant and capital was scarce; it thus made sense to reward capital above all else. Today we’re awash in capital and literally running out of nature. We’re also losing many social arrangements that bind us together as communities and enrich our lives in nonmonetary ways. This doesn’t mean capitalism is doomed or useless, but it does mean we have to modify it. We have to adapt it to the twenty-first century rather than the eighteenth. And that can be done."

 

"The key difference between versions 2.0 and 3.0 is the inclusion in the latter of a set of institutions I call the commons sector. Instead of having only one engine—that is, the corporate-dominated private sector—our improved economic system would run on two: one geared to maximizing private profit, the other to preserving and enhancing common wealth.

 

These twin engines—call them the corporate and commons sectors—would feed and constrain each other. One would cater to our “me” side, the other to our “we” side. When properly balanced—and achieving that balance would be government’s big

job—these twin engines would make us more prosperous, secure, and content than our present single engine does or can. And it would do this without destroying the planet."

 

"A series of ecosystem trusts that protect air, water, forests and habitat;

• A mutual fund that pays dividends to all Americans—one person, one share;

• A trust fund that provides start-up capital to every child;

• A risk-sharing pool for health care that covers everyone;

• A national fund based on copyright fees that supports local arts;

• A limit on the amount of advertising."

 

Government leans towards private corporations more than nature, community, or culture. When corporate power receeds then safeguards protecting the commons can be put in place.

 

"Society is indeed a contract . . . between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. — Edmund Burke (1792)"

 

"First, the civilization finds a formula— agriculture, irrigation, fishing, capitalism—for extracting value from ecosystems. Because the formula works so well, the civilization’s leaders become blindly attached to it. Eventually, the key resources on which the formula depends become depleted and the inflexible civilization collapses like a house of cards."

 

"This notion of the commons designates a set of assets that have two characteristics: they’re all gifts, and they’re all shared."

 

Nature - Community - Culture

 

Markets do not naturally protect the future.

 

"• By common wealth I mean the monetary and nonmonetary value of all the assets in the commons. Like stockholders’ equity in a corporation, it may increase or decrease from year to year depending on how well the commons is managed.

• By common property I mean a class of human-made rights that lies somewhere between private property and state property. Like private property, common property arises when the state recognizes it. Unlike private property, it’s inclusive rather than exclusive—it strives to share ownership as widely, rather than as narrowly, as possible.

• By the commons sector I mean an organized sector of our economy. It embraces some of the gifts we inherit together, but not all. In effect, it’s a subset of the given commons that we consciously organize according to commons principles. It’s small at the moment, but the point of this book is that we should enlarge it."

 

1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons” biologist Garrett Hardin "The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another. . . . But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest. . . . Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all."

 

"Hardin’s notion of tragedy was taken from philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, who in turn drew upon Aristotle. According to Whitehead, the essence of tragedy is “the remorseless working of things.” In Hardin’s view, commons are fated to self-destruct."

 

"The real danger to the commons is enclosure and trespass by outsiders."

 

"Just as our Constitution sets the rules for our democracy, so

our economic operating system sets the rules for capitalism." p.8

 

feedback loops - either correct the problem or make it worse.

Like steam engine with a governor

 

Dr. Seuss - The Lorax

A thneed is a thing we want but don’t really need.

separate look at demand for thneeds and real needs

 

"Money is the blood of our economic system; it shouldn’t be the soul." p.13

 

"They hang the man and flog the woman

That steal the goose from off the common,

But let the greater villain loose

That steals the common from the goose.

—English folk poem, ca. 1750"

 

"About ten thousand years ago, human agriculture and permanent settlements arose, and with them came private property. Rulers granted ownership of land to heads of families (usually males). Often, military conquerors distributed land to their lieutenants. Titles could then be passed to heirs—typically, oldest sons got everything. In Europe, Roman law codified many of these practices."

 

"In Roman times, bodies of water,shorelines, wildlife, and air were explicitly classified as res communes,resources available to all. During the Middle Ages, kings and feudal lords often claimed title to rivers, forests, and wild animals, only to have such claims periodically rebuked. The Magna Carta, which King John of England was forced to sign in 1215, established forests and fisheries as res communes. Given that forests were sources of game, firewood, building materials, medicinal herbs, and grazing for livestock, this was no small shift."

 

"The rationale for private property is that it boosts economic production,

but the commons has a rationale, too: it provides sustenance for all. Both sides must be respected."

 

"Locke believed that God gave the earth to “mankind in common,” but that private property is justified because it spurs humans to work. Whenever a person mixes his labor with nature, he “joins to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.” But here Locke added an important proviso: “For this labor being the

unquestionable property of the laborer,” he wrote, “no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” In other words, a person can acquire property, but there’s a limit to how much he or she can rightfully appropriate. That limit is set by two considerations: first, it should be no more than he can join his labor to, and second, it has to leave “enough and as good” in common for others. This was consistent with English common law at the time, which held, for example, that a riparian landowner could withdraw water for his own use, but couldn’t diminish the supply available to others."

 

"Despite Locke’s quest for balance, the English commons didn’t last. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the movement to enclose and privatize it accelerated greatly. According to historian Karl Polanyi, this enclosure was the great transformation that launched the modern era. Local gentry, backed by Parliament, fenced off village lands and converted them to private holdings. Impoverished peasants then drifted to cities and became industrial workers. Landlords invested their agricultural profits in manufacturing, and modern times, economically speaking, began."

 

"In the latter, he went on, equality is impossible, but in the former, “all individuals have legitimate birthrights.” Since such birthrights were diminished by enclosure, there ought to be an “indemnification for that loss.”

 

Paine therefore proposed a “national fund” that would do two things:

Pay to every person, when arrived at the age of twenty-one years, the sum of fifteen pounds sterling, as a compensation in part, for the loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property: And also, the sum of ten pounds per annum, during life, to every person

now living, of the age of fifty years, and to all others as they shall arrive at that age."

 

"The plot is almost always the same: when a commons acquires commercial value, someone tries to grab it. In the old days, that meant politically connected individuals; nowadays, it means politically powerful corporations."

 

"As former Secretary of the Interior Walter Hickel said, “If you steal $10 from a

man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.”"

"the other half is a

form of trespass called externalizing—that is, shifting costs to the commons."

 

"When I speak in this book of corporations, I’m speaking of a very

special institution: the publicly traded stock corporation. This is an

institution with a board of directors, a set of executive officers, and a

fluctuating set of shareholders to whom the directors and officers are

legally accountable. These corporations have an explicit mission: to

maximize return to stock owners."

 

"In 1886, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that corporations were “persons” entitled

under the Fourteenth Amendment to the same protections as living citizens. In effect, a corporate franchise became a perpetual grant of sovereignty, with the sovereign powers consisting of immortality, self-government, and limited liability."

p.21

"These changes not only gave corporations great economic power; they conferred political power as well. Unlike average citizens, corporations have large flows of money at their disposal. With this money they can hire lobbyists, sway public opinion, and donate copiously to politicians. They can also sue, or threaten to sue, whenever it serves their needs. The one thing they can’t do is vote, but

with all their extra powers, voting is hardly necessary." p.21

 

"This was a major phase change for capitalism. Before, people wanted more goods than the economy could provide. Demand, in other words, exceeded supply, and we lived in what might be called shortage capitalism. We could also call it Capitalism 1.0.

 

After the change, we shifted into surplus capitalism, or what I call Capitalism 2.0. In this version, there’s no limit to what corporations can produce; their problem is finding buyers. A sizeable chunk of GDP is spent to make people want this unneeded output. And credit is lavishly extended so they can buy it.

 

This historic shift can be described another way. A century ago, our chief scarcity was goods. It thus made sense to sacrifice other things in pursuit of goods, and capitalism was masterful at doing this. Today we’re waist-deep in thneeds, and our scarcities are different.Among the middle classes, the top scarcities, I’d say, are time, companionship, and community (see figure 2.2).

 

Among the poor, there remains a lack of goods, but that lack isn’t due to a shortage of production capacity—it’s due to the poor’s inability to pay. The critical scarcity here, in other words, is income."

 

"In 2005, a United Nations–sponsored research team reported that roughly 60 percent of the ecosystems that support life on earth are being used unsustainably. Such overuse, reported the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, increases the likelihood that abrupt, nonlinear changes will seriously affect human well-being. The potential consequences include floods, droughts, heat waves, fishery collapse, dead zones along coasts, sea level rises, and new diseases." p.25

 

"The United States, for example, with 5 percent of the world’s people, has

dumped nearly 30 percent of our species’ cumulative carbon dioxide wastes into the atmosphere." p. 26

 

"In cold numbers, the top 5 percent owned more than the bottom 95 percent" p.27

 

"Capitalism by its very design maximizes returns to existing wealth owners." p.28

 

"Thus, of the total gain in marketable wealth that occurred in the United States

between 1983 and 1998, more than half went to the top 1 percent." p.29

 

"One is that, once material needs are met, happiness is based on comparative rather than absolute conditions. If your neighbors have bigger houses than you do, the fact that yours is smaller diminishes your happiness, even though your house by itself meets your needs. In the same way, more income wouldn’t make you happier if other people got even more. That’s why an affluent country can get richer without

its citizens getting happier."

 

"you’re no good without Brand X—breeds the opposites of gratitude and contentment,

two widely acknowledged precursors of happiness. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, the average American encounters about three thousand such messages each day."

 

"Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense . . . of those who have some property against those who have none at all.

—Adam Smith, 1776"

 

"Capital’s primacy thus isn’t an accident, nor the fault of George W. Bush. It’s what happens when capitalism inhabits democracy."

 

"the head of public lands in the Interior Department is a former mining industry lobbyist, the head of the air division at the EPA is a former utility lobbyist, the second in command at EPA is an ex-Monsanto lobbyist, and the head of Superfund cleanups at EPA (which makes industry clean up its toxic wastes) formerly advised

companies on how to evade Superfund." p.35-36

 

"By contrast, ordinary citizens are cash-poor, unorganized, and ill-informed. They amble to the polls a few times per decade, if that. Of all the players in politics, they’re the easiest to fool."

 

"Mancur Olson’s logic of collective action. Olson, a Harvard economist, argued that unless the number of players in a group is very small, people won’t combine to pursue their common interests."

 

"Not even seated at democracy’s table—not organized, not propertied, and not enfranchised—are future generations, ecosystems, and nonhuman species." p.38

 

"The idea of using taxes to protect nature dates back to 1920, when Cambridge University’s top economist, Arthur Pigou, proposed it."

 

Federal Reserve Board created in 1913 to manage money supply.

"The genius of the Fed is that its governors can make tough economic decisions without risking defeat at the polls."

 

"Today, nearly a third of the land in the United States is government-owned."

 

"the Mining Act of 1872, under which private companies can stake claims to mineral-bearing lands for $5 an acre, and pay no royalties on the minerals they extract. Every attempt to reform this antiquated law has failed because of the mining companies’ political clout."

 

"These practices occur because the Forest Service is not a trust committed to ecosystem preservation, but a politically influenced agency dedicated to “multiple use” of government-owned forests." p.43

 

"Today, twenty-two states hold about 155 million acres in trust for public schools and colleges—which is to say, for future generations. Like the federal government, the state trusts lease much of their land for oil drilling, timber cutting, and cattle grazing. The trusts’ duty is to preserve not the land itself but the income streams it generates. This creates beneficiaries (educators, students, parents) who

monitor the land managers closely."

 

"Further, even though the state trusts aren’t bound to protect ecosystems per se, they tend to do so because they have a long-term calculus."

 

First, ownership isn’t the same thing as trusteeship. Owners of property—even government owners—have wide latitude to do whatever they want with it; a trustee does not. Trustees are bound by the terms of their trust and by centuries-old principles of trusteeship, foremost among which is “undivided

loyalty” to beneficiaries.

Second, in a capitalist democracy, the state is a dispenser of many valuable prizes. Whoever amasses the most political power wins the most valuable prizes. The rewards include property rights, friendly regulators, subsidies, tax breaks, and free or cheap use of the commons. The notion that the state promotes “the common good” is sadly naive.

Third, while free marketers are fond of saying that capitalism is a precondition for democracy, what they neglect to add is that capitalism also distorts democracy. Like gravity, its tug is constant. The bigger the concentrations of capital, the stronger the tug."

 

"First, we must have a proper view of government’s role. That role isn’t to run the economy, or even to manage the commons directly; it’s to assign common property rights to trustworthy guardians who will. Second, we must have a plan to fix our economic operating system, not just to put patches on symptoms. And third, we must recognize that the duration of any anticorporate ascendancy will be brief, and that we must use that small window to build institutions that outlast it."

 

"The corporation is an externalizing machine, in the same way that a shark is a killing machine. There isn't any question of malevolence or of will. The enterprise has within it, as the shark has within it, those characteristics that enable it to do that for which it is designed.

—Robert Monks, 1998" p.49

 

"I argue that private corporations, operating in unconstrained markets, can allocate

resources efficiently but can’t preserve them."p.49

 

"The algorithms are: (1) maximize return to capital, (2) distribute property income on a per-share basis, and (3) the price of nature equals zero. The starting condition is that the top 5 percent of the people own more property shares than the

remaining 95 percent."

 

"For all practical purposes, the publicly traded corporation is a slave to its algorithm."

 

"As The Economist has written, “The great virtue of the single bottom line is that it holds managers to account for something. The triple bottom line does not. It is not so much a license to operate as a license to obfuscate.”"p.52

 

Coase

 

"Imagination is more important than knowledge.

—Albert Einstein, 1929"

 

The commons sector to offset the corporate sector and organize and protect natural assets. Create common property overseen by variety of institutions - not a monoculture. Resource: limited or inexhaustable?

 

"our common wealth. Each of us is the joint recipient of a vast inheritance. This shared inheritance includes air and water, habitats and ecosystems, languages and cultures, science and technologies, social and political systems, and quite a bit more."

 

"Despite our obsession with private wealth, most of what we cherish, we share. To believe otherwise is to imagine a flower’s beauty owes nothing to nutrients in the soil, energy from the sun, or the activity of bees."

 

"In these commons, managing institutions should maximize public access and minimize private tollbooths."

 

"As Locke argued, it’s okay to privatize parts of the commons as long

as “enough and as good” is left for everyone forever."

 

PUT FUTURE GENERATIONS FIRST

 

"bound by the precautionary principle: when in doubt, err on the side of safety."

 

"Whereas private property is inherently exclusive, common property strives to be inclusive. It always wants more co-owners or participants, consistent with preservation of the asset."

 

one person - one share

 

"everyone should receive equal shares of the income derived from selling limited usage rights."

 

"Currently, private property owners enjoy a near-monopoly on the privilege of receiving property income. But as the Alaska Permanent Fund shows, it’s possible for common property co-owners to receive income too."

 

"Since common property rights are birthrights, they shouldn’t be tradeable the way corporate shares are. This means commons owners wouldn’t reap capital gains. Instead, they’d retain their shared income stakes throughout their lives, and through such stakes, share in rent, royalties, interest, and dividends."

 

"God gave the care of his earth and its species to our first parents. That responsibility has passed into our hands.

—National Association of Evangelicals, 2004"

 

Marjorie Kelly The Divine Right of Capital

 

"Corporate directors, for example, are bound by law to put shareholders’ financial gain first. If a raider offers a higher price for a publicly traded company than its current market value, directors have little choice but to sell, regardless of the consequences for workers, communities, or nature. Similarly, it’s the fiduciary duty of mutual funds, pension funds, and other institutional investors to seek the highest returns for their shareholders or beneficiaries." p.81

 

"The commons should trump capital." enforced by courts

 

"•Managers must act with undivided loyalty to beneficiaries.

•Unless authorized to act otherwise, managers must preserve

the corpus of the trust. It’s okay to spend income, but not

to diminish principal.

•Managers must ensure transparency by making timely

financial information available to beneficiaries."

 

"the common property trust. It’s a special kind of trust that manages assets that come from the commons and are meant to be preserved as commons. Common property trusts manage these assets first and foremost on behalf of future generations. They may have secondary beneficiaries, such as public education or residents of a particular locale, but such living beneficiaries take backseats to the yet-to-be-born. These trusts carry out their missions by owning and managing bundles of property rights."

 

"A conservation easement is a voluntary agreement between a landowner and a trust that permanently limits uses of the land."

 

Trusts. "They’d also have the power to auction limited pollution rights to the highest bidders, and to divide the resulting income among commons owners."

 

"rent has a more precise meaning: it’s money paid because of scarcity."

 

Henry George Progress and Poverty 1880s

 

Rich use the commons more and should therefore pay more rent. It keeps the poor poor if they don't get dividends but still have to pay the rent.

 

"But commons rent, if fully paid, would boost living standards for the poor much more than for anyone else. And unlike other forms of help for the poor, commons rent can’t be derided as welfare. It is, technically, unearned income, but no more so than dividends received by inheritors of private wealth. It’s property income, and should be a universal property right."

 

Trust accountable to common property owners

Government accountable to?

 

"once selected, trustees should have secure tenure, and—like judges—lengthy terms. Indeed, trustees should be like judges in other ways: professional, impeccably honest, well-compensated, and honored. Being a commons trustee should be a distinguished and attractive calling."

 

"It might be argued that, by shielding trustees from direct political influence, we’d make them—and commons trusts generally—undemocratic. The same could be said, however, for our courts."

 

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

—U.S. Declaration of Independence, 1776"

 

"John Locke’s response to royalty’s claim of divine right was the idea

of everyone’s inherent right to life, liberty, and property. Thomas

Jefferson, in drafting America’s Declaration of Independence, changed

Locke’s trinity to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

 

"Without great difficulty, we could add three birthrights to our economic operating

system: one would pay everyone a regular dividend, the second would give every child a start-up stake, and the third would reduce and share medical costs."

 

"We believe the poor are poor and the rich are rich because they deserve to be, but don’t consider that millions of Americans work two or three jobs and still can’t make ends meet. Plus, we think tinkering with the “natural” distribution of income is “socialism,” or “big government,”or some other manifestation of evil, despite the fact that our current distribution of income isn’t “natural” at all, but rigged

from the get-go by maldistributed property."

 

John Rawls, one of America’s leading philosophers, pre distribution of property and income.

 

"Every British child born after 2002 gets a trust fund seeded by $440 from the government—$880 for children in the poorest 40 percent of families. All interest earned by the trust funds is tax-free.)"

 

"It also seems sadly ironic that a nation that began by abolishing primogeniture is now on the verge of creating a permanent aristocracy of wealth. That said, if the inheritance tax is eliminated, an intergenerational transfer fund would be a fitting substitute."

 

"Individual Inheritance Accounts; they’d be front-of-life counterparts of Individual Retirement Accounts. After children turn eighteen, they could withdraw from their accounts for further education, a first home purchase, or to start

a business."

 

"He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine, as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1813"

 

"The Statute of Queen Anne, passed by the English Parliament in 1710, gave authors, not printers, title to their works. Such title was in the form of an exclusive right for fourteen years, with an option to renew for the same period. Thereafter, works would enter what we now call the public domain, and anyone could reprint them without further compensating the author." to entice them to write

 

"In this spirit, the U.S. Constitution gave Congress authority “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Shortly thereafter, in 1790, the first American copyright law gave authors the same deal as in Britain: exclusive rights for fourteen years, with an option to renew for

another fourteen. After that, their work entered the public domain."

 

"One consequence is that the public domain has been marginalized; corporations now take from the commons and give nothing back. Another is that the experience of culture has been altered; we’re now consumers of culture rather than participants."

 

"Ben Franklin...never sought a patent on his most famous invention, the Franklin stove. “As we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others,” he wrote, “we should be glad to serve others by any invention of ours.”"

 

"The Bayh-Dole Act of 1980, which let universities get patents on taxpayer-

funded research and license those patents to corporations, opened the floodgates. Corporate money rushed into academic labs, and with it came a corporate mindset. Where scientists once shared their discoveries openly, many now fear to discuss them, lest someone beat them to the patent office."

 

patent trolling

 

"To release science from corporate control, we need to take a twofold approach: apply more stringent standards for issuing patents, and provide more public funds for research (with the proviso that publicly funded discoveries stay in the public domain)."

 

"When commons are scarce or threatened, we ought to limit aggregate use, assign property rights to trusts, and charge market prices to users. When commons are limitless (like culture, the Internet, and potentially the airwaves), our challenge is the opposite: to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number at the lowest cost. To create scarcity where it doesn’t need to exist diminishes rather than enlarges our well-being."

 

American Permanant Fund

 

Children's Opportunity Trust

 

Spectrum Trust

 

"The premise behind a commons tax credit is that wealthy Americans owe more to the commons than they currently pay to the government in taxes. That being so, a commons tax credit would work like this. The federal government would raise the uppermost tax bracket by a few percentage points. At the same time, it would give

affected taxpayers a choice: pay the extra money to the government, or contribute it to one or more qualified commons trusts. If people do the latter, they get a 100 percent tax credit, thereby avoiding additional taxes. The message to the wealthy thus is: You have to give back more. Whether you give it to the IRS or directly to the commons is up to you. If you want to eliminate the government middleman, that’s fine."

 

"Government in particular has four important roles to play:

1. Until it assigns responsibility for a commons to someone else, government is the default trustee, and should be held to trusteeship standards.

2. Government is the initial assigner and ultimate arbiter of property rights. Instead of privatizing nearly everything, it should assign more property rights to commons trusts and give commons rights precedence over capital’s.

3. Only government can broker inter- and intragenerational compacts like Social Security and Medicare. We need government to do this again for health insurance and the Children’s Opportunity Trust.

4. Government can help finance the reacquisition and restoration of previously privatized pieces of the commons. State and local governments in particular have the authority to issue long-term tax-exempt bonds, which can be used to acquire private land and water rights."

 

"We should, first of all, start noticing and talking about our common wealth. Whenever we see it, we should point to it and let the world know to whom it belongs.

 

Second, we should demand more birthrights and property rights than we have now. Rights that belong to everyone. Rights built into our operating system. Rights that protect future generations as well as our own.

 

Third, we should imagine and design multiple pieces of the commons sector—that is, organized forms we want the commons to take. And we should build and test our models wherever possible. Frequently in the past, models developed locally have both replicated on their own, and risen to the national level. That’s how Social

Security and many of our environmental laws emerged."

 

"So claim your birthright, and your children’s. Claim it in living rooms, at church, in barbershops, and hair salons. This is how movements begin."

 

"Berners-Lee wrote the codes for Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). More importantly, he persuaded CERN to release them into the world with no patents, licenses, or other strings attached. This made it possible for anybody to adopt them without fear of lawsuits or ever having to pay

a penny. Within a few years, the World Wide Web was ubiquitous."

 

Corporations + Commons = Capitalism 3.0

 

"This third version of capitalism is a logical successor to the first two. In Capitalism 1.0 we had a shortage of goods, in Capitalism 2.0 a surplus. In Capitalism 3.0 we’ll have plenty, but not too much. We’ll have more things we truly need—healthier ecosystems, communities, culture—and fewer thneeds. We’ll have a proper balance between our “me” and our “we” sides. We’ll be more connected and

less isolated, more secure and less stressed. Overall, I’d venture, we’ll be happier."

 

the price of nature will no longer be zero.