I’ve just started with a new project or course or whatever you want to call it with a dear friend. Looks like it’s gonna be a structured way of going through a journey of self-discovery that we had already embarked on. So we’re very excited. It’s Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way.” I had an initial resistance to the spiritual aspect of the book but with several recommendations, I decided to give it a try because she doesn’t force any way of thinking on you and what she says is pretty reasonable and inspiring and intriguing. As someone who always considered herself non-creative, I think I needed something to show me that creativity is not just paintings and we all have a creative force within us that just needs to be guided and channeled somehow. I literally, very concretely feel it! I told my friend on a psychedelic nightwalk that I feel within myself something like a force that I need to learn how to use, and I see it in most people but we’re always so preoccupied with work or whatever we do for a living. We use up all of our mental and physical energy for boring things we don’t really care about. It makes me so sad, what a fucking waste. And I told her I want to do something about it. And now we are. And this is one of many first steps. So coming back to the book, it’s a 12-week course based on 12 chapters which I haven’t read yet but it’s based on two uncompromisable main activities: morning pages and artist dates. Morning pages require you to start your day off with writing 3 pages, no matter what the content. And these are not meant to be shared, just to teach yourself that you don’t necessarily need some striking inspiration to engage in an act of creativity and it works like journaling where you empty your mind before starting your day. Artist dates are weekly minimum 2-hour dates with yourself, you are the artist. No one else is allowed to join and you can’t bail on yourself. And you do something nice, the way you would treat a date you’re really into. I’m taking myself to an open-air movie this week :) I’ve only done morning pages for two days and I’m already hooked. I’ve had a great two days, might be a coincidence but still! And I want to write, I got this irresistible urge to write today! So that’s what I’m doing and our topic is my side project, my DAO, my library, my community, or more accurately all of these things. This has been an intimidating piece for me because it means a lot so my perfectionism takes over but here I go.
So let’s start from where it all began, the conception of the idea. I’ve already mentioned elsewhere the psychedelic summer that I spent camping and how it did wonders for me and made me question just about everything. Anyway while we were going from camping place to camping place on the Lycian trail in the southwest of Turkey we had lots of ideas about how to make the best camping site ever. And this became a constant topic of discussion amongst us, we were gonna do it. But the idea evolved into so much more for me. Initially, we talked about the design and then the next step for me was that I didn’t want a commercial camping site. It was going to be organized in alternative ways. No money for example, you don’t buy services, you contribute to the ongoing life in the community whichever way you can and that is the basis for your existence there. So it turned from a campsite to a community for me. We want a stone amphitheater for example, there are so many in the ancient ruins in Turkey but there’s no way someone gives us one of them so I suggested we build it ourselves. And my friends joked that I was trying to build myself an ancient city, can’t say that that isn’t an attractive idea. So anyway, then I thought about the alternative learning communities or villages that we have in Turkey. There are two that I know of, and both have educational programs that vary in topics and are actually pretty interesting: Arkhé Project & Nesin Villages. You stay in tents or bungalows as far as I understand and complete mini-courses. But it’s still commercial and even a bit expensive in my opinion. I would love for my community to have a focus on knowledge and it’s already something I’m very engaged with in my personal life so why not?
So then I started thinking about what kind of an alternative learning community I envision and I had some ideas. First of all, I want to get rid of the hierarchical boring classroom space with a one-directional information flow in the form of lectures. So the educational activities would be designed by the people within the community with full freedom. They can do whatever they want and some examples of alternative teaching methods that pop into my mind are field trips, movies, fireside discussions, performances, book clubs, documentary viewings, games, simulations, arts & crafts, etc. The curriculum would be fully adjustable to the context. And what would the focus of the educational activities be? The way I see it, our traditional school systems suck because they don’t care about what would be best for us to learn in life, they care about what would be best for us to learn so that we can become productive workers. I had three focus points on my mind: Humanity, Nature, Art. When I say humanity, I mean basically anything about humanity (social sciences, humanities, cultural studies, etc.). when I say nature I mean natural sciences, human beings as nature, our relationship with nature, etc. And art is art, a very broad category of human creative endeavors. I want to do a pilot project (like a practice course with my friends) with a topic that is dear to me but I’m not sure where to start. Psychedelic Socialism? My thesis topic? I’ll figure that out later.
So to sum up where we are, it’s an alternative learning community in the form of a self-sustainable ecovillage. Or at least that’s the ideal end goal, it might have to start out not completely self-sustainable. And the evolution of the idea continues. I discovered the concept of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) in one of my favorite courses in my masters program. So DAOs are internet native communities, they’re basically a blockchain-based method/tool for social organization of any kind. Any group of people that come together for a common purpose can use a DAO to govern themselves. DAOs basically live on discord, that’s where the interaction mainly occurs. Then they have smart contracts which are basically pieces of code in which the rules defining the organiztion are written. They have tokens that are designable in how they work and they usually give you ownership & governance rights. So they are user-owned entities. The coolest part about them perhaps is that the governance structure and economic structure can be designed, or at least the most intellectually interesting part for me. And I think this presents a unique opportunity to experiment with alternative socioeconomic mechanisms. So that’s what my thesis will be focused on: what kinds of social outcomes do different token economics produce? How do we incentivize collaboration/cooperation/participation without coercion? I’m tackling the collective action problem or the social dilemma or the tragedy of the commons or the coordination problem or the moloch, whatever you call it. While going down the rabbit holes of web3, I realized that despite the possibility of any kind of organization emerging from this concept, most use cases were extremely interesting in that they had an anarchist feel to them. Their manifestos and visions were all very inspiring and exciting. And one observation I made was that they don’t usually create brand new things but take the things we have in web2 and make them better. So this platform I’m writing on, Mirror, is a decentralized version of WordPress or Medium. And its fucking amazing, I love it! I tried both others and am very happy to have found this one.
So this got me thinking, why don’t I create a DAO? I have a purpose too. My academic experience at Mannheim University showed me how fucked up a system academia is. Now I don’t envision to fix academia with one DAO, there’s already a Decentralized Science movement that collectively wants to do that, but I would love to contribute in what matters most to me. Here’s a video on DeSci:
Of the many issues with traditional academia, what bothers me most is the way we produce and disseminate knowledge. Because what is the purpose of academia if not to collectively produce knowledge and share it? And if that is the purpose, I hate to be a killjoy but we are falling very short of that goal. We don’t have a division of labor in teaching and research and not everyone wants to do both and it’s a hell of a lot of work to do both too. But people compromise on the teaching because there is more incentive to publish and no “real” reason to be a good teacher. And what happens with the publishing process? We work our asses off to produce knowledge, it’s fucking hard! And then what happens? we have the product of our intellectual work, an article. And guess what? we don’t get paid for it, no no, in fact we have to pay journals to publish them. And only if we pass through a very poorly designed peer-review process. And then you would expect the readers to be able to reach them for free, right? Nope, guess again. The articles are behind a paywall and fucking expensive ones too. Only universities ever pay a shit ton of money for the articles and that means that not only is the public not reaching the knowledge produced, but it’s stuck in universities and quite often within certain disciplines. And that’s even an overstatement, there are probably so many articles only the peer reviewers read. How is it that the knowledge we produce is not a public and common good? And even if the articles were public goods, we’ve practically created language barriers with the terminology we use and I feel like half the time we use those big complicated words to seem smarter. So what’s the point? It’s a waste of time! It’s distracting an enormous amount of people that give a shit and focusing their creative energies on things that will never make a difference. It’s so so so sad. I think a lot of academics forget this or ignore it though because they are salaried workers with the constant pressure to publish, no time to follow up on what actually happens with their ideas, no time for extra side projects. The system is counterproductive and I refuse to let my labor be wasted like that. I refuse to stand by and watch that happen to my fellow academics. I want to take back that energy and put it into something worthwhile, meaningful, satisfying, fun, purposeful.
There’s nothing wrong with writing a scientific article, but why leave it at that? We could use the knowledge produced within academia and transform it into content that is more impactful, easier to consume for the layperson, interesting and thought-provoking, and emotion-provoking. We can use those ideas and insights and turn them into movies, novels, photograph series, paintings, poems, documentaries, songs, games, podcasts, whatever the fuck we want. And some already do but its not the norm and it takes a lot of extra effort so there’s no incentive other than intrinsic motivation to do it. How would we do it? Well, we don’t have to individually learn all of those skills, there are people with so many different kinds of skills so why not collaborate on such creative intellectual projects? It would be sooo much fun! And so fulfilling! We could earn directly from our work and eradicate the barriers between us and our people, our communities. Knowledge in every form could be a public good. So I want a DAO that would free us in the production & dissemination of knowledge, a digital space for those that resonate with this idea to meet and interact and create. It’s a learning commons, a knowledge commons, or an academic commons.
And this combines with my initial idea for an ecovillage. The DAO can be the umbrella global organization that lives on the internet and we can have online public goods in the form of multimedia content. And then members like me could build their own villages as more localized physical centers for just plain living life and also to gather for our creative projects and in-person educational activities. I can see it! I now truly understand what a “vision” is, it’s so concrete! I can close my eyes and I see it and it’s so beautiful! I feel that I would do anything to achieve this goal, I can devote my life to this and I’ll die happy. It’s given me a purpose, a will to live, an adventure to embark on, a cause, a vision, a drive, a reason to take care of myself, a happy place, a home, peace, belonging… But I need help. I can’t do this alone and I don’t want to, the whole idea is based on a community. I need to perhaps take leadership to initiate the process, to get the wheels moving. And I can use my academic career as a means to understand what the best way to design this community would be. It’s like all the pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place, I know what I want to do and it all makes sense. It’s like my whole life has brought me to the conception of this idea and I will follow through with giving birth to it.
The spirit of the commons is the spirit of imagining, of bringing people and resources together, and creating a necessarily positive vision for the world not as it is, but as it could be. And commons are all around us: from community gardens, to certain kinds of open source software, to worker cooperatives. We participate in a commons when we submit our work to institutional repositories that are tended by communities with the goal of disseminating research to the world, and we participate in a commons when we collaborate with our neighbors and catch a glimpse of this vision of our fate. For libraries, the moment has never been more urgent and emergent – we have the tools in our hands, and it is up to us to make it happen.
I also found a fitting theme. With the hopefully approaching end of the pandemic, something wonderful has happened. Libraries are open again! Not to say that they weren’t open at all, but they had lost their appeal with the requirements to wear masks all the time, to present health documentation and to book your spot in advance. And I came back to the library for the first time after years. I remembered how much I’ve always loved this space and I thought about the different libraries I’ve loved over the years. All in very different places --countries even, at different times, with different meanings to different versions of me. So what is it about libraries that make them so great? I spent the last week thinking about this and I have a cool idea!
I remember when I was a kid, the library was my absolute favorite place! It was sort of like going to a park to play with imaginary new friends. Instead of swings and slides, it was a playground that had thousands of magical portals to new worlds (I always liked to think of the experience of reading in the way Cornelia Funke portrays it in Inkspell). I also liked bookstores, Barnes & Noble being my childhood favorite, so what’s the difference there? Well, as much as I liked Barnes & Noble, it created a sense of deprivation in me that libraries never did. When you go to a library you literally have access to everything in there because it’s the community’s to share: everything belongs to everyone within its walls, you’re only expected to be responsible and caring. When you go to Barnes & Noble, nothing belongs to anyone except the corporation unless the individuals have enough money to buy it. So the library was a huge space filled with endless opportunities for exploration & learning with no barriers, no exclusion, no bitter feeling of having a book on your mind that you just weren’t able to afford today but maybe next month you can try again. No abandoning books that you’ve already read to a shelf where no one else can benefit from the magic in its pages. When you think about it, libraries are perhaps one of the last remaining commons we have, books are one of the only goods we’re able to share effectively.
And libraries aren’t just about sharing books, they’re actually so much more than that. Did you know that libraries used to be Google? People would have a question, go and ask the librarian, they would do the research and get back to them. So interesting! Later in my life, the library became a space for learning. I would go to the library whenever I needed to focus on studying. This could be a collective study process or an individual one, libraries offer spaces for both. It became a place for me to give birth to new ideas, a delivery room of sorts. I remember when I needed to write I would just put myself in the library and let the magic happen, there was always something about the space that put me in a flow and helped to give some form & structure to my thoughts. After 3 years of not having this space, I was going crazy constantly trying to learn in an isolated, individual way in my room. Then I came to the library last week and oh the difference it made! Just having other people around me increased my motivation & concentration so much.
Let’s consider the history of libraries for a bit. So they were initially places to store information so that we could cumulatively advance our collective knowledge but they evolved into something more: community centers. Libraries don’t only have books anymore, they’ve expanded their collections to keep up with technological developments. They not only have various accessible multimedia content, they even adapt to local context and can be a center for sharing non-learning related materials such as kitchen supplies, electronics, etc. They can have training programs and workshops based on the needs of their community. Hell, they can even be a home for those who don’t have one. Some libraries welcome people to sleep there. I’ve actually done this a few times during my university years and it was a pretty common phenomenon. Not that comfortable maybe but it was something, it was a shelter. And I was never worried to leave my stuff unattended at the library, which is unlike pretty much any other public space, especially in Istanbul. It’s almost as if the competitive self-interested ethos of neoliberalism doesn’t exist within that space. It’s an impenetrable bubble.
So what is a library then? It’s a public space open to everyone. It’s a commons in that it rejects the idea of private property in a way and works based on the organization of sharing, or we can call it a space for public goods perhaps. It promotes learning along with sharing. It provides you with not only resources for learning but also an accessible space. They’re localized institutions that take shape based on the needs of their communities which means they’re flexible and adaptive to the needs of their communities. They are social spaces that always also offer individual spaces for independent work. They can be a space for collaboration and intellectual or artistic production, and a very inclusive space at that. It can be a space for connection and creativity and collaboration. It’s the perfect metaphor for what I envision the DAO to be!
Commons theory can provide important interventions within neoliberal managerial information capitalism when applied to the library as an institution. The commons and its associated practices provide a model of abundance, sharing, and cooperation. Libraries can and should participate in alternative economic and management models to create an inclusive vision beyond and in opposition to current social formations.
So if any of this appeals to you or resonates with you, find me. Let’s do it together, let’s build the world we want to live in! We’re in for an adventure and one hell of a good time.
