Will You Click This Link? The Commoner's Catalog for Changemaking
A new resource for learning about cooperative economics and 'commoning' efforts
The goal of this post is very simple. It’s to get you to follow this link over to the newly available Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking.
Yes, I am dedicating one whole newsletter to getting you to click a link.
Internet reading habits are funny. There’s a temptation to think that everyone else moves through the space in the same we way we do. Myself, I’m an inveterate link-clicker, one of those with endless tabs open after reading only a few articles. “That book sounds interesting… Click. Where are they getting their info on that?… Click. That person seems familiar, is that who I think it is?… Click.” And so forth.
Now, I don’t have a lot of data to go by when it comes to understanding your all’s reading habits, but this I have learned: by and large, you are not an excessively click-happy bunch. Substack provides some very basic percentages on how many readers follow links in a give post, and which links. All those links I put in documenting where I’ve been learning this, that, or the other thing? Most go totally unused. Hence I figured, if I want you all to actually go take a look at something, I better make a little fuss about it.
So why go peruse the The Commoner’s Catalog of Changemaking?
Written by David Bollier and published by the Schumacher Center for a New economics just this last December, it is one of the more thorough (yet fairly brief!) introductions to the growing world of cooperative economic projects and thinking, offering up books you might read, new social practices you might try out. It gives one a first look at how we might think about commons—or commoning—in every arena from land to food to information. Consider it something like a map of most of the topics I have stored in my head that seem relevant to the Unsettling project.
I’m biased, of course, as I’ve had the opportunity to work directly on some of the ideas Bollier highlights: community currencies, participatory budgeting, community rights efforts, localization projects, and a few others.
There are also profiles of some pretty exemplary organizations, groups who are thinking through new strategies for social change and doing the experiments to bring them about, like Agrarian Trust and Cooperation Jackson.
In addition, there are shoutouts to some favorite authors whom I find to be quite useful thinkers, from Silvia Federici (an obvious pick when it comes to discussing the commons), to Ivan Illich (influential in certain spheres but not always well-known), to Bruno Latour (a happy surprise to see his work having an impact outside of academic circles; his attempt to redraw our political maps in Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime is definitely helping take us into new, important territory beyond the tired left/right and other stale binaries).
There are a few of you on this list for whom all this might be old hat, but for many others, I would guess not. So why not go check it out? It’s free online, the type of thing one can skim through and learn something and then come back later to learn a little more. Though if you like it enough to own a copy, you can purchase the print edition.
The title again (and one more chance to click through if you haven’t already!) is The Commoner’s Catalog for Changemaking.