The Other Highwaymen

Highwayman, by Jimmy Webb (c1977), became the eponym for the outlaw country group that consisted of Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, and Kris Kristofferson, who collectively represent a large share of the world's total coolness. The song narrates the life (and death) of four men, or one man passing through four lifetimes. It has an incredibly catchy bounce to it, and there is a pattern on Youtube of writing new verses for the song. This caught my attention, since the base level of discourse on Youtube is garbled monosyllabic insults, and even a basic AABBCC rhyme scheme seems like critical theory by comparison. Some of the new verses have to do with real people (Jesus, Archimedes, etc.) Others are more autobiographical, including my favorite line here: "no client of mine ever knew what bleeds were". Some are funny, some are heartbreaking, some don't really seem to grasp the rhyme scheme after all. All in all, I think Webb would be proud....

I was a garbage man, I rode the dank streets of L.A.

I was on my route when I got jumped by some essay.

I hit him with a greasy bash of trash.

He sent his pitbull, and it bit me in my ass.

I fell ill to rabies but I will not pass, I'll be around and around,...

I was the son of god, born of a virgin.

Healed the sick and poor, and did miracles some more.

Then the romans came, and said who should we do in

Oh yeah this guys into sin.

They hung me on the cross,

They really showed me who was boss.

But after 3 days i came back again and again and again

I was a coal miner,

Beneath the earth I did thrive,

Shovel and pickax by my side,

I lived in a small Appalachian town,

Every day we would go down,

When the earth came down, they said that I was killed,

But I am living still

I was a coffee plant,

making caffeine in my beans,

somebody canned me by their means

Now I sit in a cupboard waiting to be brewed,

I hope my caffeine is so strong, the drinker will be screwed.

And when I'm drunken my power will be desired,

I hope it makes them wired,

And I will make them wired, and wired and wired and wired ......and wired.....

I Flew a Star ship

And it was called the Enterprise

With Captain Kirk here by my side

and then was taken over by Jean- Luc Picard

The loss of Kirk as captain hit me very hard..

And when i left the ship, they said that i was killed,

But i'm living still

I write the music,

For an all American band

On the stage we made our stand

Playing songs across this great land of the free

And what they'll say on that dark day they bury me

Is that the music was his God given domain

And he will remain...

I was a gangsta man,

Out in compton I did ride,

With blow and pistol by my side,

Many a young lads lost their money to my trade,

Many a ni***s shed their life blood on my blade,

The bastards shot my in my arm and in my thigh,

But I am still alive...

I was an intel man,

Tradecraft and cunning by my side.

No global laws did I abide.

I worked the angles of a target like a pawn.

Traveled the world chasing sun-up's early dawn.

And then I got caught up behind an enemy's line...

Stuck in the sand I lost my head beneath a blind,

But I'll be back again, and again, and again, and again and again...

I was a paladin, WoW's holy powers at my side.

I was fightin kobolds when a tauren jumped me from behind.

He used pyroblast and I never had a chance.

I tried to fight back but I had unequiped my lance

He stalked my tombstone so I couldnt resurrect,

But I will be back, i always will be back, and back, and back...

I am a stoner, with a big bong by my siiiiide.

In a hot boxed car I ride.

Plenty of swerving as the smoke clouds fill my eyes,

Better get off this road before some-body dies.

Just as that thought came up I heard an awful sound,

I'm going to jail now.... but I'll always be around, and around and around

I was a senator

I said the gays were really crude

They'd made our pop culture so lewd

I ran for president, I really thought I might

Get to the white house with the voters from the right

Than Dan Savage turned my last name into frothy fecal lube

Man I hate that dude, I hate that dude, hate that dude...

I am a woman I gave love

But no one gave love back

My heart did die one long night

So long ago time stood still

But my heart did live to love

I will back again and again and again 

I was a logger. Deep in the mighty forests I did work

The law of the woods I did abide

Many a tall tree fell to my saw

Along a patch in the northwoods

A tree took a wrong turn, crushed my body in the earth

My body forever lost beneath that tree

But I am living still

I was a graphic designer, I set up postcards and brochures

No client of mine even knew what bleeds were

I'd try to set up some nice business cards

But everyone used vistaprint like retards

I tried to make sure that my clients' marketing looked good

But comic sans and papyrus was all they understood

I was a teacher, drawing circles in the sand.

Best minds of Greece learning at my side.

Killed when the Romans invaded my land.

Today it is a wheelchair that I ride.

With Gravity and Spacetime as my friends.

But the work never ends,

And I look to the day when I can do this again, and again, and again

I was a viking man, I set sail with the tide

Across the ocean riding high

I carved my name with the blow of axe and sword

Many a year I spent away from home at war

I caught an arrow from atop a fortress gate

But I will remain, I always will remain.

I was a sadistic man to the rifle I did abide.

Love and hate in my heart do collide.

I'll always be around to my marine brothers I will always love and abide.

But until death i will love my sadistic side.

My peom to my fallen friends i love u

I was an army man,

In a hummer I did ride,

With grenade and pistol at my side.

A many insurgent died through my iron sights.

Many a loved ones worried through the nights.

A sniper got me once we where inbound,

But i am still around, ill always be around and around and around and around and around...

I was an demoman...

In Cp-Dustbowl I did ride,

Sword and chargin'targe by my side...

Many a young Scout lost his baseball on my blade...

Many a Soldier sheld his health on my grenades.

A RED spy backstabbed me at the first control point.

But I'm stil around, I'll always be around, and around, and around...

I was a driving man,

Across the backroads i did ride,

With blunts and bottles by my side,

I saw a fat man ride down the highway on a bike,

And into the gaurdrail he did ride,

He is still alive,

But I laughed so hard I died,

But I'll always be alive,

Yes ill always smoke and ride and get high and ride and get high

I was an administrator,

I shuffled paper in an office in the city,

I scanned a thousand pieces of paper in a day,

I Processed memos and calculated pay,

They say i died from an infected paper cut,

In a coffin made from recycled paper i was shut,

But now I haunt the office slut.

I was a lonely child,

Living with not a sibling was I,

Every day I played with no-one at my side,

Many a day I would watch across my pond,

Why had the gods treated me so very wrong?

My brother fell in and drowned when he was just five,

But he is still alive.

I am a Youtube man

I have lived against the grain.

Through troubled times I have survived.

Unlike my brothers who have fallen by the way.

Some came home and they will never be the same.

I am a Veteran, I did join of my free will' and I am standing still...

And i will... and I will... and I will...

I was a hockey fan

In the streets of canada

And we lost the stanley cup

So I went mental on the streets and burned some cars

I got burned and never woke back up

But I'll be back again and again and again ..

I made some famous youtube vids.

Ran out of ideas, and quickly hit the skids.

Folks ask me, "What's the deal with Chocolate Rain?"

But I can not explain.

And I remain.. I remain.. I remain

Cheap Treets

The idea of establishing fixed ratios between different commodities is an error as old as economic theory, and unfortunately still has adherents. It held a special fascination during the middle ages, with endless theorizing about bimetallism and the like. One of the more famous documents in this literature is the Assize of Bread and Ale, first proclaimed c.1266 by Henry III.

The Assisa Panis provides one of the most elaborate attempts to standardize prices in medieval history. The formulas price seven different types of bread in the context of thirty-nine possible market prices for wheat. To understand them, it has to be born in mind that medieval England (like the continent) held bread prices constant, and varied the weight of the loaf instead. Moreover, the shilling was used both as a unit of weight and a unit of currency, causing further confusion.

Here are the bread pricing formulas, per the Internet Medieval Sourcebook:

When a Quarter of Wheat is sold for 12d., then Wastel Bread of a farthing shall weigh £6 and 16s. But Bread Cocket of a farthing of the same grain and bultel, shall weigh more than Wastel by 2s. And Cocket Bread made of grain of lower price, shall weigh more than Wastel by 5s. Bread made into a Simnel shall weigh 2s. less than Wastel. Bread made of the whole Wheat shall weigh a Cocket and a half, so that a Cocket shall weigh more than a Wastel by 5s. Bread of Treet shall weigh 2 wastels. And bread of common wheat shall weigh two great cockets.

All of this is then spread across a twentyfold range of possible wheat prices. Henry III does not go to the lengths of Dupré de Saint-Maur, who established “natural” price ratios between different kinds of grain, but this is still a formidable economic exercise by 13th-century standards. It appears very rational, thoroughly considered, and scientific: exactly the sort of image that government economists like to project today. But it isn't rational. The confusion caused by the various cockets obscures a simple algebraic problem: Henry (or his economists) have mixed together linear and geometric functions. The resulting lines are bound to cross each other, though most of these crossovers do not occur in the range of wheat prices the authors have envisioned (and some of the crossovers occur only in the abstract, at negative wheat prices.)

However, as can be seen by charting the Assisa Panis formulas, one crossover occurs near the middle of the stated range: when a quarter of wheat sells for 9 shillings, bread of treet (a dessert bread) and whole wheat bread are equivalent in weight (i.e. price). When wheat costs less than 9 shillings, treet is heavier (cheaper); when wheat costs more than 9 shillings, whole wheat bread is cheaper.

If it is not immediately apparent that this is irrational, consider the price of gasoline today. When the price of a barrel of oil goes up or down, all grades of gasoline are affected, but premium will always be more expensive than regular.

Moreover, if we extrapolate the price of wheat, more irrationalities appear. If a wastel loaf is reduced to 5 shillings, treet crosses the price curve for the low-cost version of cocket. At 2 shillings, it reaches the high-budget cocket curve; moreover, the appropriate weight for simnel cake becomes zero (and thereafter negative!).

The irrationalities in formulas of this sort never play out in real life. What dooms projects like these is the belief that market prices can be pinned down to inflexible ratios in the first place, and that problem would persist even if the curves stacked as neatly as china bowls. Rather, the irrationalities bear witness that the mathematics, despite their authoritative precision, have not been thought through. Indeed, it seems very clear that the authors of the Assize and Bread and Ale did not evaluate their formulas, either algebraically or manually. Solving the 273 simple problems they had created would have taken a 13th-century clerk perhaps an a hour, and he surely would have discovered the treet / whole wheat crossover.

For want of an hour's work, the Assize stayed in effect for just under 600 years. Like all such systems, it went through cycles of being fairly innocuous, then more annoying, and finally absurd. It is possible (although far from proven) that the “baker's dozen” originated in a pathetic effort by bakers to stay on the right side of the law. In all events, whenever the law became intolerable vis-a-vis market realities, it was re-calibrated: the version above seems to have lasted only about fifty years. These constant modifications were necessitated, of course, because the original legislation made no sense, as evidenced by the treet / whole wheat crossover. Yet the effect of the secondary interventions, then as now, was to create an class of legislator/economists with a discourse of expertise in solving the problem that their predecessors had created. As the fixes repeatedly failed and were replaced with more complex fixes, the reputation of the experts became paradoxically greater.

Surely it takes great minds to get us out of the mess that great minds have gotten us into.

Measuring Factors Contributing to Public Perception of the Consent of the Governed

Consent of the governed is an ancient concept with a convoluted history. While it is a critical feature of modern political rhetoric—enshrined, for instance, in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence—I have shown (here and here) that it hardly features at all in popular thinking about consent. One of my interests in conducting a survey on people's attitudes towards consent (described here) was in assessing the way people understand the idea of “consent of the governed” in relation to particular cases.

120 of the 500 stories in the survey were modified versions of the same story, in which an individual is said to have (indirectly) consented to the actions of their government. Four variables were altered: the individual's status, the type of government, the action in question, and the way in which the individual participated (or did not) in the state's decision. The stories spanned a wide range of circumstances, but all fit the general schema that is referenced by the phrase “consent of the governed.”

The respondents provided 2621 direct comparisons between the different versions of this ur-story. These comparisons were analyzed using the assumption of a linear formula with different values for each of the 19 possible story elements, approximated via a Monte Carlo algorithm (40,000 iterations randomly varying the previous best-fit values by progressively smaller amounts.) Using the resulting optimal weighting for each variable, 77.5% of the subject's comparisons were predicted correctly by a linear equation, where ± 1% was considered “correct” for equalities. The resulting breakdown of constituent factors is graphed below. The “neutral” point is simply the average of all weight values; it should not be interpreted as a threshold between consent and non-consent.

The variable for the type of state action provided 33% of overall variance from the mean, the plurality of the whole. This seems to be in keeping with other suggestions that our perception of consent is heavily colored by the nature of the activity. Signing a waiver for a haircut is not at all the same as signing a waiver for a heart transplant, at least by the subjects of the survey. From there, the type of government contributed 27% of variance, the form of participation accounts for 24%, and the individual's personal status only 16%.

The weighting are shown in the chart below. While relatively little here is surprising, the formality of the analysis is perhaps novel enough to make many of these points warrant discussion.

Outliers

We might begin with the two state actions that are essentially outliers in terms of the strength of their factors: the incarceration of thieves and taxation. As I've said before, it is a commonplace that people ascribe high levels of consent to “normal” events and lower levels of consent to unusual actions. Both of these events are so engrained into our sense of business-as-usual that I imagine they have come to be considered almost apolitical. Franklin's adage about death and taxes seems relevant here: if we view something as inevitable, we may be apt to also view it as consensual.

The idea that thieves have consented to the legal consequence of their crimes (imprisonment) is apparently very non-controversial: even for marginalized groups in a dictatorship, it receives a neutral score in this analysis. I imagine that this is, in part, because theft is considered a transcultural criminal act, and imprisonment a nearly ubiquitous response to theft. There is, however, a striking disjunct between the notion that thieves have consented to be imprisoned and the (legally parallel) notion that murderers have consented to be executed. (In both cases, the story stated that the individual was guilty, plead innocent, and was convicted.) In the abstract notion of the Rule of Law, these may be equivalent concepts, but they score very far apart in this analysis. It would appear that people who accept the idea that you can consent to suffer imprisonment balk at the idea that anyone can consent to their own execution.

Individual Status

Individual status breaks down as hypothesized: adult immigrants to a state are rated as consenting more highly to the state's action, citizens born in the state somewhat less so, and racially marginalized groups still less so. The super-consensual status of immigrants makes sense in several respects: they have gone through an elaborate legal ritual, entailing considerable personal difficulty, to enter the situation they are in. Moreover, they have exercised intentionality (as adults) in a way that native citizens have not necessarily done. On the other hand, it could be argued that immigrants in general are less informed about local laws and legal customs than native-born citizens.

This variable was the least important of the four, accounting for only 16% of total variance from the mean—less than half the impact of the event variable.

Form of Government

The weighting for governmental form are, again, fairly unsurprising. Dictatorships have the lowest ranking of any variable, but an almost equally low rank was given to pseudo-democracies that had in fact been “rigidly controlled by a single ruling party for half a century.” Conventional democracies rank considerably higher, and the rather Utopian description of “direct democracies using town meetings and referenda” garners a ranking very much higher than that. The considerable span here is noteworthy: an ongoing question in international law has been the extent to which citizens of authoritarian regimes can be held personally accountable for the actions of their government. The popular sentiment here would appear to be that people are not so accountable, and it makes little difference whether the state is explicitly dictatorial or maintains a facade of democratic process.

The other rather striking finding here is that the subjects readily agree that a putative direct democracy would provide a substantially closer bond between state action and individual consent. This implies that most subjects can easily envision a much more consensual form of government than the one we currently have, and make evaluations accordingly.

State Action

The two outlier variables, taxation and the imprisonment of thieves, are both actions of the state. The remaining five state actions received much lower rankings, although one of them (the execution of a murderer) was still above average.

Two forms of austerity measure were described, corresponding to two narratives about third-world debt. In each case, the state was described as having “contracted significant international debts over the last three decades” and “imposing austerity measures that directly impact” the individual in the story. In one case, the state had spent the money on development projects. In another case, it had been “squandered by corrupt politicians.”

Subjects felt that this latter case—corruption/austerity--was somewhat more consensual than development/austerity. This is perhaps the most counter-intuitive result from this section of the study. But the sentiment of the subjects here seems to be that government corruption is broadly within the scope of events that a citizen is accountable for remedying, whereas international development loans are not. In other words, domestic events are more receptive to the notion of “consent of the governed” than international events.

In fact, we might see another sign of this domestic / international dichotomy in the next pairing of state actions. Compulsory military conscription is ranked in between democratic governments and non-specified support: it is, if not seen as being as consensual as taxation, at least not considered to be extraordinarily coercive. (Again, the principle of inevitability may apply.) However, when the stories describe specific military actions, the subjects view this as much less consensual from the perspective of any given citizen.

The story used was “X has just declared war on a neighboring country, Y. In a bombing raid against one of Y's military installations, X has killed nine people. [The Protagonist] has consented to these nine people being killed.” This received the lowest ranking of any state action. It would appear that while subjects are (relatively) sanguine that consent of the governed applies to military conscription, and also applies to the state executing criminals, they do not believe this consent extends categorically to cover the specifics of international military operations.

This echoes one half of the Nuremberg paradox: citizens can disclaim responsibility for the extreme actions of the state. Other aspects of this study will, I hope, allow us to look at the counterpoint: that the state can disclaim responsibility for the decisions of its citizenry. In any event, this is a major discursive claim of democracy, and the paradox is quite evident here. If one has implicitly consented to be drafted into a military force, it seems problematic to assert that one has not consented for that military force to be utilized (in any particular way).

Yet this is undoubtedly a common attitude, and our final category touches on it to some degree.

Mode of Participation

For states described as direct democracies or democracies, and for the three stories involving austerity measures or warfare, five options for participation were stated. The default option, “unknown”, was also extended to the stories involving dictatorships and pseudo-democracies. The four other options were as follows: the subject could have voted in support of the referendum on the state's action (or voted for the ruling party); could have opposed the referendum or the ruling party; could have failed to vote; or could have refused to participate on principle, because they believe the government is illegitimate.

What is perhaps most surprising about the results here is the very large span between the ranking of “support” and “oppose.” A longstanding theme in consent-of-the-governed literature, stated with maudlin eloquence as early as Plato's Crito, is that the opposition consents to the outcome of the political process they have engaged in. A secondary theme, especially prominent in the hegemonic discourse of electoral politics, is that non-participation also implies consent to the outcome. “If you don't vote, you can't complain,” as the adage goes.

But the subjects in this study do not appear to entirely agree with these precepts. To a very large degree, they view citizens as not having consented to state actions which they voted against. Moreover, while they view non-participation as almost tantamount to a yea vote, they see principled non-participation as almost identical to active opposition. This is worth a great deal more discussion than I have the space for here.

Discussion

These findings concretize the observation that the general public does not view the “consent of the governed” in the way that political philosophers have urged us to. We do not envision there being a single legal formula that determines consent or non-consent, regardless of the event. Nor do we believe that participation in a political process necessarily implies consent to the outcome of that process. These results seem to uphold the idea of a social contract that binds people to consenting to criminal law and taxation. But the subjects do not seem to extend this idea of a social contract to the more impersonal actions of the state: economics and warfare.

On the ownership of virtual persons

"This is not my tune / but it's mine to use"

-Sadie, Joana Newsom

The Great North Woods is haunted by authors, most of them safely dead (Frost, Kipling) or departed (Solzhenhitsyn). When I began this essay, J. D. Salinger was very much alive, pursuing his curiously irritating monasticism in upstate New Hampshire. And as I wrote, Salinger was busy unleashing his lawyers to attack his quasi-namesake, J. D. California, for proposing to publish a novel called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. 60 Years was intended to be a follow-up piece to Catcher in the Rye, featuring the original character, Holden Caulfield, as an old man (now named Mr. C). This entire conflict may have been a hoax, in fact, but the litigation was in keeping with Salinger's reputation. He was an artist who, if he were able to, would probably have had security guards from the New Yorker come around to our houses and burn our copies of Franny and Zooey. Current IPR law, happily, did not give him the right to do that. But it did protect his imaginary worlds from imaginary threats.

The intersection between narrative fiction and legal fiction is a comparatively new one. Newer still is the notion of legal protections for fiction. Until quite recently, the law has regarded all dramatic works and most other pieces of fiction as little more than a lineup of the usual suspects for pornography, sedition, and blasphemy. If they happened to be clear of those charges, they were of scant further legal interest. Until the 19^th century, authors attempting to make money from their muses had a wide range of options, but these hardly ever included legally protected royalties. They could search for a patron, like Virgil; or sell tickets to performance events, like Shakespeare; or incorporate their writing into a larger and harder-to-duplicate piece of artwork, like Blake; or get a government sinecure, like Newton; or get real jobs, like almost everyone else. The works themselves, as economic entities, were given only feeble protection in the mind of the law, and no protection whatsoever in the minds of the police.

And literature went on, of course, quite merrily. To quote Gillian Welch, “We're gonna do it anyway / Even if it doesn't pay.” But her bitterness occurs at a rare point in history, when a (comparatively small number) of musicians could aspire to make a livelihood off selling contractual rights to their music, rather than performing it. Already, there is every sign that this state of affairs will not last long, and musicians will be the first ones up against the wall. But they're used to it.

For the present moment, we are deeply engrossed in these abstractions of content, wherein an author who publishes a novel thereby secures a plausible legal claim against the publication of a completely different novel, whose author will not even be born for a quarter century. As if the imagined worlds of fiction are a kind of gold rush, complete with claim jumpers and real-estate agents. Now, please note that there is no economic rationale here, no 'taking' in a tangible sense. It is absurd to suppose that the publication of 60 Years could do anything but boost the sales of Catcher in the Rye. The taking is of an imaginary asset: the Holden Caulfield persona.

Legal cases of this nature are intended to put heads on posts, to keep at bay the “barbarians” who are, in this case, fanfic authors. Now, when I hear the horrible little internet-ism “fanfic,” I have a very specific vision, and it is not a pleasant one. I see websites seething with a morass of indistinguishable horrible stories, all of them about the same set of characters, whose personas and environment have already been fashioned by much better authors, freeing the fanfic writers for the simple choreography of sex or violence or ego with an arsenal of ready-made puppets. I see unspeakable things being done to innocent maiden apostrophes. I see the over-wide paragraphs demanded by browser windows, which somehow ruin even the most orphic prose. I see multi-colored background images tiled underneath the text, as if the whole thing is some perverse experiment in finding the breaking point of the human eyeball. And I am talking about prose, here. The poetry, brilliantly original free verse, all of it center-aligned.....oh god, I cannot even talk about the poetry.

This apocalyptic vision of mine is shared by a great deal of media consumers and critics, who reiterate in various ways a distinction between “real authors” (JD Salinger) and “fanfic writers” (JD California). The distinction begins with a fascinating legalism: the ownership of the fictional characters. The ownership of the setting also comes into play, but only in cases where the setting itself behaves more or less like a fictional character. Tolkein's Middle Earth is a uniquely invented geographic persona; in a different way, so is Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria. But the San Francisco shown in Monk is just San Francisco.

We can further isolate this distinction. What is at stake here are not the names of the characters, but their essence, their persona. When Alice Randall was taken to court for writing The Wind Done Gone, she had not plagiarized any particular passage from Gone With the Wind. Nor, pointedly, had she used the names of Margaret Mitchell's heroes and heroines: Rhett became R, Ashley became “Dreamy Gentleman,” and so forth, just as Holden Caulfield becomes “Mr. C”. The gist of the lawsuit was that Randall had stolen the spirit of Mitchell's characters and setting: that persona, in this sense, is the sort of thing that one might produce, own, buy, sell, and steal—that it is a capital commodity. The writers who produce these personas are “real authors,” those who appropriate them are writing fanfic.

Transparently, this distinction is based on a capitalist litmus test: real authors are the ones who produce profit for publishing companies, just as real musicians are the ones who produce profit for recording studios. Any writing that does not put money in the coffers of a major publisher is "writing for pleasure," and has marginal status, both culturally and legally. Real authors (and real musicians) are cast, of course, as the sympathetic victims of fanfic authors and musicians who sample, like The Verve. But it is worth bearing in mind that authors and musicians, in round numbers, have never actually made two bucks in a row, while publishing houses and record labels have turned a pretty good profit over the years.

Now, if fanfiction is described as writing that steals pre-existing personas and settings, it is weirdly precise to describe most Western literature before 1600 as fanfiction. The works of Homer, Mallory, Dante, all of Shakespeare except The Tempest, Milton....all of these rely on stock characters, stock settings, and even pre-existing storylines. Indeed, the very power of forms like Commedia dell'Arte or the historical tragedies and comedies of Elizabethan theater is that the audience already knows what's going on. When you pick up Paradise Lost you don't wonder who's going to win at the end. When you set a story in Camelot, you don't need to spend twenty pages on exposition. Rather, you wonder how this iteration of the Great Story will be told. Even the lesser stories that make up the Thousand Nights and One Night or the Decamaron are variations on a handful of standard themes, with entirely interchangeable characters.

As Western authors began to invent new characters, powerful unique personas, they must have crossed a threshold of doubt about whether it was even a legitimate literary project to do so. Prince Hamlet, Don Quixote, and Eugene Onegin are all depicted very consciously as personas arising from fiction: each of them powerfully unique, but also rooted obsessively in the imitation or reflection of art. (I think the same may be true in the East. Sei Shonagon's self-portrait follows a similar pattern, and occupies a similar role in Japanese literature, though half a millennium earlier.)

But the persona that interests me for the moment, qua fanfiction, is Falstaff. Or, as he was probably known in life, John Oldcastle. John Oldcastle, who was executed in 1417, had appeared in at least five works, including several fictional pieces, before Shakespeare decided to rework him as a character in Henry IV. He was, in other words, a stock character. According to tradition, Oldcastle appeared as a figure in the play, but Lord Cobham—a descendant of the real Oldcastle—intervened before the script could be printed, and had Shakespeare change the characters name, leaving only one pun to reference the original:

By the Lord, thou sayest true, lad. And is not my

hostess of the tavern a most sweet wench?

As the honey of Hybla, my old lad of the castle. And

is not a buff jerkin a most sweet robe of durance?

-(Henry IV, part I, act I, scene ii)

Thus was born Falstaff, one of the most famous and indeed one of the most unique characters in Western literature. And without question, the Falstaff that we know and love is an invention of Shakespeare, but Lord Cobham's hereditary claim to the Oldcastle persona was, in a sense, upheld and legitimated.

There is an unquestionable strength and freedom to this kind of writing. I will use contemporary examples. When Moore wrote The Watchmen, he began by using characters from the Charlton comics pantheon, which had recently been purchased en bloc by DC comics. They freaked out, and he had to switch to new characters, more or less a clef renditions of the earlier ones. Again, Joss Whedon mentions that one of the major incentives for incorporating Dracula in Buffy The Vampire Slayer was that Dracula was public domain. Now, for writers of the caliber of Whedon or Moore, these little frictions are perhaps trivial, but they are, obviously, frictions. No one who looks back at 20th-century literature from the distance of two or three centuries will have the slightest interest in whether or not a given character was legally defensible, they will only care whether or not the character was compelling. Moreover, the critics of the 23^rd century will have only contempt for the legal machinations that got between today's artists and their masterpieces. And they are right. We are wrong.

But it all seems so compelling. I want to quote, at some length, a piece from the website of one of my favorite living authors, Ursula Le Guin. It is followed by an admonitory coda from her agent:

It's all right with me — it's really none of my business — if people want to write stories for themselves & their friends using names and places from my work, but these days, thanks to the Web, "stuff for friends" gets sent out all over the place and put where it doesn't belong and mistaken for the genuine article, and can cause both confusion and real, legal trouble.

As for anybody publishing any story "derived from" my stuff, I am absolutely opposed to it & have never given anyone permission to do so. It is lovely to "share worlds" if your imagination works that way, but mine doesn't; to me, it's not sharing but an invasion, literally — strangers coming in and taking over the country I live in, my heartland......

A note from UKL's literary agency:

No formal policy but as with any of our authors we would object strongly on her behalf if anyone were to publish either stories or books using her characters and situations. Writing for your own pleasure is one thing but disseminating it is something else. It used to be that fan fiction would reach only a specific audience — a close circle of friends and acquaintances. But with the Web things have changed.

Now, a running theme in all of LeGuin's fictional worlds is that property ownership in general is pathological, but slavery, the ownership of persons, is especially horrific; the root evil, at least by analogy, of all social pathology. This moral concern is also precisely the one that prompted Randall to rework an epic novel set in the antebellum South, retelling it through the eyes of slaves. It is a fascinating irony that LeGuin defends the ownership of her virtual persons, and that this defense is then wielded like a bludgeon against Randall.

And it raises a host of squirrely questions about how far such logic can be expected to push. If the law is willing to view personas as capital assets, fungible capital assets, then what is the disposition of the personas we actually happen to have? Oldcastle was a real person, before he became Falstaff. Accepting that Randall was appropriating Mitchell's personas of the slaves, is it not reasonable to ask whether Mitchell had appropriated the personas of actual slaves, as Shakespeare did with Oldcastle? If so—since they had no Lord Cobham to defend them—that conversion of their actual persona into a commodified, legally defended virtual persona seems strikingly like an extension of slavery.

From this wild jumping-off point, let me sprawl forward (briefly) into the future of what commodified personas might look like. There is already a nascent trade in the production of avatars to represent people in virtual spaces. To date this primarily means the creation of imagery (sprites, etc.) by graphic designers, who certainly are concerned with property rights. A typical boilerplate (from Dodrio's Sprite site) reads “Please do not steal/copy/or claim as your own anything on this website without permission from the creators and/or owners...” and is repeated in variations several times on the page, as well as appearing in a pop-up window. To a limited extent there is also a trade in voice, cadence, and mannerism as components of persona. For instance, the prizes on that wretched, wretched show, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, are designer answering-machine messages. Such messages are a stone age version of an “expert agent” persona: they are expected to do business in their owner's absence, and they are expected to have a distinctive, economic valuable personality. Add a few hundred thousand lines of code, and it is easy to imagine the answering machine that returns calls, checks your email, schedules your appointments, and apologizes to your sister-in-law about the barbecue. All with vibrant personality....but whose? And at what cost? In 2007, ConAgra digitized the then-deceased Orville Redenbacher to sell popcorn from beyond the grave. His grandson approved. But what if Gary Redenbacher had said no? What if ConAgra had wanted to run the undead Orville in a slot urging people to vote for Obama, or Bush? Who owns Orville's personality?

Again, we are several tiers into the widespread application of Peter Kramer calls, with wonderful accuracy, as “cosmetic psychopharmaceuticals.” We are probably more than halfway to the point where a particular drug-and-therapy cocktail can at least be touted as producing a “signature personality,” the way that certain horrible celebrities market (and copyright) their signature fragrance. We all know people who have, in various ways, modeled their personalities on the image of various celebrities, or even fictional characters. I would imagine that millions of lovestruck Americans have tried to emulate Hepburn and Peppard's kiss from Breakfast at Tiffany's. In the future, it might be possible for Paramount to sue them, rather in the way that Disney sues day-care-centers who paint Mickey Mouse on the wall. And their position may not be unsympathetic, because for a very small fee, honest people would have been able to buy* Holly Golightly pills, which not only make you impish and eccentrically romantic, but also convey a legal right to act that way for a week after each purchase.

Of course, none of this will happen. It's paranoid, to begin with, and the future always twists in unforeseeable ways. But it is unquestionably a logical progression from the idea that personas are commodities. And it is this reality that authors should be asked to defend when they want to make property claims over their characters. Slavery has never worked out well, even when the slaves are fictional entities.

* I just love that tense. I don't even know what it's called.

Modes of Government in Intentional Communities

Modes of Government

The first element of the FIC data that I want to discuss is governmental style. The questionnaires allowed communities to describe their decision-making system using any of seven options. They could, however, select multiple options, and many of them did so. The five main choices were: “Leader” for autocracies; “Consensus” for a consensus democracies (sometimes self-identified as anarchies); “Majority” for a majoritarian democracies; “Elders” for oligarchies (usually the founders), and “Other.” In some versions of the questionnaire, two other options existed: “Democratic Leader” and “Planner-Manager.”

To some degree, we can typify these governmental elements in an empirical fashion. At correlations of 0.2 or better, communities with leaders are associated with using a “weighting system,” wherein not all members have the same level of standing, and having a core group of advisors. They are also associated with high labor demands; with a shared spiritual path (especially Eastern religions or the Emissaries of Divine Light, and not an eclectic spirituality); with being celibate or prohibiting homosexuality, or having some other mandatory sexual policy. They are strongly negatively associated with feminism.

Consensus groups are statistically associated with feminism; with having relatively few communal meals; and with permitting the use of alcohol. They are negatively associated with Eastern religions; with weighting systems; and with core groups. Consensus is numerically the most prominent governmental mode among the FIC communities. It was the dominant political method in the FIC itself, derived from the FIC's Quaker and Mennonite precursors. In the 1960s and 1970s, formal consensus began to supplant majoritarianism as the default model for communities that professed some version of radical democratic politics. (The student cooperative movement seems to have been majoritarian). I have outlined this genealogy in more detail in a previous article.

Majoritarian groups are statistically associated with high labor demands and the absence of sexual policies. “Elder” groups are associated with prohibiting alcohol, and with having a “core group:” presumably in this case the core group and the elders are usually one and the same. “Other” groups are, of course, impossible to typify. They are statistically associated with prohibitions on alcohol use, and with land that is own by a single individual.

“Democratic leader” systems are ostensibly autocracies mitigated by some form of election or plebiscite, although as we will see below, there is some reason to doubt that this always the case. “Planner-Manager” systems are in principle based on a bicameral elected legislature, modeled on the one described in B.F. Skinner's book, Walden II. They existed only in the 1970s, and seem to have disappeared in the general shift away from leftist fascination with behavioral psychology.

Mixed Modes

Where communities have indicated multiple forms of government, it is often unclear exactly what they meant. For instance, a “Leader / Majority” system might refer to rule by a leader who is periodically elected by a majority vote. It might refer to a leader having complete control over some facets of the community, while other aspects are controlled by a majoritarian assembly. It might simply refer to a leader who periodically uses a plebiscite to validate their decisions.

One of the popular criticisms of communes, especially after the Manson Family arrests in 1969, was that they were run by dictatorial cults of personality. It seems likely that many essentially autocratic communities wish to present themselves in a democratic light. This is perhaps especially true in communities where a single founder owns the land and assets of the community—and therefore exercise considerable de facto political authority—but has some type of democratic vision. In all events, there are many variations on the theme of communities with leaders that also use some other political model, including the designation “democratic Leader.” I will refer to these as “leader-plus” communities. Again, there is good reason to think that this was frequently little more than a public relations effort.

Nevertheless, the term “consensus” is often applied to less formal procedures, and sometimes is used to reflect a political style rather than a process. It seems likely some communities reporting consensus in tandem with other methods of government probably did not use a formal consensus model. However, as mentioned in the article above, a common modification of consensus process in secular organizations is to allow a reversion to some type of supermajority rule in the event that consensus is not reached. This became a fairly common (and very stable) pattern among intentional communities, and is probably reflected by the “Consensus / majority” designation in many cases.

Frequency of and conversion between modes

The secular pattern over the last three decades has been for consensus process and autocracy to squeeze out nearly all other modes of community government. This could plausibly be seen as a kind of polarization between democratic and authoritarian models. The diagram below shows the number communities professing a given mode of government in the seven surveys for which there was sufficient data. The total N is 1878. (For clarity, this data is collapsed somewhat further than the collapse system described for the analysis below; most importantly, the leader-plus communities are combined with autocracy.)

There are 682 instances in which we can make a longitudinal comparison between the same community at two points in time, and in which we have information about the governmental model for those points. These encompass 487 communities.

I have collapsed the data as follows. “Other” has been maintained, but combinations with “other” have been truncated to their basic form. (E.g. “Leader / majority / other” is collapsed to “Leader / majority”.) “Democratic leaders” have been collapsed to “Leader / Majority.” (There were no communities in this sample that indicated Democratic Leader by itself.) Finally, a range of communities that checked four or more different modes of government, usually in unique patterns, are all collapsed into “Diverse.” It is noteworthy that nearly every group in this category includes “Leader” as one of their categories.

After these collapses, there are 161 instances of governmental modes changing, and 521 cases of the modes remaining the same. I've created the chart below to visualize these conversions. The width of the arrows represents the likelihood of a given conversion. For the sake of clarity, probabilities lower than 2% annually are not shown. This means that there are in fact some “pathways” between governmental styles that are not shown here, though they are exceedingly unusual.

There is considerable variation in the stability of the governmental modes. “Other” and “Consensus” are both retained 98% of the time annually. “Leader / Consensus” is retained 96% of the time, “Leader” and “Majority” 94% of the time. Of the other major modes, “Planner-Manager” is 91%, and “Elders” at 81%, and “Diverse” at 79%. At the bottom of the spectrum, “Majority / Elders” is retained only 57% of the time, making it the least stable governmental mode in this sample (Though it is also a fairly unusual one).

As both diagrams indicate, there is a tendency for governmental modes to convert towards three attractors: Consensus, Leader, and Other. The coloring shows the conversion-sheds for these three attractors, although these are not absolute: this graph does not show conversions at very low levels of probability. On the basis of this graph, most community government modes (shown in white) are capable of ultimately converting to either consensus or leader systems; a few may also convert to “other.”

There is a mechanical logic to these transformations in one sense. Consensus systems and autocracies both have a sort of constitutional inertia. In principle, these are the two modes of government that can persist even when all but one person is opposed to them. On the other hand, a majoritarian assembly (including planner-manager systems) can convert to some other mode of government even over the wishes of a substantial minority.

Oligarchies (“elders”) present a more nuanced question. In principle, an oligarchy could behave like an autocracy, only converting to another mode of government when the members voluntarily relinquish power. In fact, oligarchies appear to be among the least stable model here, with attrition of 19% per year, mostly to “other.”

Finally, the pattern of conversion shown here bears out my suspicion that autocratic communities may paint themselves as democratic. Among the conversions from “leader-plus” communities, 55% go to simple autocracies, and another 32% go to some other version of “leader-plus.”

Towards Autocracy or Consensus? Predictive Factors.

The diagram above shows that there is very considerable overlap between the conversion sheds of consensus and leader systems. A number of factors, however, seem to predispose a group to convert to one format or the other. The following list are factors that (individually) have a correlation at |r| > 0.1 for both to autocracy and (with the opposite sign) for consensus, with all correlations significant at 0.01 or better. The combined variance for each pairing is shown on the right.

CONVERSION TO AUTOCRACY	CONVERSION TO CONSENSUS	COMBINED VARIANCE
Leader	No leader	61%
No Consensus	Consensus	56%
Not Feminist	Feminist	43%
Weight System	No Weight System	37%
Core Group	No Core Group	32%
Queer Friendly	Not Queer Friendly	19%
Eastern Religion	No Eastern Religion	18%
More labor required	Less labor required	17%
Spiritual Path	No Spiritual Path	16%
More group meals	Fewer group meals	12%
More buildings	Fewer buildings	12%
Sexual Policy	No Sexual Policy	12%
More people	Fewer people	9%
No alcohol	Alcohol	6%
No Joining Fee	Joining Fee	5%
No Land Trust	Land Trust	5%
“Other” politics	No “other” politics	5%

Most of this is relatively unsurprising. Existing political structures that are non-egalitarian predict conversion to autocracy, and the absence of those predicts conversion to consensus. Being socially conservative in matters of feminist values, sex, or alcohol use all predict conversion to autocracy; being socially liberal in those matters predicts conversion to consensus. Communities with a shared spiritual path, especially an Eastern religion, tend towards autocracy, others tend towards consensus.

A more interesting pattern exists with respect to the communities' economics. Larger communities are more likely to become autocratic. Communities that subsequently convert to consensus average an adult population of 19; those that subsequently convert to autocracy average a 79. However, we can qualify this observation in several ways. First, the number of buildings is more predictive measure of size than the number of the people: plausibly this corresponds to the communities' economic assets. And the source and tenure of those assets seems to matter as well: communities with joining fees, or with a land trust, are more likely to convert to consensus process. This would seem to suggest that economic stakeholding is an important factor in the evolution of governmental modes.

I had hypothesized that there would be correlations with change in population or gender balance, but I cannot find any.

Although it is not apparent in the numbers above, the tiny minority of conversions away from autocracy and consensus typically involve “elder” formulas of some type. Oligarchy is also the most indeterminate system, tending to convert to consensus or autocracy with about equal frequency.

Báez and Book-Burning

I have just been reading Fernando Báez's A Universal Hisdtory of the Destruction of Books. Báez is, among other things, the head of the Venezuelan National Library, but his scholarship has been centered on the Library of Alexandria. He is a brilliant writer, and—since I can tell—Alfred Macadam is providing a brilliant translation. A Universal History is a lovely book, and it fills an ironic vacancy in the history of letters. But it is also an aggravating book, one that demands a discussion it does not itself provide.

The issue of text loss is very dear to me, in part because I have spent a few too many hours introducing young people to ancient and classical literature. In this role, I always feel like a collaborator in millenia-old censorship. To read the Greek philosophers today means, at the outset, to read Plato and Aristotle. Coleridge, I think it was, even proposed to divide all approaches to knowledge between those two ancient schools, as if there was no one else in town. This approach is a sad acceptance of the academies' long campaigns against the works of their competition. The Cynics, the Skeptics, the Epicureans, the Stoics—we have almost none of their writing left. And so we teach the beautiful words of the book-burners, and only then, if we have time, we mention the fragments of the opposition happened to survive the fire.

Plato's Republic is a very explicit and eloquent call for censorship. If a counter-argument existed in the contemporary literature, an Hellenic Areopagitica, it was probably something like Epicurus' book The Canon. And it is an unsurprising tragedy that we still have the former, but no trace of the latter.

Of course, perhaps The Canon was worthless. Perhaps, as Neil Steinberg suggests, everything was lost was literary junk. Perhaps book destruction is a process of attrition, sifting out the dross. These sentiments help assuage our conscience—as readers and teachers--for toleraring this winner-take-all version of literature. The great gift of Báez's work is to rip away these false comforts, and make us face the staggering dimensions of what we have lost. Moreover, Báez confronts us with the fact that books have been destroyed, in large part, not by random attrition or even an anti-intellectual populism, but by the organized efforts of cultural elites.

Báez writes in the litanic style that I associate with certain other Latin American authors—Galeano, Borges, even Neruda. He catalogs a endless series of tragedies, and he does so almost entirely without comment. Frustratingly, this follows on an introduction that makes it very clear Báez could have been brilliantly narrated his funeral march for books. That he does not play Virgil to the reader's Dante is possibly a function of time: the book feels rushed, and Báez suggests that his own experiences of the US-overseen devastation of the Iraqi libraries compelled him to go to press faster than he might have otherwise.

And so A Universal History tactically resembles certain other litanies of destruction. I am thinking of the old UK newspaper Green Anarchist, or the NOI's propaganda piece, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, or (less esoterically) the Declaration of Independence. In some circumstances, authors believe that the most damning indictment is a bare litany of the facts, with little or no commentary.

And maybe that is a very pure and noble goal. But the choices Báez makes in presenting his case are too curious to avoid comment. Most immediately, I think, the reader is quickly confronted by an oddity in Báez's understanding of destroying books. He interprets these losses as cultural crimes (even if only crimes of negligence) aimed at a physical target. And he explains them in terms of apocalyptic thought: destroying books is an effort to destroy memory; to destroy and re-make the world. In this analysis, Báez is quite aware that books are both metonyms for texts and are, in many historical circumstances, the actual instrument of those texts: exogenous memories. To destroy the only remaining copy of the Ksitigarbha is to destroy the Ksitigarbha forever: it is both a symbolic and a semantic deletion. But Báez consistently remarks on symbolic bibliocausties that have no semantic impact whatsoever.

That a few fundamentalists have burned copies of Harry Potter may be distasteful or offensive; it may even be a warning sign of a rising censoriousness. But there are 6 million other copies in circulation, which will probably ensure, for a time at least, that the Harry Potter text is not lost to human knowledge. Meanwhile, there is a continuous attrition of actual texts, especially marginal texts: ephemera; pulp magazines; pornography; manuscripts; letters; ledgers; marginalia; packaging; advertisements. These are huge cultural losses, even if they are not felt to be so at the moment: a text extinguished can never be replaced. Báez does not seem to make this distinction between text and book at all: for the purposes of his catalog, any act of destroying a book seems almost equivalent in desecration. He discusses the fictional destruction of fictional books such as the Necronomicon, and the destruction of manuscripts by their own authors, in quite the same tone as he discusses focused efforts to eradicate a text for ideological reasons. Most suprisingly, Báez laments that compact disks can store so much data that “when someone destroys a disk containing that kind of information, he or she destroys an entire library.”

Now, I'm sure this is meant as a challenge to our assumptions about the scope of the field. It expands the discussion in a counter-intuitive way, a great tactic of social historians like Fernan Braudel and Sidney Homer. In much the same tone, we might begin to discuss to the benefits of wind mills, and then point out that nearly all wind power, historically, has been used to winnow grain, dry laundry, or move ships. This is quite true, and even insightful, and yet it may well try the patience of someone whose interest is advocating for wind turbines. Similarly, if we approach Báez's project from a desire to conserve endangered texts—a process which at this point probably means digitizing them—it is a bit maddening to hear him suggest an equivalence between a unique papyrus fragment in Cairo and a digital file of The Da Vinci Code on someone's Kindle.

I'm sure Báez doesn't think of those items as equivalent, either. But he seems to treat digitization as merely a venue for even faster book-destruction. This leaves it to us to pursue a very provocative line of reasoning that he hints at a few times, and which is implied heavily by the entire weight of the volume. And it is this: while books are destroyed everywhere, libraries destroy texts.

Over and over, the pattern established in A Universal History is that rare books are consolidated into libraries—at Babylon or Alexandria or Berlin or in private collections. The prestige of these libraries obviates the need for those books to exist elsewhere. For instance, I do not need a copy of the Umdat al-Salik, because if I should need to refer to it, there's probably one at UVM, and there's certainly one in the Library of Congress. And so libraries become not only points of access for a text, they soon become the only point of access for certain texts. At the same time, they become increasingly attractive cultural targets in the event of warfare or other disturbance. And eventually they are burned. To a very impressive degree, Báez catalogs the fact that book-destroyers do not have to go to great pains to collect the books they want to destroy. That work has been done for them, in advance.

Some of the most poignant passages in the book are from Iraqi librarians facing the nearly total devastation of their collections, in the land that first invented writing. Lamenting the loss of the ancient books in the Mustansiriya University, one of the men Báez interviewed said “Someday someone will burn the Library of Congress, you know, but they won't lose anything like what's been destroyed here.” The claim is doubly shocking, but I am only interested in the first half. Of course, of course, someday the Library of Congress will be burned. It was burned down, after all, as recently as 1814. As Rumsfeld said of the Iraqi looting: “stuff happens.” And already, a vast number of the texts at the LoC are either unreadable or lost in the stacks.

And yet, for the first time in history, it is possible to fireproof the texts themselves, even if the books get burned. We can put the Umdat al-Salik on dozens of servers all around the world for less money than it would cost to ship a physical copy of the thing through inter-library loan. This project is already well underway, with sites like the Gutenberg Project or Perseus, though in general their formatting issues are daunting. But the principle of this redundancy has been tested on thousands of little memes ranging from political cartoons to sex tapes to pirated music: once it is on the internet, it is nearly impossible to delete it. Project Gutenberg, for instance, has 38 mirror sites and allows anyone to freely download all the texts they currently store. (Which means, of course, that anyone who has done so can re-upload them onto their own servers.) This is what today's censors have to contend with, should they want to eliminate any of those 30,000 texts from the world.

The British Library has an amazing collection of bookbindings, which they prominently advertise as a tourist attraction. It is conceivable that in a few decades, that will be the primary role of archival libraries: preserving rare books as physical artifacts, the way we preserve paintings or furniture. But readers and scholars interested in the texts will not need to enter those museums of bookbinding. And culture warriors bent on destroying the texts will have a much, much, harder job than they have ever had.

I don't know if Báez, who is a great lover of libraries, would approve of this analysis. And even if he did, perhaps is much too optimistic. But we seem to be in a moment of enormous possibility. Báez relates that King Vishtaspa ordered two copies of the Avesta to be made: one stored in Sasbigan and one in Persepolis. This must have been a huge task—Pliny the Elder suggests that the original Avesta was upwards of two million verses. It didn't work. Alexander burned the archives in Persepolis and the copy in Sasbigan seems to have been lost, perhaps earlier. But today, we can effortlessly put the Avesta on dozens of servers, all over the world, and ensure that, Hydra-like, it becomes even more redundant the moment it comes under attack.

Perhaps the end of library-burning will also be the end of libraries.

Introduction to the FIC Data

This is a preliminary introduction to a collection of studies of intentional communities. My survey population for most of these studies is formed from the indices published by the Federation of Intentional Communities (FIC). These publications date back to 1972. Occasionally, they would send out questionnaires, attempting to contact all the communities in their network, a group that included a very wide range of living arrangements. The resulting indices were aimed at people who wanted to join intentional communities, and served a function of allowing communities to publicize their existence and goals. While these surveys were not created for research purposes, and may have significant self-reporting bias, in aggregate they create a longitudinal database: we can use them to see how communities grow or decline, change in nature, and survive or dissolve.

This is a vast data set: 3,185 observations, usually consisting of 95 data points, on 1,978 different communities. It took me years to compile, and somehow it has survived the death of three different computers, although I lost most of my analysis and notes in that process, which was rather discouraging. Recently, I have begun re-creating them.

Defining Intentional Communities

For the purposes of this study, the “intentional communities” of interest are the group of institutions listed by the FIC surveys. These institutions all share several major features: they have a physical plant where people live (and often work); they have an ideological discourse that shapes aspects of their living arrangements there; and they have a organizational existence as a polity.

These communities tend to be small. The mean community in this survey has a population of 39 people, but the modal range is between 5 and 10. However, 7% of the communities have populations of 100 or higher, and the highest claims 4,100.

There have been many waves of intentional community development in American history, beginning with settlements like the Plymouth Bay Colony. In the 19^th century, Utopian Socialist communities like Amana, Oneida, and the Shaker communities enjoyed considerable longevity and cultural influence. Between the Great Depression and World War II, the student cooperative movement produced a large number of housing cooperatives that were the immediate precursors to the communes of the 1960s and 1970s. Those communes, in turn, have given rise to the co-housing movement. The communities listed in the FIC index are primarily focused on the last two categories.

A case can be made, however, that institutions such as the private plats, gated communities, retirement homes, and the like are also intentional communities in the sense defined above. Some of these seem to overlap to a considerable extent with co-housing projects. Yet clearly they do not fall inside the FIC's criteria. It isn't immediately clear why not: the FIC includes a very wide range of ideological positions, organizational structures, beliefs, and the like, many of them mutually antagonistic. However—and this is the final feature that all the communities seem to share—the institutions in the FIC indices all have a discourse that in some way positions themselves in opposition to mainstream society.

Functions of intentional communities

In their opposition to (or at least distancing from) mainstream US culture, many intentional communities envision themselves as testing grounds for a millenial society, either in the sense of religious chiliasm or post-revolutionary radicalism; occasionally both. From this point of view, the purpose of the community is to demonstrate the viability (or superiority) of a particular way of life.

The way this is usually framed—both by outside critics and by many communities themselves--is in terms of longevity. By that metric, the IC movements are widely considered to be failures. Many people, even sympathizers like Stewart Brand, have suggested that intentional communities tend to fail rapidly, and that this gives the lie to their basic project.

The question of the longevity of communities is one that we can address empirically later on. But we need not accept the longevity as a primary goal to value the IC movements; no more than we need to accept Catholicism to value the Sistine Chapel. After all, very few corporations have proven to be sustainable: almost all of them fail within a decade. Yet corporate capitalism, as a movement, has done great and dreadful things. There are at least two other major functions of the IC movements, which I consider equally, if not more, important.

In the first place, intentional communities in the United States have, for a very long time, served as repositories of counter-cultural memory and perspective for outsiders. I remember my own exposure, as a young man, to Jonah House in Baltimore, and to Estación Libre and the other safe houses in San Cristóbal de las Casas. I had, in those spaces, neither the time nor the prerequisite knowledge to fully absorb all the resources jammed on their crumbling bookshelves. But I was exposed, in a more direct way, to a set of memories and assumptions that were quite unlike the world I was familiar with (and I say this as someone who had a radical left-wing education). Through the incidental media of posters and T-shirts and old pamphlets stapled to the kitchen wall, I quickly learned that there was an entire cultural history I had been missing: had, in fact, been denied.

As a frequent visitor of the Collective A-Go-Go in Worcester, I have seen this same dynamic play out dozens, if not hundreds, of times. Intentional communities of this sort frequently host or sponsor speakers, workshops, and other formal events, but I am inclined to think that those are almost secondary. The great reproduction of radical culture occurs when someone arrives two hours early for the party, and they have nothing to do but sit there reading zines and listening to freaky-looking people talk about their plans for the next protest. It occurs in the most incidental ways: the vegan dinner; or the beer offered to the 15-year-old at breakfast; or the women working on their biodiesel rig or their tandem bicycle in the driveway; or the composting toilet; or the nudity; or the long walk in from the road; or even the slavish devotion to a charismatic leader. Whatever it is, it jogs the outsider into a new set of questions: are my assumptions about how to live warranted? And the communities often provide locally unique resources to explore those questions.

In the data set I am working with, there are somewhere a little over 50,000 adults who have spent time living in intentional communities. But I have no doubt that there are five million people who have passed through those communities, and for some large number of them, the experience has been deeply important to their worldview. There are no metrics for this, of course. But it is no less important for being unmeasurable.

The second great function of intentional communities is measurable, to some degree, and I am working on this project because I believe it has not yet been measured very well. Intentional communities are—as they themselves point out—anthropological experiments. In the 1,978 communities encompassed by this data set, we can find bureaucracies, anarchies, democracies, oligarchies, god-kingdoms, lesbian separatist gynocracies, and a dizzying range of other possible modes of social organization. Moreover, the FIC indices create a longitudinal database on the outcomes of those experiments, spanning 34 years.

There are a many reasons to approach this database with skepticism, but it is so unique, and so large, that it begs to be analyzed. So let's begin....