It’s not the buildings, the roads, the bridges & other concrete that make a city what it is, but the people inhabiting it. Hence, dearest peers, knowing this city to be their home, lend me your ears.

These are dark times that we’re going through. Violence. Oppression. Racism. You name it and it’s what we experience, ad nauseam. Change is needed. We need it — we demand it; and this being the season of ballot boxes & EVMs, we yearn to vote to that end. ‘Tis here, we beg to differ and ask: is it really a considerable choice when we’re given to choose our predators, between lions, tigers and wolves? Yes, one of them is way worse than the others & needs to be gone for everyone’s good; but is empowering the other murderers any better?

For as long as can be remembered, our lives have been spent as slaves & serfs to these powers: the fools, bigots & goons, called politicians we elect into leaders, the banks, capitalists & industrialists we sell ourselves to and to each other, caught in their barbaric game of tag, in which we’re all ‘it’ in the end. we want to change all of that; don’t you?

They say, everything big, starts small. Hence, in a world of 7.6 billion, would it be too wrong to start with our city of 14 million, prided so much for its openness, liberalism & intelligentsia? Kolkata is OUR CITY: OUR COMMONS, OUR HOME, enclosed by bigots & greedy gluttons to have created a graveyard for our dreams and for life, especially for the thousands who pour into it every day, hoping to obtain the collectively acknowledged fictional oxygen, called money, required of us all to exist. This is no longer a city, but a corporate heath, bearing concrete in place of vegetation.

We yearn of you, hence, let’s not set aside our differences on who we wish to elect, which fiction we wish to pray to and so on, but evolve our minds to move beyond such gibberish and actually work to make this city sustainable, homely, liveable, post partisanism, post market, post capitalist and really smart, not just a dumb city with proprietary Wi-Fi, that the oligarchs deem smart. Let us build, on this pyre of yesterdays’ failures, a new city that truly would shower joy on all.

Considering today’s problems, our wish is to take back the city into our collective hands, as our commons, manage it so, and make it thrive, not grow exponentially. Of course, when we say take back, we don’t ask for a violent revolution of the proletariat, but establishment of mutual-aid-networks & P2P Commoning practices, with each of our houses, condos, etc. being its reliable nodes. It is impossible to build such a space using current structures, such as the market (a network where people paywall goods & services to exploit each other & accumulate capital) or the state, with its systemic biases of race, religion, etc., the NGO circus standing on Corporate Social Responsibility Grants, acting as band-aids distributed by those that machine gun us, and other top-down, vertical (hierarchical) institutions. Therefore, let’s start here, as the Kolkata Commons Collective, a mutual-aid-network, where we organize ourselves horizontally, as equals, and work hard to produce, maintain and common the commons for us all to enjoy.

In case you think our beliefs to be Utopian and ideas too lofty, the same was & still is thought of the knowledge commons: Wikipedia, the numerous thriving Wikis, Free & Open Source Software, especially Linux, which powers apart from the desktops of a few of us, the entire internet, all supercomputers, most phones (Android, Sailfish, Tizen), Open Source Hardware such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, RISC V, the Wikispeed car, FOSMC bike, 3D Printers, Open Designs, Creative Commons works, Theatre Commons groups, Cities like Seoul, Barcelona, Brussels, etc., the hackerspaces & real makerspaces (anarchist, non-profit, commons oriented ones, unlike the corporate, for-profit open washes of science museums & technical schools) coming up around the world, etc., and many more. The big question is, whether we continue our banal, servile, practically cannibalistic ways, being sceptical of our capabilities, or pitch in to prove the market-worshipping, orthodox, sceptics wrong, to liberate ourselves and everyone else?

Here’s a nice introduction to the Commons.

In case you wonder what are these commons we so talk about, feel free to check this 6-minutes’ short or 24-minutes’ long explanations.

If you so happen to think everything is fine & will be fine, here’s also a little something for you to consider.

If you wish to binge a bit more, check out how & why the City should be a Commons or a summary of commoning.

After that of course, let us please network & work! Here are some of our proposals — a list to which you’re more than welcome to add, via comments maybe.

Proposals:—

• Localizing our physical, economic circuits to reduce the ecological footprint & make the city resilient to calamities, both natural & artificial. The media may be glorifying Orissa on its disaster management, since Fani hit, but let’s remember that huge sectors of the state are still dead, without electricity, water, etc. since being dependent on a centralized power grid system, they’ve no recourse but wait for the long electrical and other circuits to be connected again become functional again.
• So noting the above, creating, improving & sharing our own version of Open Source Ecology‘s Global Village Construction Set, and establishing a network of Hackerspaces to start manufacturing Glocally (doing the light things globally and the heavy things locally), to aid us.
• Running a web of SOLEs (Self Organized Learning Environments) to aid our education.
• Creating a distributed internet based on meshnet technology, using the ESP8266 and similar Open Source Wireless microchips, protocols like LoRaWAN like systems, etc., to free our dependence on centralized, paid, private connection providers we use to access the WWW and communicate. So think distributed web with IPFS & dat protocols, along with garlic routed, P2P VoIP, accessible & managed as a common, without any central authority or monetary barriers.
• Manufacturing & distribution of basic phones similar to the WiPhone, to inhabitants who require it, and much, much later, a fully Open Source, RISC V based smartphone running Android ROMs or GNU/Linux distros with touch friendly UIs.
• Establishing a real, public transport system using car-sharing algorithms (Real Sharing and not Uber/Ola/Lyft/…/’s share washed micro-lending economy) to share the leftover seating & storage spaces on our existing Cars, converting our petrol & diesel drinkers to sustainable, local sources, such as electric, via renewables like solar, wind, hydro, etc., collecting, scavenging & hacking the abandoned vehicles, lying on randomly on roads, especially around Police Stations to aid these ventures, producing, distributing & evolving the WikiSpeed, OSCAR, OpenMotors‘ Tabby, FOSMC, & other platforms, and connecting them as a Transport Commons for everyone to enjoy.
• Running networks of submersiles, solar powered, lightweight aircraft & low altitude satellite systems, to physically reach greater distances without having to go through state regulations and corporate pay walling.
• Establishing distributed power-grids, using solar, wind and other available, sustainable technology, to escape our dependence on the Power Corps.
• Movement to Open Source platforms, as opposed to proprietary, private ones to remove our dependence on Corps. For instance, moving from MS Windows, Apple Mac OS X, etc. to GNU/Linux distros, FreeBSD forks, etc.
• Nurturing Open Source Communities, to voluntarily labour to help develop the global Open Source pool and other Commons
• Creating a network of Vertical Farms, Aeroponic Gardens, Aquaponic Greenhouses, and so on to produce Food Commons for us all, networking into a post-market, moneyless ecosystem using the Open Food Network.
• Creating a network of sustainable water cycles to provide potable, fresh water commons.
• Providing universal healthcare as a commons, producing Open Source medicines & medical equipment, in our mesh of bio-hackerspaces, while also extending our human bodies‘ capabilities through transhumanist practices and sustaining a thriving grinding (biohacking) culture in the city.
• Hacking our prodigal buildings to make them more comfortable, effective & efficient, connecting everything with DiY Open Source IoT systems.
• Nurturing a thriving pro-science, DiY, hacker/maker culture in our city along with aiding education in STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts & Mathematics) and the humanities in their advanced forms … the list goes on.
• And finally, scaling to the suburbs and villages of West Bengal, and even other cities in other states, connecting Kolkata to the global commons movement, and making ourselves visible on the global map, to help liberate the world.