David Bollier

In Silent Theft -- a new book by New America's Public Assets Program -- David Bollier describes America's vast "common wealth" and the increasing threat of commercial enclosure that is denying a fair return to taxpayers and eroding shared cultural values. The American Commons encompasses both tangible assets and resources that are neither private nor public property in a conventional sense including natural systems, such as the atmosphere, the airwaves and the human genome, but also resource management regimes,… more

Sweeping changes in our nation’s communications infrastructure and markets over the past twenty years have radically changed the topography of the public sphere and democratic culture. But the mental maps which many people use to conceive “the public interest” in communications hark back to circa 1975, a time when the traditional broadcast model dominated and there were only three commercial television networks, cable TV consisted of “community antennae” to reach rural areas and even the VCR had not yet been… more

For the complete document, please see the attached PDF version below.

Selected reviews of Silent Theft are featured below:

Monday, June 10, 2002 It’s almost human nature: if you’re allowed the use of something for enough time, you begin to think you have a right to it, even that you own it. Take broadcast television. Its signals travel by means of the electromagnetic spectrum, specifically that segment known colloquially as the airwaves. The spectrum is a fact of the physical universe. Capital didn’t create it. It can’t… more

If Stevenson was correct in his reinterpretation of Goethe—“That which you inherit from your fathers/You must earn in order to possess”—then the efflorescence of digital technologies over the past twenty years is posing some unprecedented challenges to our democratic polity. The computer, the Internet and any other digital technologies are dramatically changing the character oforganizations, markets, the nation-state and the global economy. What is less clear is how the traditional rights and liberties of American citizens shall be re-interpreted inthe… more

Before getting underway, I want to thank a number of my friends and colleagues at the New America Foundation: Michael Calabrese, Director of the Public Assets Project, who helped bring off this conference and consulted with me on my report; Ted Halstead, president of the NAF, and Steve Clemons, vice president of New America, both strong supporters of this project. I am also grateful to the Surdna Foundation of New York City for its support of my report, and to… more

Many of the resources that Americans own as a people — forests and minerals under public lands, public information and federally financed research, the broadcast airwaves and public institutions and traditions — are increasingly being taken over by private business interests. These appropriations of common assets are siphoning revenues from the public treasury, shifting ownership and control from public to private interests, and eroding democratic processes and shared cultural values.

In the face of this marketization of public resources, most Americans… more