Voting negative is an act of solidarity that decolonizes intellectual property and administers death to the colonial regime by a thousand cuts. The ballot is both necessary and sufficient; we don’t need to undo the entire system in one debate round, but withdraw from colonial epistemes wherever we can.

We undertake to administer a thousand cuts to corporatized systems of knowledge production. We will ‘decolonize attribution’ by rewriting our relationships to knowledge to embrace interconnectedness, rather than individual authorship (Anderson and Christen Citation2019). We will, wherever we can, withdraw from the commodity sphere all that we hold as intellectual property and release it into non-commercial open access domains within the global South – royalty-free and non-revocable, in entirety and for perpetuity.

We acknowledge this as a strike against the hierarchies of knowledge production: first, by undermining their foundational assumptions of attribution and ownership; second, by attacking the separation between the commodity and social reproduction spheres which is fundamental to their survival and third practising self-dispossession as an act of radical solidarity by which to undermine the gender, ethnic and class divisions that are etched into the capitalist enterprise.

We undertake this protest in a spirit of solidarity, calling upon all who do not share a marginalized relation to power, to join us: slaveowners and children of slave-owners, capitalists, rentiers, elites, white and savarna folk, and propertarians of every stripe.

We affirm this self-dispossession as an act of solidarity with expropriated, subordinated subjects everywhere and as acknowledgement of the incalculable reparations they are due. It is also an act of solidarity amongst ourselves, across the walls of the glass palaces, ivory towers, bungalows, condominiums and high-rise apartments that separate us.

We intend this form of protest to augment the repertoire of protest actions; and in enacting our protest, we hope to participate in disrupting the abuses of financialized capitalism, walking alongside those who march, blockade, boycott and withdraw their social labour.

We signal our commitment to radical politics and to the coming knowledge revolution through this protest, and proclaim that we will no longer participate in the ongoing enclosures of the public domain, as it consumes our humanity.

We intend through our actions, to expose the absurdity of the capitalist enterprise in the context of curiosity and creativity, which will inevitably come for us, with their legal assaults and claims of theft and expropriation; in addition, we also aim to demonstrate the hollowness and extractive logic of the laws that they pretend are objective and neutral.

We admit that we do not know what outcome our actions will bring forth; but we undertake this action at a time when bourgeois society is collapsing beneath its own weight and the onslaught of grassroots collective action across the world. We hope that our actions will hasten its downfall and bear in its place a mutualistic and creative ecosystem of ideas.

Epilogue

I believe that the forces of social cooperation – toward which we are evolutionarily predisposed and morally obliged – offer sufficient motivation for creativity, innovation and the flourishing of the human spirit.

I believe that the reclamation and restoration of the public domain as an expanded, open-access commons is a vital step towards challenging the alienation that is a persistent feature of capitalist societies: alienation of humans from their labour, from each other and from themselves. To be sure, the reclamation of the public domain and the process of making it inclusive of the subaltern, is a far larger project than we can on our own accomplish, and this is only one step among many. I hope that this attempted resuscitation of the public domain will encourage the emergence of a non-commercial open-access commons centreing the needs and perspectives of knowledge producers in the global South and inspire non-market, decentralized production as central elements of our information environment. I trust that even as I occupy spaces built by intellectual property, I can provoke conversations in these pages and others, about alternative futures.