The Fourth Sector

Gas by Johnathan Kent

There’s a very 21st Century clash shaping up that in many ways echoes a struggle that has been going on for hundreds of years; the battle to take common spaces into private ownership. Corporate initiatives like The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), PIPA, ACTA and attempts to end net neutrality amount to an attempt to fence off the internet for the benefit of multinationals. It threatens a vast and, in very many ways, deeply democratic emerging economy that is reshaping the way we live and work. Indeed the struggle for the internet looks set to be one of the most important conflicts of the next twenty years.

The Fourth Sector is collective, collaborative and cooperative. It’s been given new life by new technology and to some it looks entirely novel, bringing together as it does transient communities of interest and purpose without regard to borders and with very little by way of formal organisational structures.