EO1 is a collective for literary-artistic scholarship, working toward the commons as the common good. It is developing a framework for attribution without ownership: a shared record of works and their relations, held in common and open to all. Below is the architecture in cross-section.
The Ethos
“No Rights”
dissolve the author-work-property nexus
Each cluster is a project of artistic-scholarship, formed around a shared inquiry. It governs its own members, funds, and rules. Its works enter the register under the "No Rights" rule, dedicated to the cultural commons.
Hover or tap any layer to read what it is. The Rule, the clusters, and the register link to their pages.
A cultural work is relational, collective, and event-based.
Copyright law rests on a conceit: that a work is a substance, an exchangeable asset rather than a shared inheritance. This conceit is not neutral. It makes culture alienable: the kind of thing that can be owned, priced, and transferred—and so enables its capture by commercial platforms. It normalises possessive individualism, discourages sharing and collaboration, and reduces the circulation and transformation through which works live. The result is impoverishment: of the commons, of collective flourishing, of the life that works carry when they move.
The conceit runs deeper than ownership. Copyright binds the work to a commodifiable temporality: it stabilises the gap between creation and market life, and in doing so it converts creative time into market time. This is how commodification erases works-based agency, the capacity of works to act, to travel, to be taken up again.
The alternative is a shared record of works and their relations, held in common and open to all. This is what "No Rights" means: the dissolution of the author-work-property nexus, so that authors and works are freed from the constraints of commodification. Copyright makes use depend on the owner's authorisation as its default position. In this shared record, no permission is required. A work circulates: it is read, copied, remixed, performed. Its relations (its origins, its derivatives, re-editions, its lineage) are recorded alongside it.
A work lives through its relations. Severed from them, it becomes an orphan, available for capture. The record exists so that the life of the work remains visible and traceable. Blockchain is the mechanism for such a record: public, persistent, and held by no one, so that the record itself cannot be enclosed.