Commons Goods Available to Purchase

This chapter revisits literature on the commons, including literature after 2011 that lauded the Egyptian January 25 Revolution but left intact deep attachments to civilizational logics that relegated the semicivilized to the status of less-than-human. It explores alternative genealogies in the history of political thought related to the commons, and commoners, with ethnography from Cairo. Long after dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, communicative channels and embodied commons remained ethnographically tractable on the streets of Cairo in practices that create and reproduce the social infrastructures of communicative channels running through nerves, muscle, ground, and wire, across multiple nodes of distributed agency of the urban commoners.