This is Part 3 of a 5-part series on the law of [blockchain] commons, which is currently in development.
Before getting prescriptive on how an ideal-type law of commons should operate, we should take a broader snapshot of some legal commons regimes in effect today. Broader views allow us to sharpen our focus on some of the tragedies caused by our existing approaches to commons management.
A. New Legal Commons
This snapshot — and our own direct observations of the state of the world — show that many existing legal commons models are irreparably broken. The “right to fish” means very little when there are no more fish left.
This realization exposes the existential need to develop robust resource-use modeling tools that permit realtime material resource-mapping, analytics, and integration with real-world economic processes.
We should continue to think of blockchain commons as new value capture mechanisms and optimization strategies. But in addition, we must consistently emphasize that they are an existential need.
Civilization’s survival depends on the blockchain commons. No pressure. :)
The eco-commons are getting broken faster than global temperature records. Our solutions need to be responsive to this reality.
Framing commons problems as existential crises exposes deep political fault lines. But that is to be expected. As we saw in Part 2, Commons > Law frameworks may even be seen (initially, at least) as a challenge to existing ruling interests. In some ways, they are.
Yet even the most power-hungry Leviathan must understand the emptiness of life in a world that is a hollowed-out shell of its former eco-flourishing self.
B. Law as Commons
Now let’s return to a more constructive idea of Law as commons.
Under our working definition of commons spaces, we already see that open-source code repositories and knowledge banks can (and are) viewed as formal legal commons regimes (e.g., global patent law) — with express recognition by many jurisdictions.
What does an even broader “Law Commons” look like — far beyond narrow regimes like IP law, environmental law, the law of the sea, and so on?
Here are some some concrete characteristics:
- open-source geospatial mapping engines & data (e.g., OpenAR Cloud; #EthMaps);
- open-source jurisdictional maps, including private/public jdxns (#EthMaps + #EthLaw);
- open-source doctrinal law maps, including all the world’s legislative, regulatory, and public case-specific law (#EthLaw);
- etc.
This results in a view of view of the tech and law-stacks as mutually-constitutive and complementary.
Importantly, please note how the tech stack is front-running the law stack. Proof? Lawyers hop on to the Internet to research law and map the fastest route from their office to the courthouse.
The key decision point for everyone today is whether we want the tech stack to be dominated by private BigTech corporations (with all the known and yet-unknown problems this produces), or whether we want a tech stack that is maximally resistant to capture by the BigTechBrothers of the world.
The answer should be clear.
Everyone benefits from open-source commons stacks. A world with, say, EthMaps & EthLaw* mapping engines is Pareto optimal to a world without these stacks.
At a minimum, these global databases serve mission-critical redundancy functions, a core utility proposition of projects like OpenStreetMap.
Our legal frameworks must protect global blockchain commons stack developers, because global blockchain commons developers are building technologies that protect us.
It’s really that straightforward.
C. Law v. Commons?
Next, while commons frameworks can serve vital spotlight, oversight, & balance-of-power functions, it would be a mistake to view them through some anti-statist ideological prism.
Yes, blockchain-based processes could eventually optimize and automate things like waste-remediation and potentially even supplant traditional private or public resource-management/waste-management systems. But that’s a good thing; we all directly benefit from smarter resource management processes.
As a legal form, “commons” is no more or less politically-loaded than the term “contract” — we should resist all attempts to load it with ideological baggage.
In fact, please note how commons stacks are also desirable from the standpoint of established power networks.
If you think your hold on power is firm, you’re not opposed to researchers mapping your dominion because you’re genuinely curious to see how far it extends. If you think your hold on power is weak, you desperately want access to a technology that shows how your hold on power is slipping.
Maps & law are these core technologies of governance; like knives, they can be used by good faith & malicious actors. Maps and law are undeniably useful technologies; they form much of our basic social BIOS.
So, decentralized law & mapping commons are not just nice-to-haves from a civilizational perspective. Maps & law are core technologies of global governance that themselves necessitate controlling as a legal commons.
Defending the law as commons is one of the 21st century’s most consequential political fights, if not the greatest political fight outright.
D. Why Blockchain Commons?
The Realpolitik answer is simple: to avoid capture & control by power structures that benefit from business-as-usual.
But there’s also a clear economic benefit to a permissive approach to new forms of blockchain-based social organization. Plurality of approaches leads to the highest likelihood of successful outcomes, in probabilistic as well as empirical, and normative terms.
As a new discipline & sphere of economic activity, token engineering can not only solve difficult jurisdictional puzzles; it can help humans answer the biggest question of all — what actually drives us?
Letting a thousand DAOs bloom may only produce a handful of successful blockchain hyperutility use cases.
But even a handful of globally-successful hyperutility dApps is an order-of-magnitude improvement over our current resource use paradigms.
E. Commons ≠ Hopium
Dynamic augmented bonding curves won’t magically solve all the world’s problems. The proverbial “blockchain” won’t solve the world’s litter problem.
But blockchain developers running dynamic augmented bonding curves can incentivize humans in multiple globally-scalable ways that have never been tried before because they have not been technically possible before.
Together, we can solve these problems. We’re the only ones who can. We broke it; now we must fix it.
Otherwise, the trash isn’t going anywhere. It will just accumulate, like in the opening scene of Idiocracy.
Fixing our broken resource-management frameworks is a great civilization-defining problem to work on. It’s precisely the type of problem we should be training our best and brightest minds towards.
For when we solve the global littering & waste problem (& the full problem & solution set for blockchain commons is much deeper than that!), then we will have accomplished something that civilization has never done in its entire existence. In historical terms, it will be as significant as first launching into space!
Even though the risk of failure is high, blockchain commons schemes are the best shot we have of restoring the ‘sapien’ to our self-endowed homo sapiens badge.
Blockchain incentive structures & advances in token engineering offer humanity its best shot at moonshot solutions for some of humanity’s greatest coordination problems.
Many Clean[Block]Tech initiatives have high risk-of-failure, which is precisely why we need legal regimes that maximize innovation and experimentation, especially in the ecological commons context like waste-remediation.
Legal frameworks that support pluralistic commons-based incentive initiatives represent our best chance at meaningfully sustainable ecological revival. As botanists teach us, that’s how plants have seeded themselves so successfully for hundreds of millions of years.
The greater the number of seeds, the more decentralized their dispersal, the higher the chance of survival.
F. The [Blockchained] Commons Stack
So where do we go from here?
First, if you haven’t checked out the Commons Stack, you should. It’s one of the most exciting projects in the entire blockchain space.
The Commons Stack is a globally distributed network of experienced blockchain developers who have seized upon a powerful idea — that certain blockchain “primitives” (like organization templates, token designs, codebases, etc.) should remain open-source & free for use by global communities of coders who want to participate in building a freer and fairer world. If this still seems too abstract, the key takeaway is that the Commons Stack crew is committed to this vision. For life.
Commons Stack has a compelling vision, and it’s launching soon. You can learn more about it in this excellent article by Jeff Emmett:
In Part 4, we will do an educational-use “legal audit” of the Commons Stack as an illustration of how the law of commons functions today. We will also outline a robust comparative law methodology for studying the blockchain commons as a legal form. You owe it to yourself to get familiar with the Commons Stack materials.
For now, CleanApp Foundation and Crypto Law Review will continue analyzing the law of blockchain commons, but we need your help! Please share your views on what works and doesn’t work in your legal commonspheres.
We need rigorous sustained comparative commons law analysis, and one methodology for doing this is forthcoming in Part 4. But as important, we need to gather and share best practices from around the world from people who are directly harmed by the tragic costs of inaction.
Please also share this to help us gather jurisdiction-specific and context-specific examples. The more data points we generate, the better.
The response box is 👇.
*EthMaps & EthLaw are hypothetical names for forthcoming tech stacks, because the utility propositions bound up in these stacks make it inevitable that humanity will build these tech stacks — no matter how long it takes.
