
Looking at today’s Internet, it is easy to wonder: whatever happened to the dream that it would be good for democracy? Well, looking past the scandals of big social media and scary plays of autocracy’s hackers, I think there’s still room for hope. The web remains full of small experiments in self-governance. It’s still happening, quietly maybe, but at such a tremendous scale that we have a chance, not only to revive the founding dream of the web, but to bring modern scientific methods to basic millenia-old questions about self-governance, and how it works.
Minecraft? Minecraft.
That’s why I spent five years studying Minecraft. Minecraft, the game you or your kid or niece played anytime between 5 minutes and 10 years ago, consists of joining one of millions of boundless virtual worlds, and building things out of cubic blocks. Minecraft doesn’t have a plot, but narrative abhors a vacuum, so people used the basic mechanics of the game to create their own plots, and in the process catapulted it into its current status as the best-selling video game of all time. Bigger than Tetris.
Minecraft’s players and their creations have been the most visible facet of the game, but they are supported by a class of amateur functionaries that have made Minecraft special for a very different reason. These are the “ops” and administrators, the people who do the thankless work of running each copy of Minecraft’s world so that it works well enough that the creators can create.
Minecraft, it turns out, is special not just for its open-ended gameplay, but because it is “self-hosted”: when you play on a world with other people, there is a good chance that it is being maintained not by a big company like Microsoft, but by an amateur, a player, who somehow roped themselves in to all kinds of uncool, non-cubic work writing rules, resolving conflicts, fixing problems, and herding cats. We’re used to leaving critical challenges to professionals and, indeed, most web services you use are administered by people who specialize in providing CPU, RAM, and bandwidth publicly. But there is a whole underworld of amateur-run server communities, in which people with no governance training, and no salary, who would presumably prefer to be doing something else, take on the challenge of building and maintaining a community of people who share a common vision, and work together toward it. When that works, it doesn’t matter if that vision is a block-by-block replica of the starship Enterprise, it’s inspiring. These people have no training in governance, they are teaching themselves to build governance institutions. Each world they create is a political experiment. By my count, 19 of 20 fail, and each success and failure is a miraculous data point in the quest to make self-governance a science.
That’s the dream of the Internet in action, especially if we can bring that success rate up from 1/20, 5 percent. To really understand the determinants of healthy institutions, we’d have to be able to watch 100,000s of the nations of Earth rise and fall. Too bad Earth only has a few hundred nations. Online communities are the next best thing: they give us the scale to run huge comparisons, and even experiments. And there is more to governing them than meets the eye.
Online communities as resource governance institutions
Minecraft servers are one example of an interesting class of thing: the public web server. A web server is a computer that someone is using to provide a web service, be it a computer game, website, mailing list, wiki, or forum. Being computers, web servers have limits: finite processing power (measured in gigahertz), memory (measured in gigabytes), bandwidth (measured in gigabytes per second), and electricity (measured in $$$ per month). Failing to provide any of these adequately means failing to provide a service that your community can rely on. Being a boundless 3D multiplayer virtual world open to virtually anyone, Minecraft is especially resource intensive, making these challenges especially critical.
Any system that manages to thrive in these conditions, despite being available to the entire spectrum of humanity, from anonymous adolescents with poor impulse control to teams of professional hackers, is doing something special. Public web servers are “commons” by default. Each additional user or player who joins your little world imposes a load on it. Even if all of your users are well intentioned your server will grind to a halt if too many are doing too much, and your community will suffer. When a valuable finite resource is available to all, we call it a common pool resource, and we keep our eyes out for the classic Tragedy of the Commons: the problem of too many people taking too much until everyone has nothing.
The coincidence of the Information Age with the global dominance of market exchange is that virtually every application of advancing technology has been toward making commons extinct. Anything that makes a gadget smaller or cheaper makes it easier to privately own, and more legible to systems that understand goods as things that you own and buy and sell. This goes back all the way to barbed wire, which turned The Wild West from the gigantic pasture commons that created cowboys to one that could feasibly to fence off large tracts of previously wild land, and permit the idea of private property. (Cowboys were common pool resource managers who ranged the West bringing cow herds back to their owners, through round-ups.). Private servers like those in Minecraft are a counterpoint to this narrative. With modern technology’s adversity to the commons, it’s funny every time you stumble on a commons that was created by technology. It’s like they won’t go away.
That brings up a big question. Will commons go away? Can they be privatized and technologized away? This is one foundation of the libertarian ideology behind cryptocurrency. But the stakes are higher than the latest fad.
One claim that has been made by virtually every philosopher of democracy is that successful self-governance depends not only on having good rules in place, but on having members who hold key norms and values. Democracy has several well-known weak spots, and norms and values are its only reliable protection from demagogues, autocrats, elites, or mob rule. This sensitivity to culture puts institutions like democracy in contrast with institutions like markets, hierarchies, and autocracies, whose reliance on base carrots and sticks makes them more independent of value systems. Economist Sam Bowles distinguishes between Machiavellian and Aristotelian institutions, those that are robust to the worst citizen, and those that create good ones. The cynical versus the culture-driven institutions.
