Late Capitalism’s Commons Problem
And Why It’s Making Us So Uneasy
In a dream, people wander into a meadow. Sunlight filters through a topaz sky. You encounter people, fall into conversation about their ideas, health and relationships. It seems effortless, so easy to switch back and forth between small groups. Yet, you don’t feel at ease. A sense of wariness tugs at you. It’s as if you can trust the people but not the place. Why would that be? You wake up.
We are in the process of waking up to a new way of thinking about late capitalism’s effect on the commons. It shines a light not just on the nature of our current unease, one founded on a lack of trust. It also illuminates the potential of a new mode of organization: the blockchain-enabled commonist mode.
A meadow is a type of commons. For most of human history, meadows were not owned, but shared. They benefitted the entire community. This is still true of high-mountain meadows today.
Within that high mountain meadow, money has practically no use. There are multiple reasons why. First, if firms set up booths to sell us stuff in the meadow directly, or billboards indirectly, they would ruin it and push people to a different meadow. Second, money can’t be used to buy parts of the commons and limit access to it. Third, using money to bribe people to stay out of the commons would invite everyone to show up at the meadow to be bribed. This brings up a general tenet of commonism (more will follow below):
Money from outside the commons is no good in the commons.
Whenever external money does its way into usefulness inside a commons, it eventually kills it. A great example of this is a rainforest. Logging the rainforest is possible without ownership rights to the land. A logging company just has to put out a standing offer for logs. People in the rainforest commons will organize to take advantage of that offer. External money puts the people in the commons in the service of people outside the commons. The rainforest disappears through excessive logging, and the people leave it. Non-commons money is an exceedingly poor way to apportion commons resources.
Money from outside the commons can cause the people of the commons to destroy it on their way out.
Now, let’s apply those tenets to the true meaning of the meadow dream: the Internet.
The Internet is a type of commons. Anyone can use it. All it takes is technology that makes use of shared, open protocols. These protocols are a way of “joining”, or “entering” the commons. Throughout its brief history, the Internet has not been owned, but shared. As in the dream, the Internet commons makes possible interaction that is effortless and unconstrained.
Nested within the Internet, though, things are less clear.
In the “meadow”, one walks from free use of the Internet to free use of a company’s platforms that make use of the Internet. Underfoot, the transition looks simply like walking into a more fertile and subtly tended part of the meadow, filled with rich grass and bright flowers. This is an illusion. Though free, we have to ask for a name tag to access it. On the tag is a sophisticated and cleverly hidden surveillance device. We sometimes catch glimpses of its effect: a conversation with someone in which they recommend a spa, when we were just now talking to someone else about going to one!
So the Internet itself is still a commons and will be forever. Nested within the commons, external money is used to apportion the rights to a scarce resource: data about our interaction in the commons.
It stands to reason that use rights to the scarce resource of a commons will be apportioned by anything that limits access to them. What “limits” access to use of the Internet? Internet protocols do. These protocols limit access to those that bring capacity to the Internet. As the Internet usage grows, the supply of the scarce resource also grows.
The scarce resource of a commons is typically apportioned by the thing that grants access.
Some would say the Internet commons’ scarce resource is our attention. We disagree, and the reasons why point to two more commonist tenets.
Our attention is not just scarce within the Internet commons. It is scarce in general. The “use rights” to our attention are therefore apportioned with external money. That money pays for billboards that distract our attention in commons roads, and for television ads that command our attention on the public airwaves. External money incentivizes us to pay attention wherever we are, whatever activity we’re engaged in.
Human-made commons should be about apportioning a scarce resource unique to the commons, and not a generally scarce resource.
Our attention within any commons would only be scarce if commoners agreed to make it so. That is, the purpose of the commons itself would be to restrict the attention of those that joined it. This is a really hard thing to do. Can you imagine a commons where people passing a poster or billboard all agreed not to glance at it? Perhaps the Shakers or some other cohesive group could pull this off. The rest of us would look.
If a scarce resource is not inherently unique, then it must be made so by enforceable agreement.
Our attention is not uniquely scarce in the Internet. So, besides carrying capacity, what is?
In the meadow example above, we crossed from a commons into an area where access merely required an augmented name tag. This section of the meadow has the quality of a commons: it is shared, open to everyone for (practically) unconstrained use, and free. That is why we don’t really notice when we cross into it.
Above, though, we said access to a commons is typically limited by the thing that apportions its scarce resource. In this case, access is limited by agreeing to be surveilled. Therefore, it stands to reason that the scarce resource of the nested commons, the area we cross into, is data about our activities. External currency bribes us to give up this scarce resource by paying for a section of the commons where the grass is richer, the flowers brighter. The neat trick, the illusion, is that the name tag provider creates the semblance of a decentralized network. In reality, they are a type of centralized authority — a hub and spoke network — that takes control of the scarce resource. We will come back to the nature of this illusion in a later article.
We not only give up the use rights to data about our own activities; we give up data about our interactions with each other. This interaction is an emergent property of our intra-commons social connections. The name tag not only tracks this emergent network data. It also makes it the private property of its furnisher. This network data is not accessible through Internet protocols. Instead, the central authority uses external money to exfiltrate the nested commons’ scarce resource.
There is yet another emergent commons nested within the Internet commons and the network data commons. The network data we throw off yields a unique vantage point over the whole of our interaction. This vantage point is exceedingly scarce: only one firm has it. The view is like that of a lone drone looking upon a meadow crowded with people. Except the vantage point in this case is not visual, but algorithmic. Mining the data is what synthesizes complex tracked activities into a “view”. The drone owner sells this algorithm to firms outside the commons in exchange for external money. They use it to direct our activities and attention within the commons to their ends. One way they meet their ends is by further ring-fencing those activities. Uber is an example. The GPS data we give off is our network data. Uber translates this emergent interaction into an algorithm that only its drivers have access to. Uber seemingly charges us nothing to surveil our location data; and yet it does profit (someday) by ring-fencing access to the nested algorithm that emerges from that network data.
So, we have three commons in one, and their scarce resources are as follows: Internet network capacity; emergent network data; emergent algorithms derived from emergent network data.
Commons can nest other commons that are emergent from them, ad infinitum.
In the opening dream, there is a sense of metaphorical unease as the dreamer wanders through the meadow. The source of that unease is, we argue, the following: 1) External currency is being used to command the scarce resource of two nested commons; 2) This scarce resource is data about ourselves and the ability to coordinate our activities and attention that emerges from it; 3) due to an illusion, we are giving up this scarce resource while thinking we are still in a decentralized commons; 4) outside firms are stealthily using those scarce resources to coordinate our activities and command out attention for profit; 5) anytime we sense we give up something for nothing, and feel we are influenced by powers outside our control, it causes us unease because we feel dis-empowered.
This brings us to a major tenet of commonism, and the main reason why we believe we are at an inflection point between late capitalism and pre-commonism.
At the root of late capitalism’s pathology is our emergent feeling of disempowerment over our new, big, and emergent human commons: our network data and the ability to influence that it creates.
In the following articles in the series, we’ll argue: 1) As a blockchain commons emerges, we are about to wake up to the true nature of the “illusion of the Internet commons”, the hub-and-spoke network; and 2) Tokens will allow us to prevent external money from apportioning the emergent scarce resource of Internet commons.
The author is indebted to Alexander Espinosa for the concept of nested commons.
