The Commons
One of the most important objectives of Nature 2.0 is the establishment of a “New Commons”. But what is this thing we call the commons, and what is it good for?
Origins and history
In short, the commons is everything that is collectively owned and maintained by a community. The word has its origins in the common meadows, on which the villagers of Medieval Europe herded their cows or, more likely, their sheep and goats. The meadows could be private property — in England and Western Europe they would technically belong to some Lord or King — but the village, the community, would have the right of use (usus fructus).
In mainstream economics, the term is mainly known in the context of “the tragedy of the commons”, a narrative from the 19th century that states that lack of private ownership will inevitably lead to overuse, degeneration and exhaustion of a resource. Everyone who has lived in a dorm as a student should be able to relate to the idea. It is, however, a gross oversimplification. The tragedy of the commons only occurs when a community fails to regulate access to the common resource — CO2 reduction and climate change being the most obvious example at the moment.
Contrary to popular belief, the practice of the commons did not die after the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution. Cooperatives, which can be seen as an organizational embodiment of the commons, are widespread in agriculture, finance (insurance), housing and of course in not-for-profit contexts like sports and child care. Also, economic theory about the commons (pioneered by Elinor Ostrom, Nobel Prize 2009) found its way into the mainstream, leading to instruments like Tradable Emission Rights.
Commons in the digital age
The birth of the internet gave a new impulse to the commons. The internet is common infrastructure: owned by no one, and free to use for everyone. (Of course someone owns the cables and the servers, but the internet as a whole — cables, servers, switches, exchanges, protocols, standards — is infrastructure.) The examples of digital commons are well known: Linux and other free and open source software (FOSS) projects, Wikipedia, Creative Commons, Bitcoin. Owned by no one, free to use for everyone and regulated by the community.
But the birth of the internet also caused something else: unprecedented economies of scale in the form of very powerful network effects. In the last ten to fifteen years the world has seen the rise of arguably the most powerful companies since the Dutch East India Company: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Facebook and their Chinese counterparts. Critics like Evgeny Morozov and Shoshana Zuboff (who coined the phrase ‘surveillance capitalism’) warn that this could be only the beginning. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) these data driven companies might get even more powerful, because in AI economies of scale are cumulative — more data is better AI is better products is more users is more data.
Relevance to Nature 2.0
The internal logic of data capitalism, and how blockchain might disrupt this logic, is perhaps best described in a seminal blogpost by Joel Monegro. On the traditional internet, the infrastructure layer is pretty “thin”, says Monegro. All valuable data is captured in the application layer, by private companies. Blockchain and related technologies would allow us to build “fat protocols”: “by replicating and storing user data across an open and decentralized network rather than individual applications controlling access to disparate silos of information, we reduce the barriers to entry for new players and create a more vibrant and competitive ecosystem of products and services on top.”
But there is more. With the combination of blockchain and AI we could go further than just building (passive) infrastructure. We could build decentralized autonomous organizations (DAO’s) in the commons — owned by no one, available for everyone and for the common good. An insurance company, which, after all, is nothing more than data, statistics and algorithms, could conceivably be built as a DAO, for example.
Of course there are lots of questions to be answered. What are relevant communities? How do they form? What kind of (self-)regulation is needed to prevent the tragedy of the commons?
But also: what kind of services do we think belong in the commons? Are we still talking about an infrastructure layer on which “normal” companies can compete? Or are we thinking along the lines of Peter Diamandis and others who foresee an age of abundance in which Nature 2.0 provides us with everything we need — like Nature 1.0 does for all species except homo sapiens?
