Maintaining the Commons

As usual when I look through tweets for a monthly round-up, I find a thread that's too long to include but that has to be mentioned. This time it's one from Cory Doctorow. 

He starts out by explaining that the "tragedy of the commons" was a hoax created by a white nationalist named Garrett Hardin. If the commons will always be spoiled, you see, that means it's good to steal it from Indigenous people who aren't using it correctly. Only private ownership works.

Doctorow's real point in the thread, though, is to talk about the way internet tech companies have disproved the idea of private ownership of the commons as making things better. The less Google has behaved like a public domain entity, the worse things have become.

First there was paid advertising junking up search results. Then review spam. And now AI (LLM)-written review spam:

...while a chatbot can't produce truthful and informative articles, it *can* produce *bullshit* — at *unimaginable* scale. Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers *dream* of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.

The point about the failed commons is not as simple as it started out seeming, though:

There's a reason so many people believed Hardin's racist "Tragedy of the Commons" hoax. We have an intuitive understanding that commons are *fragile*. All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're *all* poisoned. The financial markets *love* these monsters.

We exist in an economic system that rewards the monsters. But! There is a but:

But it *is* possible for a community to maintain a commons. This is something Hardin could have discovered by studying *actual* commons, instead of inventing imaginary histories in which commons turned tragic.

As it happens, someone else did exactly that: Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom. She described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.

When that breaks down, commons *can* fail — because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse. Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again. 

The requirement is to create policy that ensures self-governance of any commons by its users, as well as fostering the ability to recognize bad actors — and exclude them.