15
The Comity of the Commons
The Web changes everything (Everything = Everything).Embrace it. Totally. Or else.
—Tom Peters1
If the Internet is a place, what kind of place is it? Remember: (1) all metaphors are wrong, and (2) we have to use them, because we understand everything metaphorically. So let’s be clear with ourselves that the Internet is not really a place. (Nor is it a printing press, plumbing, a theater, a shipping system, or any other frame we use to think and talk about the Net.) But if we choose to prefer place to other metaphors, what kind of real-world place would we prefer?
How about a market?
Well, most of what we call markets aren’t places either. We use the term market when we mean categories (“the home improvement market”), demographics (“the upscale market”), regions (“the New York market”), appetites (“the market for candy”), or a virtual place for selling (“these jewels are on the market”) or for buying (“we’re in the market for a car”). We also say “the market” or “the marketplace” when we mean the whole of business—especially when posed apart from government. The phrase “neither the state nor the market” appears in hundreds of books.2
In respect to the Internet as a place, the term commons has come into popular use. Search for commons on Google, and the top results will be for Creative Commons, Wikipedia articles, and Wikimedia Commons, a repository for media files that are either in the public domain or available with usage-friendly Creative Commons licenses. But not all things called commons are free and open. Also among the top results in a search for commons is eRA Commons, with the address commons.era.nih.gov, at the National Institutes of Health. At the bottom of that page, it says,
***WARNING***
You are accessing a U.S. Government web site which may contain information that must be protected under the U.S. Privacy Act or other sensitive information and is intended for Government-authorized use only. Unauthorized attempts to upload information, change information, or use of this web site may result in …
Why would something called a “commons” have such a stinted proviso? The short answer is, because all commons are stinted. The idea that the commons is a purely open, common pool resource is wrong—one might even say, tragically.
A Tragic Dilemma
For most of us, the noun commons tends to arrive with the adjective tragic. For that we can thank Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons,” a 1968 essay in Science on the subject of population growth.3 Hardin’s main argument was against “the tendency to assume that decisions reached individually will, in fact, be the best decisions for an entire society”—an assumption that derives, of course, from Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” Here is Hardin’s case, slightly abridged:
The tragedy of the commons develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy …
Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit—in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.4
Commons Properties
Lewis Hyde challenges Hardin’s assumption that common pool resources and a commons are the same thing.5 In Common as Air, he makes a thoroughly argued case against Hardin’s tragedy-prone commons and for something much more complex, subtle, and—I believe—important to understand if we are to make the most of the Internet.
“I take a commons to be a kind of property,” Hyde writes, “and I take ‘property’ to be, by one old dictionary definition, a right of action,” noting “that ownership rarely consists of the entire set of possible actions.” For example, “If I own a house in an American city, I have many rights of action … but not all … I cannot put a herd of cows in my yard; I cannot convert my home into a soap factory …”6 He continues, “My point is that the idea of property as a right of action suggests … that a commons is a kind of property in which more than one person has rights.”
He goes on to unpack what nearly all of us (Hardin included) never learned, or forgot, or ignored, about what a commons was and—more importantly for our purposes—how it served both commerce and culture:
Traditional English commons were lands held collectively by the residents of a parish or village: the fields, pastures, streams and woods that a number of people … had the right to use in ways organized and regulated by custom. Those who held a common right of pasturage could graze their cattle in the fields; those with a common right of piscary might fish the streams; those with a common of turbary might cut turf to burn for heat; those with a common of estovers7 might take wood necessary to heat, furnish or repair their houses. Everyone, the poor especially, had the right to glean after harvest.8
Thus, “The commons are not simply the land but the land plus the rights, customs, and institutions that preserve its communal uses.” And, “A true commons is a stinted thing; what Hardin described is not a commons at all but what is nowadays called an “unmanaged common-pool resource.”9
Notably, markets too were stinted. For example, there might be only one “market day” per week, and that might be further limited to just one afternoon.
Those who shared the commons also enforced their own rules:
In general no one could erect barriers to customary common rights, not the lord of the manor, not even the king. In fact, if encroachments appeared, commoners had a right to throw them down. Once a year, commoners would “beat the bound,” meaning they would perambulate the public ways and common lands armed with axes, mattocks, and crowbars to demolish any hedge, fence, ditch, stile, gate or building that had been erected without permission.10
These types of commons, which had retained their essential qualities since Saxon times, came to a tragic end, destroyed by “enclosure” and similar takings by government and commercial interests. To sum it up, the commons lost when industry won the industrial revolution.
Yet the sense of what a commons is, and what it is for, survives in culture and helps make sense of a common pool resource that is not by nature limited in the manner of Hardin’s, yet might still be made tragic by those who would enclose it with contrived finitudes (say, “minutes” or “channels”) for their own parochial purposes.11 This is the risk of subordinating the Internet to telephony and cable television, both of which the Internet transcends and subsumes by design—yet both of which funnel Internet access and contain use within legacy telephone and cable company facilities, provisioning, and business models.
So, how can we respect these manorial companies’ need to innovate and cause market growth as only they can, while still protecting the World Wide Commons we mostly access by their grace, and which to some degree they already consider at least partially enclosed for their own purposes? And how might we guide government policy away from encouraging or granting additional rights of enclosure to the same companies?
Hyde answers,
The commons … needs some kind of built-in border patrol or annual perambulation, a defense against the undue conversion of use rights into rents or the fencing of open fields into sheep pastures. Almost by definition, the commons needs to stint the market, for if the “free market” is free to convert everything it meets into an exchangeable good, no commons will survive.12
This is not the kind of talk that tends to warm a capitalist heart. But let’s ponder our own enclosed markets—our captive customers, our loyalty-card-carrying calves that also suckle our Web sites’ cows. What will happen when they come to possess tools that make them fully independent in the marketplace? What will happen when they cease to be veal and start beating the bounds of the Web or the Net or the marketplace as a whole—especially when those three things come to coexist and codepend to the degree that they become indistinguishable?
Here’s how Hyde, in an interview, described the current situation, not long after Common as Air came out:
The rules are not clear. Then we get these polar camps: amateur anarchists on the one side, who happily believe we need no rules, and old guard “intellectual property” purists madly trying to enforce and sharpen the rules that worked so well back in 1965. What Creative Commons and others are doing is trying to enlarge the middle ground.13
The amateur anarchists and intellectual property maximalists will still fight, but customers and vendors are the ones in position to civilize the middle ground. We call that ground, that commons, the marketplace. Both sides will stint it to serve their own common(s) interests, because they will know from growing experience how working together will be good for business and for the culture that surrounds it.