Lifecycle of a Commons - Bangkok 2024

[Music] you uh so I just want I have no slides I had no idea that I was going to have such a beautiful display behind me and so I have no slides so now I feel I feel small so to help me feel a bit bigger I'm just going to get everybody to just stand up and just shake yourself out a little bit right because that will be that will give me the equivalent of having really amazing like imagine there's a beach or or a star like your favorite screen saver is just running by okay good okay good I feel like you you've done your bit now okay so uh this as you can probably tell is going to be a little bit more freewheeling um I don't have science on my side I don't have data um I do have anecdotes and uh the multiple of anecdotes is a history so I will try and provide some uh historical context uh particular icly in the area that I work with I work with the filecoin foundation we're just down there uh and one of the things that we spend a lot of time with working with this wider Community is how to preserve uh digital public goods or more importantly the digital Commons the Falco uh ecosystem is really designed about preserving uh Humanity's most important knowledge that's kind of what the technology is aimed to do but we realize very soon after sort of building out this technology that there are a lot of other aspects to that I I don't know whether um I was asking not chat GPT because I'm a bit fancy I was asking Claude like whether knowledge itself was a a public good and I think it falls into that category of you know is language a public good is the very idea of money and markets a a public good but it's definitely something that feels like a common right it feels like a common pool a common resource uh that we we draw from and the uh the firmament I think that digital public goods uh digital Commons generally come from and in many ways the sort of existence proof that we can nurture and create these things is is of course the the internet um and for me what I find really interesting about the internet and this particular stage is uh it's it's it's sort of the length of a lifetime at this point I I think everybody particularly in the current political situation is sort of aware that the the things that happen 70 or 80 years ago uh or even a hundred years ago uh pass out of immediate human knowledge and so they sort of aify into a set of rules that we don't know whether we can bend or break or whether that they are uh necessary sufficient or both for um our our continuing culture right but things that are in that sort of 50-year period are things where we still have the people around who existed before that thing happened before that institution before that culture emerged uh and we have perhaps lucky enough to have the people who were involved in that moment I I am not one of those people I think I was born maybe a few days before the first uh uh nodes of the internet were emerged in sort of July 1969 but we now collectively have this uh uh uh implicit knowledge of how that system evolved either because we were involved in it or we had to Bear the opportunities and the ramifications of how that evolved the internet the design of the internet is a a a pervasive feature of our world that was not even conceptualized uh in the lifetimes of our or the the the growing up periods of our great-grandparents before uh uh human living knowledge exists so we have an example here which I think is really useful if we're thinking about public goods and Commons in general right which is the emergence of a Commons within that Lifetime and I think we can think about how rare that is I think when we think I I've I've been to Bangkok several times over over the last 20 or 30 30 years um uh last time I I was here is actually at the beginning of the internet's relationship with with the Thai e e economy and political system and of course it's fascinating to be in emerging City like Bangkok uh and to watch what I think is a general understanding of progress which is often uh and I don't mean this in in a sort of negative way but it's often about enclosure and uh control rationalization uh increasing legibility right it's not about creating a new Commons as taking existing resources and making them more practical and useful either for individuals or for the state or for the collective world right so what we have on something like the internet is the emergence of a new shared resource um I was as I was thinking through like sort of how I would structure this I realized that so many of the language of um exploring and generating uh those sort of Commons has this this somewhat colonialist Tang to it right sort of homesteading exploration colonization literally right but but but what we can if we want to step away from that is this idea of exploring a new a new fallow land which it doesn't isn't owned or uh legible or mapped uh uh in any way up until this point right the unexplored uh I'm not going to say unexplored country because that either means death or a Star Trek film so but the unexplored territory of the internet so this is the first moment right this is the moment of a new Commons emerging and let me just walk through uh a couple of things that are sort of interesting and perhaps missed now in that that moment of the internet emerging so let's skip past kind of the the mythology right of a military internet that was based around decentralization that was initially uh non-commercial and academic and then quickly uh uh uh private institutions were allowed to join it let's even sort of Miss out that first layer of uh the propagation of the hardware and the protocol where the internet was allow was able to compete with centralized proprietary systems and I think we forget that you know uh big actors like uh Microsoft run by Bill Gates at that point Rupert Murdoch even uh were building uh uh proprietary networks and so were States right so France for instance had miniel the United Kingdom had a a similar uh uh semi-public private uh Network called um uh called prestel uh and similar National networks were being experimented at emerging and the reason why the internet ended up being a global network was the very simple factor that people were able to once they understood the op Source protocol as uh the previous speaker talked about were able to just connect to it that it could grow around the edges um uh is that a Commons it's a Commons of sorts right it's definitely creating AOW area if you imagine uh the the classic example of the commons which is sort of in my mind at least a sort of flat grass um uh uh field where cows are potentially or your favorite kind of uh um uh agricultural animal are kind of eating grass and perhaps they're eating too much grass right but there's this idea of like the flood plane emerges um so we have this Hardware expanding right but but this is 10 minutes excellent um this is a uh a a place to create a digital public Commons and I think where people think about it now uh they mostly think about it in terms of the web right so now we have this space so we're in this secondary stage where the the the the opportunity for Commons and unenclosed space emerges and now we fill it I think there's a couple of interesting things that I want to this this is the Nugget of what I want to talk about and then we can talk about the sad things later but how did that Commons F right how did we get the features like just to pluck some examples sort of Wikipedia right a fairly late entrance into that Commons um uh uh the idea of web pages themselves right people contributing these things and I think there are a couple of things right um one was the one that we're very sort of understanding about that like the more that you put in uh the more that you can take out right like one of the things that drove uh this groundwork right were of say the and I will age myself here beautifully here but things like the blogging Revolution and things like this people contributing to a Commons for free was the sense that oh I'm adding to this Collective Venture but there's another period prior to this which is interesting so who here um has ever used the Internet Movie Database IMDb okay great um so uh the Internet Movie Database is probably if you do a search and you've got your favorite Star right that's the bit that will tell you information about it so the Internet Movie Database actually emerged before its current owner uh Amazon so it used to be called the Cardiff University Movie Database and it was run by students uh and uh where did they get the information from uh they got it by people contributing why did they do that because at that point the music and the movie Industries the the entertainment industry um uh uh deliberately or not was withdrawing its labor from uh the internet from the web because there was no monetary aspect to it right like if you think again if ever if any of you can cast your minds back to maybe being a kid and using incart which was a Microsoft in enyclopedia right that was on one of those silver dishes um uh enart was a proprietary thing like the Encyclopedia Britannica and that was the presumption of what uh digital information was going to be like right owned in that way now people the commercial side did not contribute to the web because there was no obvious uh monetary incentive right but that creates a vacuum right that sucks in in information right that pulls in these resources because people saw this capability and wanted to fill it out now I don't know if there had been that kind of um uh I I if there had been a sort of legitimate competition between a pricing system and uh this voluntary effort whether the voluntary effort would have filled that space available I think it's interesting that those national uh networks that I described about even though they were state run assumed that they had to build a monetary system on top of them Pressel charged money for individual Pages lots of companies uh worked on miniel and had a payment system but what you created is is is a resource so now we talk about having created an opportunity for a Commons to exist to do almost the opposite of an enclosure to create some sort of barrier around it so that it could not be enclosed right then you have the um uh uh potentially the threat right like if we want about about if we want to preserve Commons I think one of the biggest challenges is over uh under resourcing it under supplying support for it uh there is always the risk of overe exhausting it right um or uh uh and I think you can think of that as like just people kind of I I don't like misinformation and disinformation as terms but you can imagine like filling up space the idea of spam uh but you also have always the threat of enclosure right so uh and I think for a uh more recent generation of people experiencing the internet what they experience is this sense of enclosure right that the the data and the information the same way as the IMDb went from being a public resource to being a privately owned resource uh still available right like the the private provision of public resources is still there but but the the incentives around that kind of differ so what does it mean to protect a resource like that well I don't want to go all Ellena Ostrom on you because I think you probably all know uh these great works and anyway I have about two minutes uh but uh one of the things that I think you will find in this community uh if you are not part of this existing Community if you've come more from the traditional funding uh environment uh is an attempt to try and create those those ways of of of pushing out uh and creating a self- sustaining regenerative Commons and I think that's a really good way of thinking about it because and this is sort of my end here I think a lot of the ways that we're going to frame and think about um uh the commons one minute good nailing it um is that this is a that requires resourcing that requires money that requires funding right and I think one of the risks of that as funders as donors as uh as supporters as it were is that rather than keeping this space as uh a an area to sort of endlessly explore and and and create right you end up uh essentially making it as legible and quantifiable as the the city we see emerging around us right that by paying for certain things right so you say Okay Wikipedia needs to survive therefore and I know Wikipedia because it's legible right I'm going to direct all my money to Wikipedia right then we create something that is in itself just an artifact right when Wikipedia started the presumption was we would have a million wikipedias right a million things like that and as we got regularity and um legibility we end up with one Wikipedia so my last thought to you is okay this is the life cycle of the commons it's very natural to for it to have texture and for have institutions institutions that like we just sit there and go well Wikipedia or or Milla or even the internet itself has been around all my life and therefore it will exist forever the really interesting moment is creating those new Commons right as exploring and pushing those things out and that's I think if you want to sort of guide to understanding this community that I love fim Foundation funds funding the commons we take we participate in use many of the tools that are built that's how I think about it it's not about how do we really fund the commons it's how we grow and expand and create new ones so thank you very much all right [Music]