Public Goods

As builders of a new digital society, we must be equipped with an even more inclusive and visionary concept of what "public" and "good" can mean.

That private platforms such as Amazon’s Twitch, Twitter and Facebook now constitute the digital equivalents to public spheres is as much a political failure as one of our collective imagination.

to create a majestic and egalitarian society requires a more expansive vision of public goods than what can be imagined with economics alone.

By addressing concerns rooted in our felt localities and establishing social models for others, we can catalyze truly global public goods.

Each of these examples is based on a different idea of what makes life meaningful—on an idea of what is "good" (Taylor, 1977). Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous, but more importantly, they are objects that satisfy values that are shared.

Understanding public goods as positive externalities enables us to consider people that are not typically classified as members of a public to be our beneficiaries. This definition stands in contrast to economic discourse, where non-contributing users of some public good are considered "free riders," indicative of market failure. How coul