the commons

The AI industry is telling a story about the future of work that goes roughly like this: automate what can be automated, augment what remains, and trust that the productivity gains will compound into a wealthier, more efficient world.

The Social Edge Framework tells a different story. It says: the intelligence we are automating was never ours alone.... See more

Ivan Illich described the commons this way: “People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.”

The idea that people could actually self-organize durable arrangements for managing their own resources and that this paradigm of social governance could generate immense value, well, it seems either utopian or communistic, or at the very least, impractical. The idea that the commons could be a vehicle for social and political emancipation and... See more

it’s when people get together and say, we want to manage the shared wealth for our mutual benefit and steward it properly to sustain it.

the commons as a relational social organism