Digital Commons

The Invisible Foundation

The digital economy has quietly produced what may be history's largest-scale demonstration that commons governance can succeed—indeed, that it already underpins most of the modern technological infrastructure.

If firms had to build internally the open-source software they currently use for free, it would cost them $8.8 trillion. Yet recreating the most widely-used open-source projects would cost only $4.15 billion—revealing an extraordinary efficiency ratio where volunteer-coordinated commons production generates over 2,000 times its replacement cost in demand-side value.

Blockchain: Commons Governance for Value

If open-source software represents commons-based production, blockchain protocols represent commons-based governance of valuable shared resources. Decentralized autonomous organizations collectively manage $21-30 billion in treasury assets through token-weighted voting, delegation, and rough consensus mechanisms—essentially implementing Elinor Ostrom's design principles for commons governance at digital scale.

Bitcoin's 15-year governance track record demonstrates that leaderless, community-driven protocols can successfully navigate contentious decisions. Ethereum's transition to proof-of-stake in September 2022, the largest coordinated protocol upgrade in cryptocurrency history, was achieved through years of public debate, competing client teams, and ultimately validated by node operators choosing to run updated software.

The Knowledge Commons

Wikipedia contains 66+ million articles across 342 languages—the sixth most-visited website globally, produced by approximately 600,000 active editors who contribute 5.7 edits per second. A 2013 economic valuation estimated Wikipedia's one-time replacement cost at $6.6 billion—yet the Wikimedia Foundation operates on approximately $185 million annually.

The Creative Commons licensing infrastructure has enabled approximately 2.5 billion works to be shared under standardized permissions across 9 million websites. OpenStreetMap, maintained by millions of volunteer contributors, powers navigation for Tesla, Grab, and Pokémon Go—another trillion-dollar infrastructure layer built through commons-based peer production.

AGI: The Ultimate Test Case

If digital commons demonstrate the viability of collective ownership at scale, artificial general intelligence represents the most critical case for commons-based stewardship in human history.

If AGI generates the transformative productivity gains that proponents anticipate, the question of who captures those gains—concentrated shareholders or distributed commons beneficiaries—may prove the defining political-economic question of the twenty-first century.

Global Production, Local Benefit

GitHub now hosts over 150 million developers collaborating across 193 countries—particularly rapid growth in Africa (Nigeria +28%, Kenya +33%) and Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh +35%). This represents a genuine global commons of computational knowledge, governed through informal norms, code review processes, and community standards rather than corporate hierarchy.