This is the Ostrom Memorial Lecture I gave on 9 October of last year for the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University. Here is the video. (The intro starts at 8 minutes in, and my part starts just after 11 minutes in.) I usually speak off the cuff, but this time I wrote it out, originally in outline form*, which is germane to my current collaborations with Dave Winer, father of outlining software (and, in related ways, of blogging and podcasting). So here ya go.

Intro

The movie Blade Runner was released in 1982; and was set in a future Los Angeles. Anyone here know when in the future Blade Runner is set? I mean, exactly?

The year was 2019. More precisely, next month: November.

In Blade Runner’s 2019, Los Angeles is a dark and rainy hellscape with buildings the size of mountains, flying cars, and human replicants working on off-world colonies. It also has pay phones and low-def computer screens that are vacuum tubes.

Missing is a communication system that can put everyone in the world at zero distance from everyone else, in disembodied form, at almost no cost—a system that lives on little slabs in people’s pockets and purses, and on laptop computers far more powerful than any computer, of any size, from 1982.

In other words, this communication system—the Internet—was less thinkable in 1982 than flying cars, replicants and off-world colonies. Rewind the world to 1982, and the future Internet would appear a miracle dwarfing the likes of loaves and fish.

In economic terms, the Internet is a common pool resource; but non-rivalrous and non-excludable to such an extreme that to call it a pool or a resource is to insult what makes it common: that it is the simplest possible way for anyone and anything in the world to be present with anyone and anything else in the world, at costs that can round to zero.

As a commons, the Internet encircles every person, every institution, every business, every university, every government, every thing you can name. It is no less exhaustible than presence itself. By nature and design, it can’t be tragic, any more than the Universe can be tragic.

There is also only one of it. As with the universe, it has no other examples.

As a source of abundance, the closest thing to an example the Internet might have is the periodic table. And the Internet might be even more elemental than that: so elemental that it is easy to overlook the simple fact that it is the largest goose ever to lay golden eggs.

It can, however, be misunderstood, and that’s why it’s in trouble.

The trouble it’s in is with human nature: the one that sees more value in the goose’s eggs than in the goose itself.

See, the Internet is designed to support every possible use, every possible institution, and—alas—every possible restriction, which is why enclosure is possible. People, institutions and possibilities of all kinds can be trapped inside enclosures on the Internet. I’ll describe nine of them.

Enclosures

The first enclosure is service provisioning, for example with asymmetric connection speeds. On cable connections you may have up to 400 megabits per second downstream, but still only 10 megabits per second—one fortieth of that—upstream. (By the way this is exactly what Spectrum, formerly Time Warner Cable, provides with its most expensive home service to customers in New York City.)

They do that to maximize consumption while minimizing production by those customers. You can consume all the video you want, and think you’re getting great service. But meanwhile this asymmetrical provisioning prevents production at your end. Want to put out a broadcast or a podcast from your house, to run your own email server, or to store your own video or other personal data in your own personal “cloud”? Forget it.

The Internet was designed to support infinite production by anybody of anything. But cable TV companies don’t want you to have that that power. So you don’t. The home Internet you get from your cable company is nice to have, but it’s not the whole Internet. It’s an enclosed subset of capabilities biased by and for the cable company and large upstream producers of “content.”

So, it’s golden eggs for them, but none for you. Also missing are all the golden eggs you might make possible for those companies as an active producer rather than as a passive consumer.

The second enclosure is through 5G wireless service, currently promoted by phone companies as a new generation of Internet service. The companies deploying 5G promise greater speeds and lower lag times over wireless connections; but is also clear that they want to build in as many choke points as they like, all so you can be billed for as many uses as possible.

You want gaming? Here’s our gaming package. You want cloud storage? Here’s our cloud storage package. Each of these uses will carry terms and conditions that allow some uses and prevent others. Again, this is a phone company enclosure. No cable companies are deploying 5G. They’re fine with their own enclosure.

The third enclosure is government censorship. The most familiar example is China’s. In China’s closed Internet you will find no Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Reddit. No Pandora, Spotify, Slack or Dropbox. What you will find is pervasive surveillance of everyone and everything—and ranking of people in its Social Credit System.

By March of this year, China had already punished 23 million people with low social credit scores by banning them from traveling. Control of speech has also spread to U.S. companies such as the NBA and ESPN, which are now censoring themselves as well, bowing to the wishes of the Chinese government and its own captive business partners.

The fourth enclosure is the advertising-supported commercial Internet. This is led by Google and Facebook, but also includes all the websites and services that depend on tracking-based advertising. This form of advertising, known as adtech, has in the last decade become pretty much the only kind of advertising online.

Today there are very few major websites left that don’t participate in what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism, and Brett Frischmann and Evan Selinger call, in their book by that title, Re-engineering Humanity. Surveillance of individuals online is now so deep and widespread that nearly every news organization is either unaware of it or afraid to talk about it—in part because the advertising they run is aimed by it.

That’s why you’ll read endless stories about how bad Facebook and Google are, and how awful it is that we’re all being tracked everywhere like marked animals; but almost nothing about how the sites publishing stories about tracking also participate in exactly the same business—and far more surreptitiously. Reporting on their own involvement in the surveillance business is a third rail they won’t grab.

I know of only one magazine that took and shook that third rail, especially in the last year and a half.  That magazine was Linux Journal, where I worked for 24 years and was serving as editor-in-chief when it was killed by its owner in August. At least indirectly that was because we didn’t participate in the surveillance economy.

The fifth enclosure is protectionism. In Europe, for example, your privacy is protected by laws meant to restrict personal data use by companies online. As a result in Europe, you won’t see the Los Angeles Times or the Washington Post in your browsers, because those publishers don’t want to cope with what’s required by the EU’s laws.

While they are partly to blame—because they wish to remain in the reader-tracking business—the laws are themselves terribly flawed—for example by urging every website to put up a “cookie notice” on pages greeting readers. In most cases clicking “accept” to the site’s cookies only gives the site permission to continue doing exactly the kind of tracking the laws are meant to prevent.

So, while the purpose of these laws is to make the Internet safer, in effect they also make its useful space smaller.

The sixth enclosure is what The Guardian calls “digital colonialism.” The biggest example of that is  Facebook.org, originally called “Free Basics” and “Internet.org”

This is a China-like subset of the Internet, offered for free by Facebook in less developed parts of the world. It consists of a fully enclosed Web, only a few dozen sites wide, each hand-picked by Facebook. The rest of the Internet isn’t there.

The seventh enclosure is the forgotten past. Today the World Wide Web, which began as a kind of growing archive—a public set of published goods we could browse as if it were a library—is being lost. Forgotten. That’s because search engines are increasingly biased to index and find pages from the present and recent past, and by following the tracks of monitored browsers. It’s forgetting what’s old. Archival goods are starting to disappear, like snow on the water.

Why? Ask the algorithm.

Of course, you can’t. That brings us to our eighth enclosure: algorithmic opacity.

Consider for a moment how important power plants are, and how carefully governed they are as well. Every solar, wind, nuclear, hydro and fossil fuel power production system in the world is subject to inspection by whole classes of degreed and trained professionals.

There is nothing of the sort for the giant search engine and social networks of the world. Google and Facebook both operate dozens of data centers, each the size of many Walmart stores. Yet the inner workings of those data centers are nearly absent of government oversight.

This owes partly to the speed of change in what these centers do, but more to the simple fact that what they do is unknowable, by design. You can’t look at rows of computers with blinking lights in many acres of racks and have the first idea of what’s going on in there.

I would love to see research, for example, on that last enclosure I listed: on how well search engines continue to index old websites. Or to do anything. The whole business is as opaque as a bowling ball with no holes.

I’m not even sure you can find anyone at Google who can explain exactly why its index does one thing or another, for any one person or another. In fact, I doubt Facebook is capable of explaining why any given individual sees any given ad. They aren’t designed for that. And the algorithm itself isn’t designed to explain itself, perhaps even to the employees responsible for it.

Or so I suppose.

In the interest of moving forward with research on these topics, I invite anyone at Google, Facebook, Bing or Amazon to help researchers at institutions such as the Ostrom Workshop, and to explain exactly what’s going on inside their systems, and to provide testable and verifiable ways to research those goings-on.

The ninth and worst enclosure is the one inside our heads. Because, if we think the Internet is something we use by grace of Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and “providers” such as phone and cable companies, we’re only helping all those companies contain the Internet’s usefulness inside their walled gardens.

Not understanding the Internet can result in problems similar to ones we suffer by not understanding common pool resources such as the atmosphere, the oceans, and the Earth itself.

But there is a difference between common pool resources in the natural world, and the uncommon commons we have with the Internet.

See, while we all know that common-pool resources are in fact not limitless—even when they seem that way—we don’t have the same knowledge of the Internet, because its nature as a limitless non-thing is non-obvious.

For example, we know common pool resources in the natural world risk tragic outcomes if our use of them is ungoverned, either by good sense or governance systems with global reach. But we don’t know that the Internet is limitless by design, or that the only thing potentially tragic about it is how we restrict access to it and use of it, by enclosures such as the nine I just listed.

So my thesis here is this: if we can deeply and fully understand what the Internet is, why it is fully important, and why it is in danger of enclosure, we can also understand why, ten years after Lin Ostrom won a Nobel prize for her work on the commons, that work may be exactly what we need to save the Internet as a boundless commons that can support countless others.

The Internet

We’ll begin with what makes the Internet possible: a protocol.

A protocol is a code of etiquette for diplomatic exchanges between computers. A form of handshake.

What the Internet’s protocol does is give all the world’s digital devices and networks a handshake agreement about how to share data between any point A and any point B in the world, across any intermediary networks.

When you send an email, or look at a website, anywhere in the world, the route the shared data takes can run through any number of networks between the two. You might connect from Bloomington to Denver through Chicago, Tokyo and Mexico City. Then, two minutes later, through Toronto and Miami. Some packets within your data flows may also be dropped along the way, but the whole session will flow just fine because the errors get noticed and the data re-sent and re-assembled on the fly.

Oddly, none of this is especially complicated at the technical level, because what I just described is pretty much all the Internet does. It doesn’t concern itself with what’s inside the data traffic it routes, who is at the ends of the connections, or what their purposes are—any more than gravity cares about what it attracts.

Beyond the sunk costs of its physical infrastructure, and the operational costs of keeping the networks themselves standing up, the Internet has no first costs at its protocol level, and it adds no costs along the way. It also has no billing system.

In all these ways the Internet is, literally, neutral. It also doesn’t need regulators or lawmakers to make it neutral. That’s just its nature.

The Internet’s protocol called is called TCP/IP, and by using it, all the networks of the world subordinate their own selfish purposes.

This is what makes the Internet’s protocol generous and supportive to an absolute degree toward every purpose to which it is put. It is a rising tide that lifts all boats.

In retrospect we might say the big networks within the Internet—those run by phone and cable companies, governments and universities—agreed to participate in the Internet because it was so obviously useful that there was no reason not to.

But the rising-tide nature of the Internet was not obvious to all of them at first. In retrospect, they didn’t realize that the Internet was a Trojan Horse, wheeled through their gates by geeks who looked harmless but in fact were bringing the world a technical miracle.

I can support that claim by noting that even though phone and cable companies of the world now make trillions of dollars because of it, they never would have invented it.

Two reasons for that. One is because it was too damn simple. The other is because they would have started with billing. And not just billing you and me. They would have wanted to bill each other, and not use something invented by another company.

A measure of the Internet’s miraculous nature is that actually billing each other would have been so costly and complicated that what they do with each other, to facilitate the movement of data to, from, and across their networks, is called peering. In other words, they charge each other nothing.

Even today it is hard for the world’s phone and cable companies—and even its governments, which have always been partners of a sort—to realize that the Internet became the world-wide way to communicate because it didn’t start with billing.

Again, all TCP/IP says is that this is a way for computers, networks, and everything connected to them, to get along. And it succeeded, producing instant worldwide peace among otherwise competing providers of networks and services. It made every network operator involved win a vast positive-sum game almost none of them knew they were playing. And most of them still don’t.

You know that old joke in which the big fish says to the little fish, “Hi guys, how’s the water?” and one of the little fish says to the other “What’s water?” In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave a legendary commencement address at Kenyon College that I highly recommend, titled “This is water.”

I suspect that, if Wallace were around today, he’d address his point to our digital world.

Human experience

Those of you who already know me are aware that my wife Joyce is as much a companion and collaborator of mine as Vincent Ostrom was of Lin. I bring this up because much of of this talk is hers, including this pair of insights about the Internet: that it has no distance, and also no gravity.

Think about it: when you are on the Internet with another person—for example if you are in a chat or an online conference—there is no functional distance between you and the other person. One of you may be in Chicago and the other in Bangalore. But if the Internet is working, distance is gone. Gravity is also gone. Your face may be right-side-up on the other person’s screen, but it is absent of gravity. The space you both occupy is the other person’s two-dimensional rectangle. Even if we come up with holographic representations of ourselves, we are still incorporeal “on” the Internet. (I say “on” because we need prepositions to make sense of how things are positioned in the world. Yet our limited set of physical-world prepositions—over, under around, through, beside, within and the rest—misdirect our attention away from our disembodied state in the digital one.)

Familiar as that disembodied state may be to all of us by now, it is still new to human experience and inadequately informed by our experience as embodied creatures. It is also hard for us to see both what our limitations are, and how limitless we are at the same time.

Joyce points out that we are also highly adaptive creatures, meaning that eventually we’ll figure out what it means to live where there is no distance or gravity, much as astronauts learn to live as weightless beings in space.

But in the meantime, we’re having a hard time seeing the nature and limits of what’s good and what’s bad in this new environment. And that has to do, at least in part, on forms of enclosure in that world—and how we are exploited within private spaces where we hardly know we are trapped.

In The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan says every new medium, every new technology, “works us over completely.” Those are his words: works us over completely. Such as now, with digital technology, and the Internet.

I was talking recently with a friend about where our current digital transition ranks among all the other transitions in history that each have a formal cause. Was becoming ditital the biggest thing since the industrial revolution? Since movable type? Writing? Speech?

No, he said. “It’s the biggest thing since oxygenation.”

In case you weren’t there, or weren’t paying attention in geology class, oxygenation happened about 2.5 billion years ago. Which brings us to our next topic:

Institutions

Journalism is just one example of a trusted institution that is highly troubled in the digital world.

It worked fine in a physical world where truth-tellers who dig into topics and reported on them with minimized prejudice were relatively scarce yet easy to find, and to trust. But in a world flooded with information and opinion—a world where everyone can be a reporter, a publisher, a producer, a broadcaster, where the “news cycle” has the lifespan of a joke, and where news and gossip have become almost indistinguishable while being routed algorithmically to amplify prejudice and homophily, journalism has become an anachronism: still important, but all but drowning in a flood of biased “content” paid for by surveillance-led adtech.

People are still hungry for good information, of course, but our appetites are too easily fed by browsing through the surfeit of “content” on the Internet, which we can easily share by text, email or social media. Even if we do the best we can to share trustworthy facts and other substances that sound like truth, we remain suspended in a techno-social environment we mostly generate and re-generate ourselves. Kind of like our ancestral life forms made sense of the seas they oxygenated, long ago.

The academy is another institution that’s troubled in our digital time. After all, education on the Internet is easy to find. Good educational materials are easy to produce and share. For example, take Kahn Academy, which started with one guy tutoring his cousin though online videos.

Authority must still be earned, but there are now countless non-institutional ways to earn it. Credentials still matter, but less than they used to, and not in the same ways. Ad hoc education works in ways that can be cheap or free, while institutions of higher education remain very expensive. What happens when the market for knowledge and know-how starts moving past requirements for advanced degrees that might take students decades of their lives to pay off?

For one example of that risk already at work, take computer programming.

Which do you think matters more to a potential employer of programmers—a degree in computer science or a short but productive track record? For example, by contributing code to the Linux operating system?

To put this in perspective, Linux and operating systems like it are inside nearly every smart thing that connects to the Internet, including TVs, door locks, the world’s search engines, social network, laptops and mobile phones. Nothing could be more essential to computing life.

At the heart of Linux is what’s called the kernel. For code to get into the kernel, it has to pass muster with other programmers who have already proven their worth, and then through testing and debugging. If you’re looking for a terrific programmer, everyone contributing to the Linux kernel is well-proven. And there are thousands of them.

Now here’s the thing. It not only doesn’t matter whether or not those people have degrees in computer science, or even if they’ve had any formal training. What matters, for our purposes here, is that, to a remarkable degree, many of them don’t have either. Or perhaps most of them.

I know a little about this because, in the course of my work at Linux Journal, I would sometimes ask groups of alpha Linux programmers where they learned to code. Almost none told me “school.” Most were self-taught or learned from each other.

My point here is that the degree to which the world’s most essential and consequential operating system depends on the formal education of its makers is roughly zero.

See, the problem for educational institutions in the digital world is that most were built to leverage scarcity: scarce authority, scarce materials, scarce workspace, scarce time, scarce credentials, scarce reputation, scarce anchors of trust. To a highly functional degree we still need and depend on what only educational institutions can provide, but that degree is a lot lower than it used to be, a lot more varied among disciplines, and it risks continuing to decline as time goes on.

It might help at this point to see gravity in some ways as a problem the Internet solves. Because gravity is top-down. It fosters hierarchy and bell curves, sometimes where we need neither.

Absence of gravity instead fosters heterarchy and polycentrism. And, as we know, at the Ostrom Workshop perhaps better than anywhere, commons are good examples of heterarchy and polycentrism at work.

Knowledge Commons

In the first decade of our new millenium, Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess—already operating in our new digital age—extended the commons category to include knowledge, calling it a complex ecosystem that operates as a common: a shared resource subject to social dilemmas.

They looked at ease of access to digital forms of knowledge and easy new ways to store, access and share knowledge as a common. They also looked at the nature of knowledge and its qualities of non-rivalry and non-excludability, which were both unlike what characterizes a natural commons, with its scarcities of rivalrous and excludable goods.

A knowledge commons, they said, is characterized by abundance. This is one way what Yochai Benkler calls Commons Based Peer Production on the Internet is both easy and rampant, giving us, among many other things, both the free software and open source movements in code development and sharing, plus the Internet and the Web.

Commons Based Peer Production also demonstrates how collaboration and non-material incentives can produce better quality products, and less social friction in the course of production.

I’ve given Linux as one example of Commons Based Peer Production. Others are Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. We’re also seeing it within the academy, for example with Indiana University’s own open archives, making research more accessible and scholarship more rich and productive.

Every one of those examples comports with Lin Ostrom’s design principles:

1. clearly defined group boundaries;
2. rules governing use of common goods within local needs and conditions;
3. participation in modifying rules by those affected by the rules;
4. accessible and low cost ways to resolve disputes;
5. developing a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior;
6. graduated sanctions for rule violators;
7. and governing responsibility in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

But there is also a crisis with Commons Based Peer Production on the Internet today.

Programmers who ten or fifteen years ago would not participate in enclosing their own environments are doing exactly that, for example with 5G, which is designed to put the phone companies in charge of what we can do on the Internet.

The 5G-enclosed Internet might be faster and more handy in many ways, the range of freedoms for each of us there will be bounded by the commercial interests of the phone companies and their partners, and subject to none of Lin’s rules for governing a commons.

Consider this: every one of the nine enclosures I listed at the beginning of this talk are enabled by programmers who either forgot or never learned about the freedom and openness that made the free and open Internet possible. They are employed in the golden egg gathering business—not in one that appreciates the goose that lays those eggs, and which their predecessors gave to us all.

But this isn’t the end of the world. We’re still at the beginning. And a good model for how to begin is—

The physical world

It is significant that all the commons the Ostroms and their colleagues researched in depth were local. Their work established beyond any doubt the importance of local knowledge and local control.

I believe demonstrating this in the digital world is our best chance of saving our digital world from the nine forms of enclosure I listed at the top of this talk.

It’s our best chance because there is no substitute for reality. We may be digital beings now, as well as physical ones. There are great advantages, even in the digital world, to operating in the here-and-now physical world, where all our prepositions still work, and our metaphors still apply.

Back to Joyce again.

In the mid ‘90s, when the Internet was freshly manifest on our home computers, I was mansplaining to Joyce how this Internet thing was finally the global village long promised by tech.

Her response was, “The sweet spot of the Internet is local.” She said that’s because local is where the physical and the virtual intersect. It’s where you can’t fake reality, because you can see and feel and shake hands with it.

She also said the first thing the Internet would obsolesce would be classified ads in newspapers. That’s because the Internet would be a better place than classifieds for parents to find a crib some neighbor down the street might have for sale. Then Craigslist came along and did exactly that.

We had an instructive experience with how the real world and the Internet work together helpfully at the local level about a year and a half ago. That’s when a giant rainstorm fell on the mountains behind Santa Barbara, where we live, and the town next door, called Montecito. This was also right after the Thomas Fire—largest at the time in recorded California history—had burned all the vegetation away, and there was a maximum risk of what geologists call a “debris flow.”

The result was the biggest debris flow in the history of the region: a flash flood of rock and mud that flowed across Montecito like lava from a volcano. Nearly two hundred homes were destroyed, and twenty-three people were killed. Two of them were never found, because it’s hard to find victims buried under what turned out to be at least twenty thousand truckloads of boulders and mud.

Right afterwards, all of Montecito was evacuated, and very little news got out while emergency and rescue workers did their jobs. Our local news media did an excellent job of covering this event as a story. But I also noticed that not much was being said about the geology involved.

So, since I was familiar with debris flows out of the mountains above Los Angeles, where they have infrastructure that’s ready to handle this kind of thing, I put up a post on my blog titled “Making sense of what happened to Montecito.” In that post I shared facts about the geology involved, and also published the only list on the Web of all the addresses of homes that had been destroyed. Visits to my blog jumped from dozens a day to dozens of thousands. Lots of readers also helped improve what I wrote and re-wrote.

All of this happened over the Internet, but it pertained to a real-world local crisis.

Now here’s the thing. What I did there wasn’t writing a story. I didn’t do it for the money, and my blog is a noncommercial one anyway. I did it to help my neighbors. I did it by not being a bystander.

I also did it in the context of a knowledge commons.

Specifically, I was respectful of boundaries of responsibility; notably those of local authorities—rescue workers, law enforcement, reporters from local media, city and county workers preparing reports, and so on. I gave much credit where it was due and didn’t step on the toes of others helping out as well.

An interesting fact about journalism there at the time was the absence of fake news. Sure, there was plenty of fingers pointing in blog comments and in social media. But it was marginalized away from the fact-reporting that mattered most. There was a very productive ecosystem of information, made possible by the Internet in everyone’s midst. And by everyone, I mean lots of very different people.

Humanity

We are learning creatures by nature. We can’t help it. And we don’t learn by freight forwarding

By that, I mean what I am doing here, and what we do with each other when we talk or teach, is not delivering a commodity called information, as if we were forwarding freight. Something much more transformational is taking place, and this is profoundly relevant to the knowledge commons we share.

Consider the word information. It’s a noun derived from the verb to inform, which in turn is derived from the verb to form. When you tell me something I don’t know, you don’t just deliver a sum of information to me. You form me. As a walking sum of all I know, I am changed by that.

This means we are all authors of each other.

In that sense, the word authority belongs to the right we give others to author us: to form us.

Now look at how much more of that can happen on our planet, thanks to the Internet, with its absence of distance and gravity.

And think about how that changes every commons we participate in, as both physical and digital beings. And how much we need guidance to keep from screwing up the commons we have, or forming the ones we don’t, or forming might have in the future—if we don’t screw things up.

A rule in technology is that what can be done will be done—until we find out what shouldn’t be done. Humans have done this with every new technology and practice from speech to stone tools to nuclear power.

We are there now with the Internet. In fact, many of those enclosures I listed are well-intended efforts to limit dangerous uses of the Internet.

And now we are at a point where some of those too are a danger.

What might be the best way to look at the Internet and its uses most sensibly?

I think the answer is governance predicated on the realization that the Internet is perhaps the ultimate commons, and subject to both research and guidance informed by Lin Ostrom’s rules.

And I hope that guides our study.

There is so much to work on: expansion of agency, sensibility around license and copyright, freedom to benefit individuals and society alike, protections that don’t foreclose opportunity, saving journalism, modernizing the academy, creating and sharing wealth without victims, de-financializing our economies… the list is very long. And I look forward to working with many of us here on answers to these and many other questions.

Thank you. 

Sources

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press, 1990

Ostrom, Elinor and Hess, Charlotte, editors. Understanding Knowledge as a Commons:
From Theory to Practice, MIT Press, 2011
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/understanding-knowledge-commons
Full text online: https://wtf.tw/ref/hess_ostrom_2007.pdf

Paul D. Aligica and Vlad Tarko, “Polycentricity: From Polanyi to Ostrom, and Beyond” https://asp.mercatus.org/system/files/Polycentricity.pdf

Elinor Ostrom, “Coping With Tragedies of the Commons,” 1998 https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7c6e/92906bcf0e590e6541eaa41ad0cd92e13671.pdf

Lee Anne Fennell, “Ostrom’s Law: Property rights in the commons,” March 3, 2011
https://www.thecommonsjournal.org/articles/10.18352/ijc.252/

Christopher W. Savage, “Managing the Ambient Trust Commons: The Economics of Online Consumer Information Privacy.” Stanford Law School, 2019. https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Savage_20190129-1.pdf

 

________________

*I wrote it using—or struggling in—the godawful Outline view in Word. Since I succeeded (most don’t, because they can’t or won’t, with good reason), I’ll brag on succeeding at the subhead level:

As I’m writing this, in Febrary, 2020, Dave Winer is working on what he calls writing on rails. That’s what he gave the pre-Internet world with MORE several decades ago, and I’m helping him with now with the Internet-native kind, as a user. He explains that here. (MORE was, for me, like writing on rails. It’ll be great to go back—or forward—to that again.)