Now that Big Tech is such a dominant, growing force in the world economy, it’s hard to remember that in the early days of the internet, as the system was going mainstream in the mid-1990s, many media corporations were fearful of this perplexing networked system. How could one make money if “information wants to be free” and anything could be shared? A top Microsoft executive blasted the open source operating system Linux as “communistic,” and Hollywood studios, newspapers, and the music industry lobbied for stricter, more expansive copyright laws lest their markets wither away.
The startling revelation of the time was just how easy it was for ordinary internet users to share things and create their own digital commons. Anyone could build a website and start an online community. It was a time of giddy experimentation and cultural optimism because the possibilities seemed so vast and open. By the early 2000s, entirely new species of software and communications had emerged as if by spontaneous combustion: blogs, wikis, free and open source software, remix music, video mashups, citizen-science. Here was a digital ecosystem that was neither market-based nor state-controlled, but a people’s universe of autonomous commons!
In principle, this was more or less what the academic inventors of the internet had mind when they designed the internet’s digital protocols. Working within the gift economies of research science and scholarship, they were accustomed to giving and sharing their discoveries. They believed in “netiquette” and helping the larger community. An efficient electronic information-sharing structure was exactly what was needed not just for academic purposes, but for military and national security needs. Making money or creating markets was not a priority.
It took years for the internet to migrate to the cultural mainstream, but when it did, by the early 1990s, it triggered a profound economic, political, and cultural revolution. “What we are seeing now,” wrote Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler in his landmark 2006 book The Wealth of Networks, “is the emergence of more effective collective action practices that are decentralized but do not rely on either the price system or a managerial structure for coordination.” Benkler’s term for this emerging novelty was “commons-based peer production.” By that, he meant systems that are collaborative, nonproprietary and based on “sharing resources and outputs among widely distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each other.”
The unparalleled capacity of the internet to foster social cooperation and sharing was nonetheless shocking. The first, most astonishing examples of online commoning were free software programs, which a later band of programmers dubbed open source software. (“Free software” has a political, philosophical commitment to freedom; “open source” is a pragmatic framing of the same type of collaborative process.) These programs include Perl (a programming language), Sendmail (a mail program), Apache (the most used server program on the internet, which powers critical backend functions), and Linux (a major computer operating system that rivals Windows). The surprising power of distributed networks was quickly followed by the rise of the blogosphere, social networking, wikis, and remix music and software. A living, pulsating Web encyclopedia, Wikipedia, quickly became a digital republic unto itself. By 2021, 280,000 volunteers working worldwide in more than 300 languages had edited some 55 million articles.
It’s worth recalling this early history of the internet because the archetypes and dynamics of online life at that time remain quite relevant today. Most people spend so much time on their computers and device screens today that online culture profoundly shapes offscreen “real life” as well. Revisiting this early internet culture shows how Big Tech’s corporate reengineering of online sharing has narrowed our imaginations about the potential of commoning itself. The autocratic regime imposed by Big Tech—what Nathan Schneider calls “implicit feudalism”—has eclipsed our cultural memory. We forget that democratic governance and control of digital life are possible and necessary.
The first significant type of digital commons was free software. This software is not necessarily free in the sense of “no price,” but free in the sense that the code is open and accessible. Anyone can freely examine, tinker with, improve, and share the software without violating the creators’ copyrights.
In the early 1980s, when software development for personal computers was still a budding community art, the legendary MIT hacker Richard Stallman was one of the first to recognize that proprietary software could significantly limit an individual’s freedom to access and reuse software, and thus to innovate. Stallman was disturbed to learn that companies were using copyright law to prohibit others from fixing nasty bugs, improving the code, or sharing it with friends and colleagues. Software—once developed through the open, collegial social process of a hacker community*—was becoming a highly lucrative and proprietary product. A shared community resource was being converted into private property.
This enraged Stallman because it meant that a basic human freedom—creativity—was being stifled. He was also concerned that the market ethic and copyright law were stifling the hacker ethic of sharing and mutual support. His solution was an ingenious legal innovation known as the General Public License, or GPL, first released in 1989.
The GPL, sometimes referred to as “copyleft” (denoted by a reverse “c” inside a circle), is widely celebrated today as a landmark “hack” around copyright law. Instead of locking the code up as private property, it ensures everyone the freedom to copy, modify, or distribute a software program as they see fit, including to sell it at a price. (Hence the misleading term “free software.” Stallman tried to clarify the confusion by famously saying that the software should be “free as in freedom, not free as in free beer.” Europeans use the term “libre,” which does not have the same double meanings as “free.”)
A copyright holder who affixes the GPL to his or her software program is legally committing that code to the commons. The license accomplishes this goal by insisting upon one simple legal requirement—that any derivative work, such as a modified software program, must also be licensed under the GPL so that it too is shareable. Any further derivations of the secondary work must also be licensed under the GPL, and so on indefinitely. In this way the GPL cleverly makes software sharing the default form legally protected from privatization. To make things even more secure, no user can modify the terms of the license.
The genius of the GPL is that it ensures that a commons of GPLed software code will forever remain a commons. The code created by a given group of commoners will always stay within the commons. Future users can sell the code (there are a number of commercial vendors of the open source Linux program, for example), but the point of the GPL is that no one can legally withhold access to the code or prevent its reuse. This makes hackers willing to freely contribute their talents to building a software commons because they know that the fruits of their labors will remain forever accessible.
In the 1980s, Stallman’s obsession with “software freedom” seemed like a quixotic mission. Stallman himself—shaggy, sometimes barefoot, imperious—looked like an Old Testament prophet. As the World Wide Web took root in the mid-1990s and Linus Torvalds created the kernel of an amateur computer operating system, the GPL suddenly became historically significant. Torvalds licensed his program, Linux, under the GPL. When combined with other bodies of code, including many that Stallman had written, a commons of code for a complete computer operating system became possible. Linux (GNU/Linux, to Stallman) went on to become one of the most powerful and respected software programs in history.
Free software, as licensed under the GPL, soon gave birth to a legally similar body of code known as open source software. The chief difference between “free” and open source software is that the backers of the latter try to steer clear of the connotations of the word “free” as low quality. Open source advocates wanted to make community-made software more attractive and credible to large corporate and institutional users. They were also eager to downplay the political dimensions of Stallman’s free software movement and instead highlight the practical utility of shareable software.
Open source software has gone on to become a powerhouse of the tech economy despite (or thanks to) its no-cost access, talented contributors, and large user base. Linux is now used on millions of Web servers run by major corporations around the world and demanding computer users like NASA and Pixar. IBM, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard have built lucrative businesses by providing technical support to and customized extensions of open source programs. Commons and markets can play nicely together—although, as we shall see, investor-driven businesses generally try to eliminate any robust commons in their zones of competition.
In the late 1990s, the GPL’s importance was not lost on Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig, who was keenly aware that extreme expansions of copyright law were also stifling creativity. Lessig convened a small team of law professors, computer scientists, artists, authors, and activists to invent a series of six standardized public licenses that could be placed as “tags” on copyrighted content. A copyright holder could use one of these “CC” (Creative Commons) licenses to indicate that their work is available for sharing and reuse under specified terms.
For example, a website’s content could be tagged as freely shareable but not entitled to commercial usage without permission (the “NonCommercial” license). Or it could be tagged as freely shareable but with a prohibition against derivative works such as photo-cropping or text translations unless permissions were obtained (the “No Derivatives” license).
One CC license, the “ShareAlike license,” emulates the GPL by requiring that any derivative work also be shareable under the same license. This means that the work and all of its progeny will forever be accessible to everyone. The book you are reading is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) because I want to authorize copying of it so long as credit is given to me as the author (BY) and no commercial reuses are made without my permission (NC). Any derivative uses of this book, including translations, new printings, and excerpts, must also be legally shareable (SA).
All CC-licensed works have to credit the original author (the “Attribution License”), but beyond that, copyright holders may specify how their work may or may not be used by others, so long as they don’t abridge so-called fair use rights under copyright law, which in principle guarantee certain types of noncommercial sharing (but often without clear legal certainty).
The suite of six basic Creative Commons licenses in effect lets copyright holders invert copyright’s default rules of strict private control. The licenses instead authorize legal sharing in advance, with no permission or payment needed. Because of the licenses, creators can build commons of shareable content by limiting private appropriation or commercialization of their content, under specific terms (no commercial use, no derivative works, only if shared under the same terms, etc.). By assuring that the shared body of works will not be “taken private,” the CC licenses enable commons of creative works and information to arise and flourish. Over time, the licenses have become an essential infrastructure for a global sharing economy. They have allowed software code, research studies, photo archives, blog posts, books, and countless creative works to be shared world-wide on the internet, legally.
To be sure, there is lots of content sharing happening on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, X, and TikTok, without the use of Creative Commons licenses. Such sites are governed by one-sided corporate “terms of service” that users accept upon registering. Social media platforms resemble commons in many respects but with a significant difference: corporate management and investors call the shots. Users are vulnerable to the whims of shifting corporate strategies and investor pressures. A shift in corporate revenue models may mean that the hosting platform changes its terms of service or abandons the platform entirely. You can forever lose your posts or photo collection or the large group of followers that you’ve spent years attracting. You could suddenly be bombarded with pop-up ads as corporate platform owners record your online viewing habits and then sell dossiers of highly personal information about you to advertisers.
Such are the perils of open platforms governed as corporate fiefdoms. Indeed, companies have keen motivations to steamroll over the interests of consumers and even advertisers. Cory Doctorow calls this the “enshittification” cycle of digital platforms. First the site woos a large pool of users with attractive terms; then it shifts its commercial terms to attract a large pool of advertisers. At this point, both users and businesses are essentially locked into using the site because there are no interoperable protocols for easily switching to a competitor and the costs of abandoning one’s investment in the site are too great to consider. Knowing this, tech platforms deliberately degrade the site for the benefit of their investors and corporate management by loading it up with excessive advertising, cheesy click-bait content, and aggressive collection of personal data.
Open platforms have been a huge emancipation over the proprietary, centralized control that print and broadcast media once commanded. But open sharing is not a full liberation. It doesn’t assure that users have any voice or vote in online policies, nor does it assure long-term control and accountability. Money-minded corporate executives make the rules. While “open platforms” may invite free sharing and collaboration, they are not really commons because users remain “serfs on the digital plantation” owned by corporations.
That said, both the GPL and the CC licenses have enabled all sorts of digital commons to take root and flourish. The licenses constitute a legal infrastructure that makes works permanently shareable and protects against enclosure. The licenses have also inspired a range of other legal innovations for making other bodies of content legally shareable, such as databases and physical specimens used in research laboratories. In education, academic research, and government services, the CC licenses have strengthened the presumption that public institutions should make their information freely available. All sorts of museums, archives, government agencies, and educational institutions around the world now use CC licenses on their Web documents and digital files to make them freely accessible to everyone.
At one time, commercial publishing offered the best way for scientists to share their discoveries with each other. By moving from irregular private correspondence to a system of commercially distributed, peer-reviewed journals, science was able to share knowledge more efficiently and rapidly. Collective thinking and innovation surged. With the arrival of the World Wide Web in 1994, it became even cheaper and easier to reach a global readership instantly—while undercutting the business models of commercial publishers that were based on keeping information scarce and expensive.
Thus began a long struggle by scholars and scientists—still underway—to shift academic publishing toward a more accessible genre of publishing: the open-access (or OA) journal and book. While commercial publishers have provided certain valuable services like production and distribution, they have also become parasites on academic knowledge commons by demanding ownership of copyrights for books and research articles. This has enabled publishers to gain control over knowledge that was, in fact, funded by a long chain of others, including governments, foundations, and universities, and indirectly, taxpayers. These very same publishers have often used their copyright control—and the prestige associated with certain journal titles—to charge university libraries exorbitant subscription fees. Between 1986 and 2004, journal publishers raised subscription rates to American universities by 273 percent. By 2023, the average annual subscription for a health sciences journal was $2,752, and for a chemistry journal, $7,276.
It took universities years to heed calls for reform and mount a concerted counterattack. In 2012, Harvard University finally declared that it had had enough. It publicly advised its faculty to avoid publishing in journals that required paid access. The move helped persuade many research libraries and colleges across the US and the world that it was time to begin a more aggressive transition to OA publishing models. Harvard’s motivation was largely financial; its annual budget for journals was approaching $3.75 million. It was paying some journal publishers as much as $40,000 per year. The average US university library was spending about 65 percent of its budget on research journals, with more than half of that sum going to three major publishers: Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley.
The OA scholarly publishing movement first began to organize itself in 2001 with the goal of making academic research free and openly available to anyone in perpetuity. In retrospect, this seems like an unassailable initiative, considering that tax-payers were funding billions of dollars in research. No matter: The OA movement has had to struggle for years to overcome opposition from publishers and uninformed politicians as well as the sheer inertia of academic communities. It has had to develop new revenue models and administrative structures for scholarly journals and disrupt some long-standing traditions within academic publishing. For example, because many tenure and promotion decisions are based on the quality and prestige of the academic journals in which faculty publish their work, junior faculty members are often reluctant to publish in lesser-known OA journals rather than in high-profile periodicals like Nature and Science. The OA movement has been impeded, too, by fierce resistance from the large academic publishers, which have balked at efforts by national governments to require that all taxpayer-funded research be published under OA protocols.
Notwithstanding such resistance and misleading excuses, by 2024 there were more than 21,000 open-access scholarly journals being published. Like the GPL and CC licenses, OA journals make knowledge more freely available to everyone without the contrived scarcity that publishers like to impose through copyright restrictions and digital rights management (DRM) systems.
I called my book about the rise of free software and free culture Viral Spiral because the evolution of one type of commons-based innovation typically inspires many others, and then others. The GPL led to the CC licenses, which then gave rise to OA publishing. From there, in 2009 and after, a wide array of open educational resources, or OER, emerged as the next turn of the viral spiral. All levels of education and learning communities—not just scholarly publishing—got wise to the fact that proprietary control of knowledge is antithetical to their core values. Academia is a commons. That’s how we learn and grow—through open participation and sharing. Property rights, money, and markets tend to interfere with this mission, or corrupt it.
Community colleges were dismayed to learn that many students were dropping out or delaying their educations because they could not afford their textbooks. It is not unusual for text-book publishers to bring out new editions every two or three years simply to make the existing used books appear obsolete and to promote new textbook purchases. Some farsighted OA educators have responded by forming the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources, which helps identify and publicize open textbooks. Such books are CC-licensed and available for the cost of a print-on-demand copy. This has reduced students’ college expenses by hundreds of dollars apiece. The OER Commons, another OER organization, is a major repository of shareable curricula and instructional materials for colearning.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) pioneered open educational resources in 2001 when it produced the first major body of curricular materials—syllabi, readings, videos, datasets—for free online use. MIT’s innovation has profoundly influenced the teaching of physics and other scientific fields in China as well as many small countries with isolated rural populations. It has also spawned the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which now has more than 120 member universities and educational institutions worldwide.
The viral spiral that started with free software and the CC licenses continues to expand. The term “open source” has become a cultural meme that celebrates any production that is open, participatory, transparent, and accountable. Open source principles are driving a robust “open design” movement for the design of clothing, furniture, computer components, and even automobiles. This new stage of commons-based peer production is often called cosmolocalism because “lightweight” knowledge and design can be collaboratively developed and shared by a global community, but the “heavy” physical production of things is done locally, using less expensive, modular components. This system provides ways for farmers, scientists, entrepreneurs, and hobbyists to produce first-rate innovations without the burdens of carbon-intensive transport and proprietary corporate control and prices.
Farm Hack and Open Source Ecology are two projects that rely on a global community of designers to produce specialized agricultural equipment and machinery, which can be modified and produced using locally available materials. The Open Prosthetics Project invites anyone to contribute to the design of prosthetic limbs—or to propose specifications for limbs that ought to be designed even if the designer doesn’t know how to do it themself. Among the designs: prosthetic limbs for rock climbers and a prosthetic arm for fishing. An Italian group, Arduino, designs and produces scores of single-board micro-controllers and kits for building digital devices, all licensed by a Creative Commons or General Public License, enabling a large global user community to cheaply build and share customized electronic systems.
The cosmolocal template is even used for disaster relief. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team is a global community of public-spirited hackers who rapidly develop online maps of regions hit by earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters. The maps provide vital information to international responders by connecting knowledgeable locals on the ground with global tech-volunteers who craft online maps using complicated datasets. The maps themselves are licensed under an open license so that volunteers can rapidly compile and correct the mapping data as needed, while giving responders quick, no-cost access to accurate regional information.
The rise of DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, in recent years represents another frontier in commons governance in online spaces. Most commercial platforms are designed with strong top-down governance structures in order to empower their founders or corporate owners. Notes Nathan Schneider, author of the book Governable Spaces:“ Whoever creates the space has essentially absolute power over it. Your only tools for addressing conflict are censorship and exile. This is the logic of implicit feudalism.” In response, many libertarian-minded techies have embraced DAOs as an organizational form that purportedly will advance online democracy.
DAOs are member-owned organizations that use decentralized computer programs such as a blockchain to manage decision-making processes, governance, and finance without centralized administration and control. For example, the DAO software may enable decision-making processes that evaluate member preferences in near real-time and resolve disputes using algorithms. The software can share information widely to enhance accountability and offer novel interfaces for engaging in deliberation and governance activities. But greater user control (as mediated through software) is not necessarily the same as democratic empowerment. In practice, many DAOs amount to investor partnerships with real-time voting shares, or markets for cryptocurrency speculation. They may enable direct participation and novel forms of governance, but not “democracy” in its rich, traditional sense.
That said, DAOs do offer promising technical possibilities for greater democratic governance online if groups have the imagination and resolve to use them. The London artist collective Furtherfield, in its search for “peer-produced, decentralised digital infrastructures for art, culture, and society,” is developing DAOs “to end gatekeeping and elitism in the art world.” They also want to use DAOs “as a way to build resilient and mutable systems for scale-free interdependence and mutual aid”—a theme that they explore in a 2022 anthology of essays, Radical Friends. Furtherfield prefers the acronym DAOW, which stands for “DAOs with Others.”
Another notable development in the digital world is the rise of new types of infrastructures that make it easier and less complicated to common. Just as the original internet protocols created a framework to enable bottom-up creativity, so a new breed of commons-minded infrastructures is letting networked users take charge of their own work, on user-friendly terms, rather than becoming dependent on user-hostile corporate platforms. The rise of the open source operating system GNU/Linux, as mentioned earlier, is one of the most notable early examples of this dynamic.
Today, there are digital infrastructures for group discussions and decision-making (Loomio); for allocating money among group members in transparent, democratic ways (CoBudget); for financial accounting and tax compliance for commons and other small groups (Open Collective); and for the management of local timebanking networks (Community Weaver 3). Holochain is making distributed online cooperation a practical reality through its open source networking protocols. The platform also lets people own their own data and digital identities and use peer-to-peer applications without the intensive energy consumption that decentralized ledger systems like blockchain require.
Just as a locally grounded social economy is fundamental for human survival, so the modular autonomy of digital commons will be crucial. We need that bottom-up creativity, self-determination, and integrity of purpose, as assisted by commons-friendly infrastructures. The sheer size, complexity, and ethical decadence of large corporations and centralized institutions won’t deliver the future we need. In that regard, Belgian designer Thomas Lommée’s prophetic mantra is apt: “The next big thing will be a lot of small things.”
David Bollier at david /at/ bollier.org | New Society Publishers