TheCommons--Spaces-Thoughts-Economics

So my first point is the importance of recognizing the commons as a distinct sector for creating value. It can be difficult to recognize this reality because we don’t have an agreed-upon language or taxonomy for talking about the value-proposition of the commons. The phenomenon is still too novel. For many people, it is difficult to accept that value can exist without the sanction of money or private property rights—that value that is intangible and unquantifiable can actually matter. Cold, hard cash is nearly always seen as more valuable than something as amorphous and non-physical as an online community

I call these epochal changes in economic and cultural production The Great Value Shift. In the networked environment that is becoming pervasive, we are being forced to recognize that markets—or at least, traditional hierarchical institutions such as the corporation—do not have a monopoly on the ability to generate value.

If you can acknowledge this fact, then it follows that we should take affirmative steps to preserve the commons and the special types of value that it produces. Let me conclude by suggesting four general strategies.

The focus of many presentations was how to organize the production and distribution of new creative works in a world where free/cheap digital transmission is the norm. It turns out that many established institutions—if they are going to come to terms with the Internet—are going to have to seriously transform themselves in order to survive.

If you want to see the future, one of the best places to look is the freeboot innovators of the underground. They are always the ones who tried out the new ideas that later ripen into market opportunities. Think how hip-hop emerged from record-scratchers in Brooklyn basements and how the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club pioneered many of the early innovations in computing.

The idea of “culture without property” seems just too radical and counter-intuitive for some folks to get (or they get it only too well, because it jeopardizes their established business model). But this is not actually such a radical vision. There are already all sorts of profit-making enterprises that are building business models around open, non-proprietary platforms. IBM’s embrace of GNU Linux, the open-source operating system, is one of many prominent examples. So is Flickr, the photo-sharing website.

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation. I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you?

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won't have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan's Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.