ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Abandoning the Pseudocommons

• In Event: CTRL ALT SHIFT. Expériences, Knowledge, Activism, Methods - 3

English Abstract

Software’s lossless duplication and zero marginal cost could have enabled novel post-scarcity social arrangements. Instead, enormous effort has gone into grafting the opaque market principles of platform economics onto technologies structurally resistant to enclosure. Web 2.0’s data commons attempted to build upon a software commons which granted the freedom to use, modify, and share programs in the 1980s and 1990s. But the incredible capitalization of corporate platforms created a vacuum of investment in the technical challenges the digital commons presented. Semantic web technologies were intended to retain meaning between systems; data flow technologies were prototyped to propagate changes; verifiable provenance was supposed to ensure data authenticity - but none have fully matured.
The slow pace of technical maturation opens space for political capture. Thus something as simple as a shift in Wikidata licensing facilitates what McDowell & Vetter call the “realienation of the commons” where machine intermediaries obscure downstream use, break reference trails, and undermine the reciprocity that sustains commons-based peer production. Preservation battles and the rise of “pseudocommons” further reveal how easily intangible assets are stripped of licensing and absorbed into digital capitalism.
The corporations that once fought against the principles of data and software commons have come full circle. In an ironic twist, the world's wealthiest companies are now flagrantly violating 20th century intellectual property laws to train their LLMs - the same laws they have continuously abused to generate artificial scarcity and deny individual freedoms.
So how can the commons survive in a world of platform economies and opportunistic corporations? This paper argues they cannot and instead identifies the technical and ontological properties required for what might replace today’s pseudocommons.

Author

• David Schmudde, Beyond the Frame