Commons

A common is not unowned. It is a holding whose provenance and propagation are carried by a group rather than a person. Pasture. Water. Fisheries. Language. Science. The air.

Enclosure is not labour mixed with nothing. It is a transfer from joint holding to exclusive holding, and its provenance reads at whether that transfer kept or shrank the room the common was holding open.

Commons are not innocent by form. They can be captured, mismanaged, closed to outsiders. They fail the test exactly as private holdings do. And the story that every common ends in tragedy is false at many sites. Under known conditions, communal holding propagates cooperatively.

This is the short edition of Ø Applications — a summary. Where a step is compressed here, the original carries it in full. The original book (PDF) · This edition (PDF)

The same page on the420code.org: the420code.org/models/applications/01-the-architecture-of-property/