The Decline of the Digital Commons

Abstract

The notion of the digital commons emerged in the late 1990s and has been elaborated in the service of divergent political commitments in the following years. These have ranged from a renewal of liberal market capitalism, to a development of institutions for self-governing, to an articulation of post-capitalism. Across many internal differences, these approaches have shared expectations that the digital commons, due to their character as advanced knowledge goods and potentially global scale, would significantly contribute to social transformations, expanding market and non-market participation, strengthening community, and generally improving social justice. During the second decade of the 21st century, however, the political ambiguity of the concept allowed for its (incomplete) subsumption under digital capitalism. Everyday practices of digital commoning, though, continued. Today, however, amidst the current techno-political upheavals, driven by the commercial rollout of ‘artificial intelligence’, many of the everyday practices of digital commoning are also threatened.