Building Programmable Commons

First, we asked ‘who shall govern the Internet?’ as its decentralised and open nature promised a public sphere free from the manipulation and fragmentation of the ad-driven mass media. ‘Commons’ was an omnipresent theme in this discourse. These dynamics laid the groundwork for a global, interdisciplinary dialogue of -and for- political creation.Fast forward to the present and the early discussions on peer-to-peer technologies seem already outworn; mere chapters in the history of an infrastructure whose public nature and legacy are reflected only on a fraction of what people perceive as the ‘Internet’. Legal battles that marked the development of entire disciplines are now -almost- irrelevant serving as good reminders that power lies more in avoiding battles (ie ad-targeting) than it does in winning them. Today, programmable networks, computational infrastructures, and the software applications they support have constructed a ‘private Internet’ whose rules and trajectories are largely shaped by actors accountable only to their shareholders. Actively supported by state authorities, tech conglomerates do not only ‘take power’ by capturing public-sector space but they ‘make power’ by constantly experimenting with novel technological possibilities. Responding to some of these challenges, policymakers have been focusing on ways to regulate data and -more recently- on instituting, top-down, modes of data governance. But although data is power, power is not only data and (as ongoing work on programmable infrastructures indicates) power over what can be computed, creates power over what can be decided. Therefore, the agenda on the regulation of private power over data requires a parallel enquiry on the power concentration in the world’s computational resources and the value chains they sustain and support. This paper is part of such a project. By reviewing early work of network theorists and Internet scholars as well as literature on the governance of commons, this paper argues that beyond market, states, and their hybrids and beyond private property and public sector regimes, there exists political space for social practices and transformative legal interventions that can give shape to radically different institutional actions for the management of the world’s infocomputational resources. Programmable commons and the public value of programmability are thus introduced as parts of a broader political project that aspires to democratise access to, and management of these resources. By drawing on the history of a family of commons -namely intellectual commons, infrastructure commons, and global commons-, this paper explores the material form and impact of infocomputational technologies and presents a blend of bottom-up and top-down initiatives for their commons-based organisation and governance.