A few weeks ago Aljazeera published this opinion piece on “AI and the tyranny of the data commons“. It’s not very good.
The core observation can hardly be disputed: “platforms” have hoovered up data for their own benefit. Most recently through AI. Nothing much to disagree with there and nothing you can’t find in a million other similar articles.
But there’s a lot to dispute in this article.
The author makes a fairly garbled argument that data is a non-rival good that just doesn’t hold up. Their point might have been strengthened if they’d just focused on the many ways in which it is “excludable”. But those are fairly obvious.
Really, the article just shows how limited these economic terms are in shedding light on the modern data economy.
I also take issue with the narrative that the author makes that we’ve been sold a lie about the commons and the sharing economy. While big businesses may use these terms when it suits them, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t good, successful examples of both data commons and the sharing economy. You just won’t find them on the big platforms.
Which leads me to my main frustrations with the piece.
It is wrong to just declare “the data commons” as broken. There is no single data commons. The web isn’t a data commons. But there are many successful ones. But the author doesn’t attempt to identify any of these in order to tease out a better vision for the future.
The article just declares everything to be broken.
The piece also focuses on “The Tragedy of the Commons“. Riffing on Hardin’s debunked theory and quotable phrase to propose a “Tyranny of the Commons”. As if the whole idea of a data commons is a lie being sold to us by businesses. There’s a brief dismissive mention of Ostrom which suggests her, and other researchers work, has contributed to selling us that lie.
This is just wrong. There are many reasons to ignore Garrett Hardin’s work. But not least of them is that it is just wrong.
Focusing on Hardin in an article about the data commons is like writing a mental health article that draws on phrenology. Don’t do that.
Ostrom’s life’s work involved painstaking research to identify the many subtle ways in which real commons are successfully managed for the benefits of their communities. Not recognising that effort, or its real impacts and insights, erases that work.
Suggesting the data commons is totally broken, without recognising those projects that are successful and how they are successful makes the same mistakes, with the same potential negative impacts, that Ostrom spent so long unpicking.
If we’re going to build better, more inclusive, community owned data commons then we need to understand more about what makes real and digital commons different. And we need to understand about what makes them successful.
Let’s skip over Hardin, let’s not repeat his mistakes and instead think about how to build a better future.
Lost Boy 