we’d probably be better off with the Fortune 500,000 than the Fortune 500. Scale brings with it the ills of Seeing Like a State; the authoritarian high modernist mindset takes over at large scale. And while large organizations can exist, they can’t be the only ones with access to, or ability to, afford new technologies. Enabling the dynamic creation and destruction of new organizations and new types of organization—and legal and technical mechanisms to prevent lock-in and to prevent enclosure of public commons—will be essential to keep this new fluid era thriving. We can create new “federated” networks of organizations and social groups, like we’re seeing in the open social web of Mastodon and similar technologies, ones where local groups can have local rules that differ from, but do not conflict with, their participation in the wider whole.

CommGrid

Video explaining how a commons works, adapted from economist David Bollier’s explanation of what a commons is, and threats to the commons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bQiBcd7mBc