Understanding the TragyComedy of the New Commons

The article wants to show that knowledge, in its various forms, is a Common, alias a shared resource that is subject to social dilemmas, particularly in the digital age when it is distributed in a global way through ICT (becoming a New Common, a common good of new generation). The investigation on the connection between knowledge and ITC is rather recent, but it has been conceptualized starting from the concept of Commons, a category of goods, generally natural resources (local or global like water, forests, fisheries, wildlife, deep seas, atmosphere, etc.), which the traditional economic theory has defined like those goods where individuals can not be excluded from use, but where one person’s use subtracts from the available goods for others. So Commons show difficult exclusion, but high subtractability in consumption. They are goods which are available to all, but where, after a certain degree of consumption, one person’s use subtracts from another’use. For these characteristics of being a resource shared by a group of people at tiny, or community or international level with no exclusion, Traditional Commons are generally condemned to the “tragedy” (congestion, conflict, overuse, pollution, free riding) like in the famous example of the pasture open to all, formulated by Garett Harding, who gave the name to the whole problematic. Also the New Commons (some tipologies of knowledge in digital form) are under the same threats, but some of their specific traits, which render them different from Traditional Commons, make these risks lighter, although the hyperchange of technologies which can capture and diffuse what was once uncapturable and social networks by whom they are managed make New Commons vulnerable to pollution and degradation and in need of preservation. The “tragedy” of Traditional and New Commons can be avoided through the attribution of alternative property rights regimes (private, public, common). Common property (neither private nor public) requests strong collective action, self governing mechanism, institutional arrangements as well as high degree of social capital (values and norms of reciprocity). The “design principles”, discovered by Elinor Ostrom, which generally guide the creation of the institutions governing Traditional Commons under a common property regime, can not anyway apply all and automatically to New Commons. And even if they remain in common property regime, New Commons are also exposed to the threat of commodification and enclosure. The example of Wikipedia show that New Commons vicissitudes do not always turn in “tragedy”, but in “comedy” and that human agents are not moved only by individualism and selfishness as the economic mainstream would like to paint them. So the question of Commons seems to be more a question of cooperative relationship among people (new relational interpretation) rather than a question depending on the mere characteristics of the good in the consumption (not excludeable, but rival) according to the classical interpretation given by traditional economics.