Still, because reality doesn't respect boundaries of human-made categories, and because people never define their categories exhaustively, we can safely assume that something almost-but-not-quite like a commons, is subject to an almost-but-not-quite tragedy of the commons.
That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something? I mean, I’m not sure I agree that GitHub is nearly a commons in any sense, but let’s put that aside as a distraction…
The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons). Feedback loops are notoriously sensitive to small parameter changes. MS could presumably impose some damping if they wanted.
> That seems to assume some sort of… maybe unfounded linearity or something
Not linearity but continuity, which I think is a well-founded assumption, given that it's our categorization that simplifies the world by drawing sharp boundaries where no such bounds exist in nature.
> The idea of the tragedy of the commons relies on this feedback loop of having these unsustainably growing herds (growing because they can exploit the zero-cost-to-them resources of the commons)
AIUI, zero-cost is not a necessary condition, a positive return is enough. Fishermen still need to buy fuel and nets and pay off loans for the boats, but as long as their expected profit is greater than that, they'll still overfish and deplete the pond, unless stronger external feedback is introduced.
Given that the solution to tragedy of the commons is having the commons owned by someone who can boss the users around, GitHub being owned by MS makes it more of a commons in practice, not less.
No, it’s not a well-founded assumption. Many categories like these were created in the first place because there is a very obvious discontinuous step change in behavior.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding what tragedy of the commons is. It’s not that it’s “zero-cost” for the participants. All it requires a positive return that has a negative externality that eventually leads to the collapse of the system.
Overfishing and CO2 emissions are very clearly a tragedy of the commons.
GitHub right now is not. People putting all sorts of crap on there is not hurting github. GitHub is not going to collapse if people keep using it unbounded.
Not surprisingly, this is because it’s not a commons and Microsoft oversees it, placing appropriate rate limits and whatnot to make sure it keeps making sense as a business.
And indeed MS/GitHub does impose some "damping" in the form of things like API request throttling, CPU limits on CI, asking Homebrew not to use shallow cloning, etc. And those limits are one of the reasons given why using git as a database isn't good.
There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well.
But I would make the following clarifications:
1. A private entity is still the steward of the resource and therefore the resource figures into the aims, goals, and constraints of the private entity.
2. The common good is itself under the stewardship of the state, as its function is guardian of the common good.
3. The common good is the default (by natural law) and prior to the private good. The latter is instituted in positive law for the sake of the former by, e.g., reducing conflict over goods.
> There is an analogy in the sense that for the users a resource is, for certain practical intents and purposes, functionally common. Social media is like this as well.
I think it's both simpler and deeper than that.
Governments and corporations don't exist in nature. Those are just human constructs, mutually-recursive shared beliefs that emulate agents following some rules, as long as you don't think too hard about this.
"Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem. The name itself might've been coined with some specific scenarios in mind, but for the phenomenon itself, it doesn't matter what kind of entities exploit the "commons"; the "private" vs. "public" distinction itself is neither a sharp divide, nor does it exist in nature. All that matters is that there's some resource used by several independent parties, and each of them finds it more beneficial to defect than to cooperate.
In a way, it's basically a 3+-player prisonner's dilemma. The solution is the same, too: introducing a party that forces all other parties to cooperate. That can be a private or public or any other kind of org taking ownership of the commons and enforcing quotas, or in case of prisonners, a mob boss ready to shoot anyone who defects.
It was not my intent to be exhaustive, but to make a few points that left it up to the reader to relate them appropriately to your post in order to enrich thinking about the subject.
But it appears we cannot avoid getting into the weeds a bit…
> Governments and corporations don't exist in nature.
This is not as simple as you seem to think.
The claim “don’t exist in nature” is vague, because the word “nature” in common speech is vague. What is “natural”? Is a beehive “natural” Is a house “natural”? Is synthetic water “natural”? (I claim that the concept of “nature” concerns what it means to be some kind of thing. Perhaps polystyrene has never existed before human beings synthesized it, but it has a nature, that is, it means something to be polystyrene. And it is in the nature of human beings to make materials and artifacts, i.e., to produce technology ordered toward the human good.)
So, what is government? Well, it is an authority whose central purpose is to function as the guardian and steward of the common good. I claim that parenthood is the primordial form of human government and the family as the primordial form of the state. We are intrinsically social and political animals; legitimate societies exist only when joined by a common good. This is real and part of human nature. The capacity to deviate from human nature does not disprove the norm inherent to it.
Now, procedurally we could institute various particular and concrete arrangements through which government is actualized. We could institute a republican form of government or a monarchy, for example. These are historically conditioned. But in all cases, there is a government. Government qua government is not some arbitrary “construct”, but something proper to all forms and levels of human society.
> "Tragedy of the commons" is a general coordination problem.
We can talk about coordination once we establish the ends for which such coordination is needed, but there is something more fundamental that must be said about the framing of the problem of the “tragedy”. The framing does not presume a notion of human beings as moral agents and political and social creatures. In other words, it begins with a highly individualist, homo economicus view of human nature as rationally egoist and oriented toward maximizing utility, full stop. But I claim that is not in accord with human nature and thus the human good, even if people can fall into such pathological patterns of behavior (especially in a culture that routinely reinforces that norm).
As I wrote, human beings are inherently social animals. We cannot flourish outside of societies. A commons that suffers this sort of unhinged extraction is an example of a moral and a political failure. Why? Because it is unjust, intemperate, and a lack of solidarity to maximize resource extraction in that manner. So the tragedy is a matter of a) the moral failure of the users of that resource, and b) the failure of an authority to regulate its use. The typical solution that’s proposed is either privatization or centralization, but both solutions presuppose the false anthropology of homo economicus. (I am not claiming that privatization does not have a place, only that the dichotomy is false.)
Now, I did say that the case with something like github is analogical, because functionally, it is like a common resource, just like how social media functions like a public square in some respects. But analogy is not univocity. Github is not strictly speaking a common good, nor is social media strictly a public square, because in both cases, a private company manages them. And typically, private goods are managed for private benefit, even if they are morally bound not to harm the common good.
That intent, that purpose, is central to determining whether something is public or private, because something public has the common benefit as its aim, while something private has private benefit as its aim.
The whole notion of the "tragedy of the commons" needs to be put to rest. It's an armchair thought experiment that was disproven at the latest in the 90s by Elinor Ostrom with actual empirical evidence of commons.
The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms. The classic examples like people grazing sheep or cutting wood are bad examples that don't really work.
But that doesn't mean the tragedy of the commons can't happen in other scenarios. If we define commons a bit more generously it does happen very frequently on the internet. It's also not difficult to find cases of it happening in larger cities, or in environments where cutthroat behavior has been normalized
> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario. Participants feel obligations to the community, and misusing the commons actually does have real downsides for the individual because there are social feedback mechanisms.
That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people, when everyone knows everyone else personally. It breaks down rapidly after that. We compensate for that with hierarchies of governance, which give rise to written laws and bureaucracy.
New tribes break off old tribes, form alliances, which form larger alliances, and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase.
This is sociopolitical history of the world in a nutshell.
"and eventually you end up with countries and counties and vovoidships and cities and districts and villages, in hierarchies that gain a level per ~100x population increase."
You say it like this is a law set in stone, because this is what happened im history, but I would argue it happened under different conditions.
Mainly, the main advantage of an empire over small villages/tribes is not at all that they have more power than the villages combined, but that they can concentrate their power where it is needed. One village did not stand a chance against the empire - and the villages were not coordinated enough.
But today we would have the internet for better communication and coordination, enabling the small entieties to coordinate a defense.
Well, in theory of course. Because we do not really have autonomous small states, but are dominated by the big players. And the small states have mowtly the choice which block to align with, or get crushed. But the trend might go towards small again.
(See also cheap drones destroying expensive tanks, battleships etc.)
Internet is working exactly the opposite way to what your describing - it's making everything more centralized.
Once we had several big media companies in each country and in each big city. Now we have Google and Facebook and tik tok and twitter and then the "whatevers".
Yes, but there is a difference between having the choice of joining FB or not having a choice at all when the empire comes to claim you (like in Ukraine).
FB is part of the empire though, and it is coming for us.
canadians need an anti-imperial radio-canada run alternative. we arent gonna be able to coordinate against the empire when the empire has the main control over the internet.
when the americans come a knocking, we're gonna wish we had chinese radios
> That works while the size of the community is ~100-200 people,
Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.
It's not obvious why some societies break down early and some go on working.
> Yet we regularly observe that working with millions of people; we take care of our young, we organize, when we see that some action hurt our environment we tend to limit its use.
That's more like human universals. These behaviors generally manifest to smaller or larger degree, depending on how secure people feel. But those are extremely local behaviors. And in fact, one of them is exactly the thing I'm talking about:
> we organize
We organize. We organize for many reasons, "general living" is the main one but we're mostly born into it today (few got the chance to be among the founding people of a new village, city or country). But the same patterns show up in every other organizations people create, from companies to charities, from political interests groups to rural housewives' circles -- groups that grow past ~100 people split up. Sometimes into independent groups, sometimes into levels of hierarchies. Observe how companies have regional HQs and departments and areas and teams; religious groups have circuits and congregations, etc. Independent organizations end up creating joint ventures and partnerships, or merge together (and immediately split into a more complex internal structure).
The key factor here is, IMO, for everyone in a given group to be in regular contact with everyone else. Humans are well evolved for living in such small groups - we come with built-in hardware and software to navigate complex interpersonal situations. Alignment around shared goals and implicit rules is natural at this scale. There's no space for cheaters and free-loaders to thrive, because everyone knows everyone else - including the cheater and their victims. However, once the group crosses this "we're all a big family, in it together" size, coordinating everyone becomes hard, and free-loaders proliferate. That's where explicit laws come into play.
This pattern repeats daily, in organizations people create even today.
I get the feeling it's the combination of Schelling points and surplus. If everyone else is being pro-social, i.e. there is a culture of it, and the people aren't so hard up that they can reasonably afford to do the same, then that's what happens, either by itself (Hofstadter's theory of superrationality) or via anything so much as light social pressure.
But if a significant fraction of the population is barely scraping by then they're not willing to be "good" if it means not making ends meet, and when other people see widespread defection, they start to feel like they're the only one holding up their end of the deal and then the whole thing collapses.
This is why the tendency for people to propose rent-seeking middlemen as a "solution" to the tragedy of the commons is such a diabolical scourge. It extracts the surplus that would allow things to work more efficiently in their absence.
I’ve heard stories from communist villages where everyone knew everyone. Communal parks and property was not respected and frequently vandalized or otherwise neglected because it didn’t have an owner and it was treated as something for someone else to solve.
It’s easier to explain in those terms than assumptions about how things work in a tribe.
Even here, the state is the steward of the common good. It is a mistaken notion that the state only exists because people are bad. Even if people were perfectly conscientious and concerned about the common good, you still need a steward. It simply wouldn’t be a steward who would need to use aggressive means to protect the common good from malice or abuse.
> A high-trust community like a village can prevent a tragedy of the commons scenario.
No it does not. This sentiment, which many people have, is based on a fictional and idealistic notion of what small communities are like having never lived in such communities.
Empirically, even in high-trust small villages and hamlets where everyone knows everyone, the same incentives exist and the same outcomes happen. Every single time. I lived in several and I can't think of a counter-example. People are highly adaptive to these situations and their basic nature doesn't change because of them.
While an earlier poster is over stating Ostrom’s Nobel prize winning work — it is regularly shown that averting the tragedy of the commons is not as insurmountable as the original coining of the phrase implied.
Ostrom showed that it wasn't necessarily a tragedy, if tight groups involved decided to cooperate. This common in what we call "trust-based societies", which aren't universal.
Nonetheless, the concept is still alive, and anthropic global warming is here to remind you about this.
She not “disprove” the existence of the tragedy of the commons. What she established was that controlling the commons can be done communally rather than through privatization or through government ownership.
Communal management of a resource is still government, though. It just isn’t central government.
The thesis of the tragedy of the commons is that an uncontrolled resource will be abused. The answer is governance at some level, whether individual, collective, or government ownership.
> The "tragedy", if you absolutely need to find one, is only for unrestricted, free-for-all commons, which is obviously a bad idea.
Right. And that’s what people are usually talking about when they say “tragedy of the commons”.
People invoke the tragedy of the commons in bad faith to argue for privatization because “the alternative is communism”. i.e. Either an individual or the government has to own the resource.
This is of course a false dichotomy because governance can be done at any level.
It also seems to omit the possibility that the thing could be privately operated but not for profit.
Let's Encrypt is a solid example of something you could reasonably model as "tragedy of the commons" (who is going to maintain all this certificate verification and issuance infrastructure?) but then it turns out the value of having it is a million times more than the cost of operating it, so it's quite sustainable given a modicum of donations.
Free software licenses are another example in this category. Software frequently has a much higher value than development cost and incremental improvements decentralize well, so a license that lets you use it for free but requires you to contribute back improvements tends to work well because then people see something that would work for them except for this one thing, and it's cheaper to add that themselves or pay someone to than to pay someone who has to develop the whole thing from scratch.
