2025-07-30

More and more people recognise that the infamous article by Garrett Hardin was really about unmanaged, ungoverned commons; and how Elinor Ostrom showed this clearly in her groundbreaking research.

When we are talking about a material common-pool resource, that is rivalrous and depletable, the tragedy of the commons is essentially about the insidious pressure to over-use and deplete the resource, with the result that everyone loses. But knowledge, as such, is not a rivalrous or depletable. On the contrary, it is often the case that the more that knowledge is accessed, the more useful it is, as it becomes more widely known. So, is there anything like a tragedy of knowledge commons? If there isn't, calling knowledge commons “commons” at all makes less sense. Here I will argue, briefly, that there is an analogous but different kind of tragedy relating to knowledge commons.

In an influential article published in 2012, George Caffentzis suggests that

“The true tragedy of the knowledge commons is the absorption of the totality of knowledge into the realm of state administration or market commodification.”

Personally I would not highlight that aspect.

In A Knowledge Producer’s View on the Knowledge Commons (2023) Mathilde Noual also discusses the “Tragedy”. She touches on the concept of “epistemic pollution”¹⁾ and then goes on to outline her “MMM” model for avoiding the knowledge commons tragedy.

I recommend that for study (I intend to get back to it) but for now I'll try to set out a much simpler and shorter view along similar lines.

Most material, tangible common-pool resources are subtractable and can be depleted, and Hardin's “tragedy” comes when too much (or everything) has been subtracted from the pool. In contrast, with knowledge and information, the problem of unregulated use comes from addition, not subtraction. If people are known to be searching for a particular kind of information, there is a clear motivation for claiming that your resource (typically, website) offers that kind of information, because that is likely to bring traffic – eyeballs – attention – which can then be monetised through advertising.²⁾ If there's no way of telling which resources are the best value, the value of those resources gently ebbs away to less and less – more time is needed to find the wanted knowledge, so less knowledge is found in a given time.

It is possible, in a way, to “subtract” from the pool of knowledge, simply by enclosing it (e.g. behind a paywall) but this is often ineffective. Information wants to be free!

The short story is this: the tragedy of the (ungoverned) commons comes from subtraction from the resource; the tragedy of the (ungoverned) knowledge commons comes from addition to the resource.

• In a material commons, unregulated individuals take more than is sustainable, depleting the commons and lessening (or even destroying) its value.
• In a knowledge or information commons, unregulated individuals add more and more “noise”, resulting in information pollution, epistemic pollution, or knowledge pollution.³⁾

Just as an essential remedy to material commons tragedy is to draw a clear boundary around who may use the common-pool resource, and how; similarly but oppositely the essential remedy to knowledge or information commons tragedy is to draw a clear boundary defining who may add to the common-pool knowledge resource. It's Elinor Ostrom's first design principle: clearly defined boundaries.

As most people know, Wikipedia does actually allow anonymous edits by anyone. The reasons why this works are because: first, there are so many people who watch the pages, and are ready to revert vandalism at a few minute's notice; and second, there are clear guidelines for what is allowed to be added. Wikis are designed to allow straightforward editing over the web. So while the same open approach could in principle work for other wikis, it could only work if there were enough people watching the pages and ready to revert vandalism — but why would a knowledge commons want to allow anonymous editing? In my view, having all edits attributed to people helps, among other things, by giving a basis for reputation of a knowledge commoner editor.

The concept of information pollution seems to work well, because it has much in common with other kinds of pollution. With water or air pollution, polluters add unwanted things, which results in people not being able to use the water or air in the way that they wanted. With knowledge and information, polluters are adding stuff that does not enhance the knowledge commons, but dilutes it, making it less usable and valuable.

While knowledge is essentially limitless, attention is limited. In these days of too much information, attention can be scarce, which is why we seek it, try to capture and enclose it, and treat it with jealousy. It's well known that e.g. social media platforms are tuned to maximise the time spent on them. If everyone has access to my attention, there will be too much for me to cope with, and the knowledge that I am seeking can be drowned in noise.

The challenge here is that there is no obviously clear way for me to set boundaries around the resource of my attention. FOMO pushes me not to close off my attention, just in case something valuable comes up, which I would miss out on if I am not alert to – well — just about everything that crosses my path. This doesn't sound pretty, in the end.

Some ideas:

1. We can help each other, by dividing up the information scanning process, and feeding to each other the nuggets of knowledge that we reckon are most relevant, most worthwhile, etc. to the other person.
2. We can take care not to call for attention unless it is definitely going to benefit the other person.
3. We can co-curate knowledge commons so that we record potentially useful information, where others can easily find it when they need to know.

• my LinkedIn post (you can comment there)
• steps along the knowledge commoning way
• words

• knowledge commons