I was ranting about the tragedy of the commons for several years before I started working on my current projects in a hard-to-articulate attempt to address them. So the problem really resonates. However, I think the problem is harder than you make it seem, and have trouble following the leaps of logic/intuition between your tweets. A few responses: 1. People can cause the tragedy of the commons both by action and inaction. Rent-seeking covers the former, but the term was originally coined to cover the latter. A shared bit of grazing land that nobody owns (so no rent to seek) and therefore nobody is incentivized to fix. So I'm curious to hear more elaboration on why you think less ownership will lead to better maintenance of commons. 2. The tragedy of the commons is intimately tied to game theory and the prisoner's dilemma. One way to rephrase "manage commons sustainably" is "keep people from defecting." I hope that phrasing makes it obvious that this is a really hard problem. 3. Lots of solutions that seem to "solve" the tragedy of the commons rely on social enforcement mechanisms that only work in small groups. So, "like, don't" at scale is an unsolved problem of social engineering. 4. One kind of commons that is consistently under-appreciated is abstract idea spaces, like IP as you mentioned. Or think about the way every site started pushing for websites to black out for a day for some cause or other until one day it stopped working. Abstract commons are even harder to protect from tragedies because it's much harder to make a case that they're a commons, and so much harder to create the widespread will to enforce penalties for defection. 5. Putting it all together, the rules for deciding what constitutes rent seeking are an abstract commons. It's hard to imagine getting a lot of social credit/kudos/whuffie for better policing, and so less effort goes into it. In this way the problem becomes circular. My best response to these problems right now is to help people grow more sophisticated in their consumption choices. There's already a blooming awareness, for example, that the software you choose to support has societal implications. We're becoming less individualistic and more collectively-minded there and in a lot of other similar areas. I just want to accelerate that shift as much as possible.

asking questions about my original thread may have been a more productive starting point given you start off this five point thing with "However, I think the problem is harder than you make it seem, and have trouble following the leaps of logic/intuition between your tweets." let's start from the top: the idea that the tragedy of the commons was meant to address inaction as opposed to rent seeking, and that this in any way vindicates it. mostly: empirically we don't see tragedies of the commons. a nobel prize has been awarded for this research. elinor ostrom. she found primarily that groups tend to succeed at this in varying conditions modulo specifically the two aspects i mentioned, rent seeking and exogenous shocks. in other words, the tragedy of the commons is a nice idea, but it's pretty much exactly that: an idea. re it being analogous to the prisoners dilemma, yes, i'm aware. ostrom's work is based directly off of that insight and trying to apply game theoretic methods to this more generally social sciences problem. re rent seeking redefining the commons: just no. rent seeking is just rent seeking, or a particular sort of extractive behavior. we needn't complicate that. extractive has a well enough defined sense that we can just stick to that. the commons is the common sense set of things we think it is. whether or not the things in it are physical, they are sticky in the sense of hyperobjects, and this gives them all the necessary attributes of physicality to sensibly reset our thinking back to normal.

Sorry, I tried hard not to sound aggressive, but I guess I'm not there yet. I'll go read Elinor Ostrom.

I think I'm missing some context for this thread. Can you give an example of a "tragedy of the commons" situation that you have in mind, and how you would prevent it?

@Kartik Agaram i haven't read her work in great depth myself either, i was just summarizing what i know so far and wanted to let myself be chill re citations and stuff to get the idea out at all.

george monbiot has a nice phrasing for one part of this idea: "private sufficiency, public luxury" -- or in its more challenging form, "public luxury for all, or private luxury for some"