No transition wars or fill-in, the digital commons form a collective of innovation as a whole

But even in this ambivalent setting, the digital commons provide an opportunity to step away, even partially, from the capitalist value system, a glimpse on “’the outside’, the ‘other than capital’” (De Angelis, 2007: 13). In digital commoning we can observe value practices that do not necessarily justify market exchange as the sole mechanism of living and livelihood creation. People contribute to a collective productive effort that does not result in commodities exchanged in markets. They produce digital commons in the form of knowledge, such as in Wikipedia; code, such as FOSS; and design, such as open hardware projects. It is commons rather than commodities that characterize the effort expended in production. Digital commoners are driven by diverse motivations rather than the sole purpose of realizing market exchange. They, thus, develop value practices, i.e., actions, processes, and webs of relations, around the commons. In the most successful cases, to a certain extent and under certain conditions, they can co-produce their livelihoods through the commons (Pazaitis et al., 2017a; Pazaitis, 2020). Commons-based practices define the principles and structures shared among the participants and are, in turn, reproduced through digital commons projects. They create conditions of “counter-enclosures” (De Angelis, 2007), allowing the production of commons to survive within the capitalist value system as they transcend it. Innovations fostered by digital commons projects played a key role in creating this alternative space. These were process and organizational innovations, such as the wiki platform powering Wikipedia or the forms of modular design and low-cost integration featured in FOSS projects (Benkler, 2002). Adding to that, a series of institutional innovations, such as the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons license family, ensured the reproduction of the digital commons co-created by communities and facilitated the expansion of the ecosystem (Harhoff and Lakhani, 2016; Mateos-Garcia and Steinmueller, 2008). Even if they fostered new models for acquisition and exchange, the innovations of digital commons communities were not driven by acquisition and exchange. Simultaneously, they created the conditions for a different set of principles compared to the ones traditionally associated with innovation to come into place. As a result, there is a potential break in the dominant understanding of innovation as the spearhead of capitalism, which places the concept in a dialectical relation with the commons-based value practices. The currently dominant view of innovation is indispensably connected with the capacity to exploit technological change into the market (Pansera and Fressoli, 2021). This view is largely connected with Schumpeter’s work (1934; 1954), which is saturated with Sombart’s understanding of the capitalist spirit (Reinert and Reinert, 2006; Reinert, 2019). The latter is represented by economic rationality, summarized as the attitude of a systematic pursuit of profit, as Weber (2013) framed it (along with the ultimate, but later forgotten, goal of salvation). This view of innovation has its roots in the Renaissance, with the rational pursuit of profit as a virtue incorporated within exploration and the creation of new possibilities (Reinert and Reinert, 2011). Innovation embodies the transition from the medieval to the Renaissance perception of the human person. It signifies the act of creation in the image of God as inherently virtuous, a duty even, that was hitherto considered serious heresy (Reinert and Reinert, 2011; Reinert and Daastøl, 1997). Today this quest of exploration and creation of new possibilities has been largely delegated to market selection processes. Indeed, the “heretical” activity that would need to be stifled by something like the Spanish Inquisition would be to conceive a form of innovation that challenges the market orthodoxy. The digital commons have managed to exhibit the fittest and strongest forms in several key domains of the digital economy without primarily relying on markets’ selection mechanism or the profit drive. Rather, they created structures that harness diverse motivations, backgrounds, and experiences of an “enormous pool of human creativity and willingness to engage in intellectual effort” (Benkler, 2002: 30). In this sense, the digital commons provide a snapshot of a tentative paradigm shift of innovation predicated on the commons. This transcending dimension of the commons in innovation processes has been inferred by the “innovation commons” (Allen and Potts, 2016; Potts, 2017). Innovation commons relate to opportunities for discovery and experimentation that take place at the early stages of technological development where self-organized groups of people pool distributed knowledge and information resources based on shared rules. The innovation commons showcase the importance of the commons in innovation but restrain the scope of commoning practices to the early stages of innovative processes. Even more, commoning in these stages is largely justified on the degree of uncertainty deeming other forms of coordination too costly (Allen and Potts, 2016). Once the economic returns have been defined, innovation as we know it is validated solely by market success, or, very often, domination. But this outcome, as we analyzed earlier, is not so much a “natural” order of the markets or embedded in human nature. It is a type of order bestowed upon economic agents by the underlying value system and the relevant institutions serving it.