Reinvesting in an intellectual public domain can break the tragedy of the commons and scarcity logics.

Like the environment, knowledge is a public and common good of societies. How is such a good to be governed? Cognitive capitalism has built institutions that enable the appropriation of the surplus value generated by social knowledge and by the information produced in daily life through the use of new communication technologies and the institutional structures of intellectual property that govern international commerce today, producing what Michael Heller (1998) called the tragedy of the anticommons. In the realm of knowledge, this tragedy means the underuse of scientific knowledge as a result of the excessive use of intellectual property rights and over-patenting.

An alternative method must seek to build knowledge/ creativity systems that are free from social appropriation, i.e. cognitive systems built as shared resources (Ostrom and Hess 2011) and social public goods, not only for ethical coherence but also for economic efficiency. This construction implies a theoretical and political shift from the underlying assumptions of the tragedy of the commons (and anticommons) to rethink alternatives that enable the implementation of a cognitive rule that is pro/common of humanity and ecosystems.

One must start from the fact that, unlike natural resources, knowledge and creativity are not scarce but unlimited, and they do not emerge from pre-existing and exhaustible wealth but must be systematically cultivated or developed. This premise is important because as an unlimited good there can be no over-exploitation of the resource. The imposition of a limit by means of privatization processes is an economic error if we are interested in maximizing the social benefit.

The tragedy also becomes a virtue when the assumption that no one values wealth that is common to all is shattered. If knowledge is built collaboratively and for the common benefit, the probability of common knowledge not being valued is minimal or minimized. At the same time, when it is being constructed collectively, the property rights must belong to the community that generates that knowledge, reducing the possibility of sub-exploitation to a minimum and with that the possibility of the tragedy of the anticommons. If knowledge is built privately, the curse of the commons will be hard to break.

In the case of the prisoner’s dilemma, in which the dominant strategy is not to cooperate because communication is forbidden or non-binding, an open knowledge system is designed to generate the greatest communication flow, whereby interaction and cooperation will prosper. That is precisely where the radical advantage of a shared knowledge resource system lies (Ostrom and Hess 2011). Cooperation will not only be produced to generate knowledge but to maintain it as a common good.

A shared knowledge resource system promotes other values, beyond economic ones, because it is based on cooperation that does not exclusively aim to generate profits but rather to discover and find pleasure in creation, which can generate relational goods between community members, whereby one surely breaks from the supposed instrumental economic rationality (means-ends), the basis of the tragedy of the anticommons. Following Elster, it would be possible to build a rationality linked to sentiments, passions and sympathy as the driver of collective action for the production of knowledge as a common good. The “other” is my friend or colleague, not my competitor or enemy. The common cause is always fulfilled together with an “other” that has the same goals as the rest of the group. That implies designing institutional networks of cooperative economic behavior that promote the appropriation of common goods by the commons.

For that system to flourish, there is a need to design regulatory frameworks that give way to different types of collective ownership. If the process is shared and constructed in a team, the benefits must also be shared by the participants who worked in the cognitive or creative network, placing the possibility for social benefit at the center.

In the case of the impossibility of the logic of collective action, knowledge in an open system would not prosper due to the coercion exercised over its participants (as Olson contends) but rather it would flow freely because those involved have common interests(7). On the other hand, the successful design of the proposed open systems does not depend on them being small groups where a free rider can quickly be identified; instead the probability of a free rider decreases because the benefit lies not only in the result but, above all, in being a part of the process and enjoying the pleasure that stems from that (Ramírez 2003). At the same time, a free rider will struggle to succeed because of the horizontal accountability, which all members of the network practice. Additionally, the rate at which more common goods are created is greater than in private systems due to the interaction between the millions of brains in the network, which, at the same time, discourages and marginalizes free riders.

In short, another form of knowledge governance is required in order to break from the tragedy of the anticommons and give rise to the potency and virtue that a rule of the common goods entails. This implies –paraphrasing Bruni (2010)– ceasing to edify systems where “that which belongs to all” is equated to “that which belongs to no one,” and instead building systems in which “that which belongs to all” is appropriated as “ours”.

In this framework, the institutional method to break from the tragedy of the commons and the anticommons is the construction of social platforms with open technologies and a regulation that enables knowledge and creativity to flourish as common goods and social innovation. If that design is built in the ideal manner and the common good communities(8) –overseers and cognitive workers– have thousands or millions of members, then self-management and self-government processes can emerge, not only on a micro scale but also on a macro scale.

At another moment in history, self-management and self-government on a global scale may have been unachievable utopias. But today, the technological and informational conditions, as well as the sociocultural stock for cognitive systems to feature such an institutional design, do exist in other forms than the exclusively state-based or privatized. We could even say that the shift in the correlation of power on a global level lies in making institutional designs visible when they break from the creative rationality of the tragedy of the commons or anticommons (a privatized patent system) and generating alternative designs that enable the “potency and virtue of the commons” to flourish for the good of human living and the planet.