Was the Open Knowledge Commons Idea a Curse in Disguise? – Towards Sovereign Institutions of Knowledge

Abstract

Heavily centralized, hierarchical, hyper-capitalistic, market based solutions were much more effective in extracting and redistributing value from the shared, distributed resources, than the communities that produced them under the naive dream of building a "commons".

If the rise of fascism is the failure of the left, then the rise of the platform economy, and the “sharing economy” was the failure of the commons-based peer production movement, because it refused to think about value.

Keywords: commons, public libraries, value, sharing economy

JEL Classification: A13, K11, K12, 034