Commons and Network Nations

* Article: The Commons and Network Nations. By Michel Bauwens | On the historical foundations and emerging possibilities of commons-based sovereignty. Network.Nations, Oct 23, 2026

URL = https://networknations.substack.com/p/the-commons-and-network-nations

Introduction

Network.nations:

"In this conceptual primer, Michel Bauwens reminds us how Network Nations are not emerging in a historical vacuum. They belong to a longer history of communities organizing across territories through shared institutions, resources, and systems of governance. What distinguishes Network Nations is the possibility of updating these arrangements through digital infrastructures and commons-based governance.

He highlights the difference between translocal association (the role of Network Nations) and translocal stewardship (the role of proposed commons institutions), a distinction worth keeping in mind as the field of Network Sovereignty moves from theory to practice. The piece also explores the emerging challenges facing the digital commons in the age of AI."

The Text

By Michel Bauwens:

The commons has been more recently defined, by post-Ostromian scholars and activists such as David Bollier, through a combination of three characteristics:

• A shared resource: this establishes the objective character of a commons as a real resource, but it can be an immaterial resource such as domain-specific knowledge, a code base etc … This does distinguish commons from things that are merely common.

• This resource sharing is created through human activity: ‘there is no commons without commoning’. This stresses that commons are a human choice, and not necessarily linked to specific types of resources.

• This resource must to a great degree be governed by a community or a set of stakeholders, i.e. using their own rules of governance, which establishes as an institutional form that is distinct from the dominium of private goods, and the public management of state-owned resources.

The commons have a history.

Traditional indigenous societies, which have participatory forms of being and consciousness, and do not yet distinguish between the sacred and the profane, may be said to have a common-centric form of life, in which most natural and human-produced resources are shared as commons, or exchanged as a gift. The commons could be said to be the hegemonic form of exchange for such societies.

Classical and post-classical (post-Axial Age) regimes before the advent of the capitalist state, based on class divisions, and separate market and state institutions, do still have highly functional commons, from the medieval common pastures in medieval Europe, to the role of the Dervish brotherhoods and Akhi cooperatives in the Ottoman re-organization of conquered lands, and the ninth part of the land reserved for king and emperor in China.

Capitalism is the first form of political economy which is intent on systematically privatizing and destroying the commons, whereby the regulatory role of traditional commons is replaced by the role of the welfare state, a bureaucratically adminstered form.

Commons were important both to geographically-based administrative forms, and to the pre-digital forms of translocalisms.

1) Phyles, which served the reproduction of productive communities operating at translocal scale, within various civilizational spheres (internationally organized guilds, merchant diasporas, religious community diasporas without broader aims). A phyle is a type of translocally networked community system that has businesses and other institutions to create cooperation and support at the global level, for that particular community. Think of Venetian guilds, which had common infrastructures for the strengthening of their Mediterranean expansion. They existed in different civilizational spheres. This concept has been theorized by David de Ugarte.

2) Cosmopolises, which held the civilizational tissue together, at a trans-local scale, think of the Catholic Church, the Buddhist Sangha, the Islamic Ummah. A cosmopolis is NOT a geographic entity, it is a community of the mind as it were, a community of faith usually, which is connected translocally. However, it is a vital part of the integrative tissue of imperial systems. This is a concept that was proposed, as far as I know, by Venkatesh Rao. Think of the many congregations of the Catholic Church, which were based on common property.

A third emerging translocal concept has only emerged with the digital age is that of the Network Nation, conceived by Primavera de Filippi and colleagues from the Network Nations collective; and that of network states, as proposed by Balaji Srivanasan.

We believe that the network nation is an update of phyles, while the network state is an update of the merchant cities and states, and to the more recent experiences with Special Economic Zones, massively applied in the Chinese developmental model.

Each of these trans-local forms has historically had their own commons, and so will Network Nations need their own self-managed and self-created common infrastructure.

A particular challenge comes with the emergence of AI.

The foundational relationship between AI agents and the digital commons (such as Wikipedia, StackOverflow, open-source code repositories, and the open web) is currently characterized by asymmetrical extraction. Human agents contribute to the digital commons through effort, time, and community building. AI agents, however, are designed to maximize data extraction for model training. Because AI agents operate at machine speed and scale without being embedded in the social norms of the community, they can rapidly deplete the resource (e.g., overloading servers, draining the pool of high-quality human-generated text) faster than human agents can replenish it. This replicates Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” at an algorithmic pace.

For this and other reasons, the priority of the next era might be constructing entirely new AI-enabled and other digital commons, based on ‘Value Sovereignty’.

As we have proposed in the P2P Foundation, now is the time of the Archipelago of Regenerative Projects. These are communities that, without waiting for societal reform and/or revolution/transformation, want to initiate, ‘right here and right now’, forms of production that are both ecologically balanced and have more just (pre)distribution of the value forms being chosen and produced. Reticulum is an example of a new P2P Meshworks that has no servers, does not use the cloud, is compatible with the internet but can operate without, protects digital identity and is 100% cryptographically protected, with even quantum-proof hardware. These new productive communities, such as the Traditional Dream Factory in Portugal, and Growfi in Sicilia, are cosmo-locally native. They combine common ownership of their physical resources, i.e. common land, with shared digital infrastructures and access to globally crowdsourced ‘patient capital’. This is a budding geo-political alternative to both the Western rentier model dominated by the power of extractive private platforms, and the state-controlled cybernetic market+planning integration that has been achieved by the Chinese system, both of which do not have a balanced relationship between extraction and regeneration.

What we need are ‘commons-based instruments of expansion’ for this new type of civilizational transition. The concept is from Carroll Quigley, who notes that civilizational forms only survive and thrive if they have such institutions, which produce the surplus. But we combine it with our historical understanding of the Pulsation of the Commons. This hypothesis claims that the generative and conservation-oriented local commons institutions have had a counter-balancing role towards civilizational balance: when markets and states function well, they can care for their core populations, which diminishes the role of the commons, but when they start degrading, the local commons revive. And in times of civilizational collapse, we see that the collectively-based monastic institutions are those that revive the devastated civilizational lands and populations.

The isolated and merely local ‘islands of coherence’ will not survive without a trans-local form of organization and support, which is why we believe there will be fusions and convergences between the local and the trans-local digital. Dark Ages, the likely reality between two forms of civilizational coherence, are the very periods where human consciousness changes, as William Thompson has argued in his ‘Coming into Being’.

To achieve such a balanced model, a Phase 1 Civilization, in which extraction and regeneration are in balance, we will certainly need a ‘revolution in desire’, already prefigured by the current movements for network nations, peer to peer organized infrastructures, and the commons."

(https://networknations.substack.com/p/the-commons-and-network-nations)