Niklas Maak Hatje Cantz 2022
The ‘commons’ is any finite, valuable resource (such as water, a fishery or a national park) that is collectively enjoyed by a number of people with unfettered access.
The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is that, without shared social structures, cultural practices like kaitiakitanga (guardianship), mutual restraint by consensus or formal rules, people will tend to overuse it, deplete it and end up destroying the value of the resource altogether.1
Niklas Maak, the author of Server Manifesto, writes “data is the single greatest collective treasure of a digital society, the basic material for business and politics”. Data has become the ‘commons’ of our digital age.
The tragedy is.)
