What it is
Ownership is about who controls what, and what it costs to hold it. Every asset brings upkeep, risk and responsibility as well as value.
Ownership is not only private or public. Elinor Ostrom showed that communities can manage shared resources like fisheries and pastures sustainably, without either privatising them or handing them to the state. As software and AI make production cheaper, trust, attention and real-world assets become the scarce things.
Ostrom’s design principles for a lasting commons
The conditions Elinor Ostrom found in long-lived shared resources.
- 01Clear boundariesWho may use the resource is defined.
- 02Local rulesRules fit local conditions.
- 03Collective choiceUsers help make the rules.
- 04MonitoringUse is watched by accountable people.
- 05Graduated sanctionsPenalties grow with the offence.
- 06Conflict resolutionCheap, quick ways to settle disputes.
- 07Right to organiseOutside authorities respect the users’ rules.
- 08Nested layersLarger systems are built from smaller ones.
Source: Nobel Prize
A diagram of ideas, not a measurement.
Ideas to carry
- 1
Owning has a cost
Every asset brings upkeep, risk and responsibility, not only value.
- 2
Scarcity moves
When one thing becomes cheap, value shifts to what is still hard to get.
- 3
The commons can work
Shared resources survive when the people using them make and enforce the rules.
Established What we know
Interpretation The older lens · Stoicism and Buddhism
The Stoics split life into what is “up to us” and what is not; Buddhism treats clinging itself as the hidden cost of owning.
Reading
- c. 125EnchiridionEpictetus
- 1689Second Treatise of GovernmentJohn Locke
- 1990Governing the CommonsElinor Ostrom
AI makes content free
Me, still paying rent: interesting
Connected subjects, projects and writing
- Making and inventionSubject · Creation
Perspective When making gets cheap, value moves to what stays scarce: trust, taste and physical work.
- Economics and moneySubject · Civilization
How people produce, trade and keep score, from Adam Smith’s pin factory to a $112 trillion world economy.
- History and institutionsSubject · Civilization
Laws, states, markets and the agreements that let eight billion strangers cooperate.
- DEVRIM HoldingsProject · Civilization
The home for the ventures: a small portfolio run by one person, with AI agents doing much of the research, building and monitoring.
- Owning a business, or being owned by oneEssay · Civilization
Knowing how to work hard is not a reason to build another job for yourself. Notes on a different relationship with work.
- What stays scarce when making things gets cheap?Essay · Civilization
If software, research and design keep getting cheaper, value has to move somewhere. A working list of candidates, none of them assumed safe.
Sources
- Elinor Ostrom — Facts Nobel Prize, 2009. Checked 5 Nov 2026.
- The Code of Hammurabi Yale Law School, Avalon Project, c. 1754 BCE. Checked 5 Nov 2026.