« Event Report » - Study Day on Digital Commons: Review and Outlook

Following a LinkedIn post by Sébastien Shulz, a researcher I met during my participation in the New Governance Symposium in June 2025, I discovered the research seminar on Digital Commons: Assessment and Perspectives, which he was co-organizing with Sébastien Broca. The program resonated with my own research: attending it allowed me, beyond this personal interest, to offer you an analytical account.

The seminar took place at the Research House of Paris 8 University in Saint-Denis. Having arrived the day before, the meeting was set for 9 a.m. for coffee and welcome; the official introduction began at 9:30 a.m. in amphitheater MR 002. The research seminar was structured in two complementary parts: a morning devoted to a critical assessment of digital commons, followed by an afternoon focused on contemporary perspectives and challenges.

To prepare this account, I took notes throughout the day and recorded the various presentations to facilitate their transcription and subsequent analysis: and unlike last time, I managed to get my recordings right!

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Les organisateurs

 Sébastien Shulz is a research fellow in sociology at the CNRS. His work focuses on the political, economic, and environmental stakes of the digital, particularly through the study of digital commons, the greening of digital capitalism, and relations between commons and public action. Involved in the Digital Commons Policies working group (Internet & Society Center – CNRS) and co-founder of the Collective for a Society of Commons, his research articulates digital sociology, political economy, and institutional analysis. In his recent publications: The Commercial Capture of Ride-sharing in France (Réseaux, 2024) sheds light on how public policies for ecological mobility have strengthened platform capitalism; Digital Commons for the Ecological Transition: Ethics, Praxis and Policies (Shulz, S., O'Neil, M. Broca, S., Daly, A., 2024), co-written notably with Broca, offers a critical analysis of digital commons in light of digital capitalism, questioning their ethical, political, and material conditions of sustainability.

Sébastien Broca is a professor of information and communication sciences at Paris 8 University and director of CEMTI. His work focuses on the digitization of societies, critique of Big Tech, digital commons, and contemporary transformations of digital capitalism. Co-founder of the EnCommuns journal and co-coordinator of the Digital Commons Policies group, he is also the author of The Utopia of Free Software and Caught in the Web: From the Utopia of the Internet to Digital Capitalism (Seuil, 2025), which analyzes the progressive capture of the emancipatory ideals of the digital.

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Introduction :The Triple Lineage and Stakes of Digital Commons

The seminar opens with an introduction by the two organizers, who lay out the main scientific and political stakes of the gathering. Sébastien Shulz introduces the day with two structuring reminders. The first is reflexive: in the field of digital commons — as illustrated by the people present in the amphitheater — many are "multi-positioned" actors, simultaneously researchers, practitioners, activists, or experts, a configuration that helps explain a research field that evolves in parallel with its objects.

This observation echoes a second reminder: the genealogy of the concept of digital commons refers to three major lineages, essential for situating contemporary debates. The first emerges in the late 1990s, in the context of early digital capitalism and what James Boyle called the "second movement of enclosures on intellectual resources": "the first mentions we have of digital commons appear in 98-99, by Laurence Lessig, who uses this term to criticize the extension of intellectual property rights over informational resources." Digital commons are then conceived primarily as informational resources with open access. The approach is widely relayed by jurists such as J. Litman, Y. Benkler, L. Lessig, J. Boyle (Coriat and Broca 2015, p. 273), who work on questions of open source code and free licenses (addressed in my thesis as one of the lineages of Bitcoin, Chap I, section 1, p. 66-67).

A second lineage follows from the work of Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington school. Attention shifts from questions of access alone to those of collective governance: digital commons, particularly knowledge commons, are defined as resources co-governed by communities (this is partly the approach I use in my thesis to analyze the governance of digital commons, Bitcoin, and Ethereum).

A third lineage, more critical and termed post-Marxist, is less concerned with access regimes or institutional devices than with practices of cooperation and "doing together." Commoning is conceived as a social and political activity inscribed in a broader critique of capitalism — a perspective that Carlo Vercellone will develop further.

These three lineages do not succeed one another linearly but coexist, intersect, and evolve with the rhythms of transformations in digital capitalism.

As an extension of this framing, Sébastien Broca highlights three major shifts that are reconfiguring today's debates: the intensification of issues related to labor and value distribution, particularly in the face of the extractive dynamics of generative AI; the return of environmental constraints, long downplayed in a realm conceived as immaterial; and finally the rise of digital sovereignty as a political horizon, of which commons could be both a lever and a false lead.

It is from this double framing — genealogical and critical — that the first conference of the day opens, entrusted to Carlo Vercellone.

Carlo Vercellone — Cognitive Capitalism and Digital Commons

I was happy to see Carlo Vercellone again — and his charming accent — it took me back to my now distant student years at Nanterre. His intervention, long and dense, structured my understanding of the day by laying out a critical, sometimes confrontational frame on the ambivalent relationship between digital commons and cognitive capitalism.

Vercellone begins with definitions to grasp the "complex dialectic" between digital commons and cognitive capitalism since the crisis of Fordism. His first thesis is that cognitive capitalism (late 1970s–1980s) is defined as an attempt to exit the crisis of industrial capitalism, above all through a refashioning of mechanisms for capturing value in the face of the rise of productive forces based on knowledge, the digital, and "productions of the human by the human" (health, culture, education). This results in a dynamic of rent: extension of intellectual property, financialization, privatizations, and more recently, capture of commons creations by platforms, at the cost of Internet recentralization. In a hypothesis convergent with Broca, Vercellone argues that we have entered a third stage — a cognitive-informational capitalism — marked by the hegemony of digital capitalism and by centralized extractivism (cloud and AI).

His second thesis — the one that struck me most — concerns the commons as a mode of production. Against approaches that reduce commons to the nature of goods or legal devices, Vercellone claims a materialist conception of operaist inspiration: the commons is defined neither by access nor by local governance, but by historical forms of organization of production founded on collective intelligence. This dynamic traverses all productive sectors and opens the possibility of a communalization of the public — that is, an internal transformation of rules of management and property according to principles of self-governance. He proposes to "think, in the sense of Marx, the commons as a genuine socio-economic system in the process of emerging, which develops within capitalism itself and from its contradictions — sometimes in complementarity, but also in subordination, dependence, and predation."

Vercellone then proposes a periodization that particularly interested me, in that it breaks with deterministic readings of digital capitalism conceived as a "subject-less" process, entirely shaped by the logic of capital. He recalls that the informational revolution was first built on a synergy between counter-cultures and open science, outside market hegemony: "in the beginning, the logic or spirit of the commons preceded, and in a certain sense pushed, the development of digital capitalism." It is this anteriority that explains, according to him, a certain naïveté, since the golden age of free software rested on a radicalization of inclusivity — "the absence of clauses discriminating against uses" — opening the way to three major flaws: the authorization of uses contradictory with social aims (up to DRM); extractivism with "the appropriation of free software as free resources put at the service of capital accumulation"; and the absence of mechanisms for social remuneration of labor, constraining commons to financial dependence. The rise of platform capitalism after 2000, then of AI, are thus not ruptures but a continuous and systematic exploitation of these flaws. This crystallizes the central critique discussed throughout the day: have digital commons, despite themselves, prepared the conditions for an even more predatory and extractive capitalism?

Valérie Peugeot - "Public authority and Digital Commons"

Valérie Peugeot first presents herself "as an activist" before being — she says she wants to be "both lucid and at the same time positive" — as a counterpoint to the previous framing. I appreciated this attempt at rebalancing: between Carlo's work and that of Sébastien [Broca], there was an impression "that as commoners, we have been rather the naive fools of cognitive capitalism." Without denying this diagnosis, she seeks to re-embed digital commons within the broader ecology of urban, natural, or knowledge commons and their relationship to public power, in order to build more robust coalitions, nourished by historical experiences of resistance and to recover a long-term horizon: "the irrigation system of the Waro-Waro people, beside Lake Titicaca, is just 8,000 years old."

She recalls that public power has always maintained an ambivalent relationship with commons, oscillating between protection and destruction. The Charter of the Forest (1215) embodies an early recognition of the rights of commoners, while the legislative enclosures of the 19th century mark, by contrast, an organized destruction of commons by the State. This historical detour allows us to recall that the question of alliances with public power — at the heart of contemporary debates on digital commons — is nothing new.

She comes to distinguish three frameworks of commons according to their relationship to the State: the institutionalist approach (Ostrom), on one side of the State and the market; the functionalist approach (Rodotà), where commons and public action are more hybrid; and operaist currents, which read the State as solidary with cognitive capitalism. She recalls that, in the U.S. context, digital commons were built in a culture deeply anti-state, marked by libertarianism (John Perry Barlow's Declaration of Cyberspace, 1996) and the post-Reagan period of deregulation, which facilitated their capture by Big Tech. The French trajectory appears more hybrid, with an early opening toward other commons (health, ecology, social and solidarity economy) and direct involvement of commoners in public action. From recent policies, Peugeot identifies three state uses of commons — innovation, transformation of public action, sovereignty — but emphasizes their fragility and ambiguity.

The conclusion I retained is pragmatic: commons need alliances with all commoners as well as with public power, if we want to inscribe them "truly in a progressive political project of long duration."

Félix Tréguer - "In the Age of Technofascism, Is Digital Activism at an Impasse?"

Félix Tréguer announces he will "be the boomer of the session," offering less a thesis than an assessment of nearly fifteen years of engagement with La Quadrature du Net, marked by activist precarity and his departure this year. He paints the "picture of a rising technofascism, in a particularly adverse historical environment, with an unprecedented alliance forged between the U.S. administration and Silicon Valley," which has emptied of their political force the historical struggles for digital freedoms. He speaks less of commons than of the digital activism linked to them: this activism of the 1990s–2000s knew real victories (encryption, net neutrality), but today finds itself "forced to multiply defensive postures" and to celebrate "half-victories" procedural in nature, ultimately facilitating the consolidation of digital capitalism: he cites the "2021 European Court of Human Rights ruling, Big Brother Watch v. United Kingdom," following the Snowden revelations in 2013, which questions the fact that a State respecting the rule of law can massively surveil Internet communications.

Then he returns to a series of emblematic struggles — encryption, net neutrality, fight against mass surveillance, non-commercial sharing of culture, interoperability, alternative networks — to recall their historical conditions of possibility (heterogeneous alliances, favorable opportunity structure, militant technical capital) as well as their structural limits (post-2001 security tightening, industrial centralization, juridicization of defeats).

Finally, Tréguer acknowledges being today more lucid and critical (ecology, anticapitalism), at the cost of political marginalization and loss of influence on public action. His conclusion is pessimistic: if rebuilding spaces for debate and coalition appears necessary, given the context, "it's probably going to get worse before it gets better."

That was the last presentation of the morning, now lunch break.

Nathalie Casemajor - "Wikimedia Enterprise: The Enterprise of Commons Facing the Relational Power of Platforms".

Nathalie Casemajor presents the launch of Wikimedia Enterprise in 2021-2022 as a strategic rupture for Wikipedia — the "UFO in the world of platforms," being "the only non-commercial and self-governed site in the top 10 largest web platforms." She recalls that this shift is inscribed in a double historical trajectory: one refers to attempts at monetization in the early 2000s (advertising, commercial partnerships) and their failures, caused by strong internal crises — notably the Spanish Fork episode — leading to their lasting abandonment; the other refers to the trajectory of progressive platformization of Wikimedia, begun with Wikidata (2012), which shifted the project from a corpus of texts to an infrastructure of structured, interoperable, and massively reused data. This context poses risks for the commons, as web scrapers and generative AI exert pressure on the infrastructure, endangering the economic and technical sustainability of the movement: she speaks of a "reuse paradox," where AI models capture not only data but also the pathways of access to knowledge, bypassing Wikipedia as an entry point.

With Enterprise, the aim is to channel these massive uses, according to the principle of "selling the pipe, not the water": the data remains free and distributed among contributors, while large-scale industrial access is contractualized via optimized APIs. This strategy aims to move away from a defensive posture of commons facing tech giants: by becoming a provider of services essential to generative AI (uptime, real-time updates), Wikimedia stabilizes relations already asymmetrical due to "unequal relations of dependence." For Brian Wyatt, this is a translation of commons "into the language of capitalism": to avoid a Hardin-style tragedy of the commons without renouncing free knowledge, it is about speaking to digital giants in their own idiom — that of contract and service.

The assessment is positive: in 2024-2025, Wikimedia Enterprise reaches $8.3 million in revenue (+148% year-over-year), generates its first net profit, and has already recovered its initial investment, just three years after launch. A statutory ceiling on this revenue is set at 30% of the budget to preserve the movement's independence. As for the wild scraping that weighed on the shared resource, it has been substantially reduced. Persistent tensions remain: risk of volunteer demotivation, contractual opacity linked to trade secrets, partial dependence on AWS despite a desire to remain "cloud-agnostic," and strengthening of the Foundation's power at the expense of distributed governance. The central challenge becomes the redistribution of captured value toward the broader ecosystem of commons and free software.

Round Table: Relations Between Digital Commons, State, and Market

This round table brings together actors from the field and public action — Arnaud Lévy (noesya), Agnès Crépet (Fairphone), and Jean Cattan (secretary general of the National Digital Council) — to examine digital commons through concrete practices.

Arnaud Lévy (noesya) proposes moving away from the figure of the isolated activist to adopt a guild logic: forming a body around a profession, shared values, and collective organization. Noesya thus claims an activity oriented toward public and semi-public actors, precisely because a real need exists: to produce sober, accessible, durable sites without dependence on the extractive infrastructures of industrial web. The commons is not here a withdrawal from the market, but a situated way of producing, compatible with a public service conceived outside growth logic.

Agnès Crépet (Fairphone) insists on their industrial presence as a political lever. Fairphone acts in spaces of decision and negotiation, concretely demonstrating that the constraints invoked by major actors are matters of strategic choice: they put "the heads of the big [industrial actors] in their crap" by proving technically that alternatives (such as unlockable bootloader) are possible. This capacity to "be in the room" reveals a central asymmetry: only actors capable of industrial-scale production can durably weigh on regulations.

Jean Cattan describes the relationship to the State as fundamentally ambivalent: he underscores the structural tension between commons and state institution, while acknowledging the existence within administration of "people [...] who have chosen to act from within the State to deposit small flames." The experiences evoked nonetheless show that regulation remains a profoundly unequal field of struggle, dominated by the capacities for presence, expertise, and time of major industrial actors. Commons can only be inscribed in it at the cost of prior structuring.

Finally, the discussion managed to avoid all technophobia. I particularly appreciated that Agnès forcefully recalled that abstract renunciation of the digital is socially classist: for precarious publics (undocumented migrants, migrants), the smartphone remains a vital tool for autonomy, access to rights, and social connection. This lucidity prevents any posture of radical refusal and argues for a concrete alternative digital approach, attentive to real uses. In echo, Arnaud emphasizes that the digital constitutes a "parenthesis" of materiality permitted by a finite stock of resources (copper, minerals), inviting a shift in our relationship to technology from a logic of power to a care for preserving a habitable environment. This attention to material and social conditions finally joins the political challenge of local scale: "if we think of the communalism of Murray Bookchin, we can say that at some point we can conceive the State as being a form of polycentric governance of multiple institutions at small and larger scales," of which commons are part.

Keynote Yochai Benkler : "Coopérativism in Capitalism : How was Marx wrong in The poverty of philosophy, and how was he right?"

The day closes with a keynote both awaited and symbolic: that of Yochai Benkler, whose name is obviously not unknown. Benkler is part of that first generation of U.S. researchers who accompanied, conceptualized, and nourished the emergence of digital commons — the first intellectual lineage recalled at the opening of the day by S. Shulz. A key author of the notion of commons-based peer production, he returns with reflexive honesty on twenty-five years of hopes, misunderstandings, and political disillusions around the digital, warning that "the title [is] misleading, for there will be very little discussion of the poverty of philosophy and Marx, and much more introspection in light of his critique."

Returning to the founding period (1996–2006), he recalls the central hypothesis of commons-based peer production: the massive diffusion of material means of communication (PC, network) was to break the historical link between capital ownership and asymmetric power, opening the way to a decommodified, self-organized social production, situated outside both State and market. The ambition was to build a fundamental shared infrastructure — informational, legal, and technical — permitting stable coexistence between market production and shared social production.

Benkler acknowledges, however, that he underestimated capitalism's own dynamics. If he identified well an "ecological competition" between commons and property, he still conceived this struggle as essentially technopolitical: a "Plutonian" project, betting on direct action through technical and legal architecture rather than on the conquest of political power. Yet, from 2008 onward, a turn occurs: iPhone, cloud computing, closed platforms, and capital recentralization mark a phase of massive re-enclosure, which his early optimism had prevented him from anticipating. Capital does not combat openness frontally; it circumvents, absorbs, and reconfigures it. Commons do not disappear, but their language and practices are subjected to an extractive ethic, where the initial subversion is captured and the language of cooperation is subverted by that of performance: a "radical shift, moving from peer production to crowdsourcing, from sharing to the sharing economy, and essentially to precarious labor, with Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi communities ending up being used as an effective marketing tool by incumbent telecom operators."

This moment reveals, according to Benkler, his error in not having a genuine theory of capitalism: he "became aware that the project to which we had devoted some twenty years was fundamentally Proudhonian, subject precisely to the limits Marx had identified in his critique." Where Marx was right is in showing that capitalism is not a moral or institutional choice, but a set of historically constrained social relations, structured by dependence on the market for subsistence. The "Red Queen dynamics" designates for Benkler a capitalism where one is forced to run constantly — to sell one's labor and products on the market simply to survive — the search for positions of power (price-maker) becoming the very motor of technological change and its powerful creative forces. In this context, Proudhonian voluntarism — which he identifies in his own work — cannot suffice: "the fundamental problem lies in the imperatives of social forces, not in the voluntarism of right ideas [because] we cannot simply choose to behave differently and think differently." One does not transform a capitalist society through isolated "good practices," because the system continuously produces new forms of appropriation, domination, and "technologies of power" (labor deskilling, desire capture, status asymmetries).

From this observation flows a clear strategic shift. Benkler then sketches an explicitly programmatic path founded on the search for "real freedom," understood as lasting emancipation from market imperatives. Against voluntarist illusions, he argues that this freedom requires a frontal institutional attack on market dependence: partially decommodifying fundamental needs (housing, health, energy), and socializing key markets in labor, knowledge, and credit. Regarding artificial intelligence, he argues for a strategic shift: no longer limiting ourselves to regulation, but publicly investing in AI infrastructure, in order to offer cooperatives and non-capitalist organizations cheap access to computing power, the material condition of their autonomy.

This perspective leads Benkler to reaffirm unambiguously the centrality of the State. There is, according to him, no escape from below: without a grip on political power, commons remain structurally vulnerable to capitalist re-enclosure dynamics. Democracy is not the natural state of capitalism: it "can only be realized at the cost of constant struggle against the gravitational pull of oligarchy, which is capitalism's natural tendency." If cooperatives and commons play an essential role as "load balancers" against market excess, they cannot replace a programmatic transformation of capitalism's institutional foundations themselves.

Conclusion

I will conclude this account of a dense day with some reflections more directly linked to my own research and questions.

During exchanges with Vercellone, I attempted — perhaps clumsily — to introduce a question that runs through my work: that of cryptocurrencies as possible devices for economic sustainability of digital commons (of which they are themselves representatives). In evoking cryptocurrencies without further precision, I was actually thinking of Ethereum, ICOs, and tokenomics associated with governance tokens — that is, tools allowing communities of free software to finance themselves, pay teams, and collectively administer human and financial capital outside classical banking circuits.

The response offered — refocused on Bitcoin, its energy extractivism and speculative trajectory — mainly highlighted the persistence of a negative and largely undifferentiated reading of cryptocurrencies, at the cost of erasing the heterogeneous experiences unfolding within them. Conversely, my exchange with Nathalie Casemajor seemed particularly fruitful: in extending her analysis of Wikimedia Enterprise, the discussion opened the possibility of thinking about payment mechanisms or pricing for the use of infrastructures themselves (scraping, bots, intensive data access), implicitly echoing a central intuition of Web3 (I had recalled the emergence of the crypto x402 standard): these infrastructures then appear as a common pool resource, in the Ostromian sense, whose sustainability requires governance and situated socio-economic arbitrations.

This discrepancy also made me realize that my initial question was perhaps poorly posed. It is not merely a matter of knowing whether cryptocurrencies can finance digital commons, but of recognizing that they are themselves digital commons — with their open protocols, their developer communities, their experimental governance modes, and their tokens. As such, they are a profoundly ambivalent terrain of experimentation, where — sometimes brutally — the tensions discussed throughout the day are replayed: the dynamics of capture and subordination traverse them, are sometimes amplified, ICOs, tokenomics, DAOs replay in their own way the tensions between openness and re-enclosure, between collective autonomy and capture by financial capital, between institutional innovation and reproduction of relations of domination. But they may constitute a particularly visible laboratory of these tensions, precisely because they mix technical infrastructure, collective governance, AND explicit economic mechanisms — thus rendering more legible the 'flaws' identified.