There are many situations where it is cheaper to provide a benefit to many people all at once, rather than providing them to one person at a time. Examples range from shipping networks to public health to digital infrastructure to scientific research. As technological development accelerates, more and more goods fall into this category, incentivizing economic actors to provide goods in a massively “wholesale”, rather than retail way. This points toward greater efficiency, but also deeper economic and social vulnerabilities. It results in more and more vital infrastructure that is open to private capture and monopoly. And AI accelerates these dynamics to an unprecedented degree.
BETTER THAN FREE | Edge.org
This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports — that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
The Paradox of Reuse in 2026: A Case of Quasi-Enclosure, or "Subsidized Club Goods that Sort of Look Like Public Goods"
How we can understand, and react to, the complicated impacts of AI systems on online communities and knowledge commons
The Paradox of Reuse in 2026: A Case of Quasi-Enclosure, or "Subsidized Club Goods that Sort of Look Like Public Goods"
How we can understand, and react to, the complicated impacts of AI systems on online communities and knowledge commons
Building The CI Corporation — The Collective Intelligence Project
Existing financialization models have trapped us into only funding certain technologies, with a constrained set of stakeholders, outcomes, and possibilities. We need a better container in which to build the future of technology, be it satellites or space travel or AI research. Other approaches are n
Democratizing AI Companies — The Collective Intelligence Project
As AI reshapes society, the companies behind these technologies face a critical challenge: how to build corporate governance structures that prioritize public benefit over profit maximization;.
Seize the Means of Computation - ProMarket
To regain internet autonomy from Big Tech companies, lower switching costs with legislation that allows new services to subvert network effects and encourage adversarial interoperability. Too often, our discussion of Big Tech’s dominance starts and ends with a simplistic account of network-effects-driven inevitability, as though the winner-take-all market we have today could not have been […]
The Next Great Divergence: How AI could split the world again if we don’t intervene | Brookings
Michael Muthukrishna and Philip Schellekens argue that AI, like past general-purpose technologies, could drive a new global divergence unless deliberate action ensures its benefits are broadly shared rather than geographically concentrated.
Import AI 452: Scaling laws for cyberwar; rising tides of AI automation; and a puzzle over gDP forecasting
How much could AI revolutionize the economy?
AI's Trillion-Dollar Opportunity: Sequoia AI Ascent 2025 Keynote
From Chile to the Philippines, meet the people pushing back on AI
Individuals and communities are resisting the demands and practices of Big Tech's AI infrastructure — such as data centers and digital labor — due to their environmental and social costs.
A Collectivist, Economic Vision for AI
Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before. The word “intelligence” is being used as a North Star for the development of this technology, with human cognition viewed as a baseline. This view neglects the fact that humans are social animals and that much of our intelligence is social and cultural in origin. Moreover, failing to properly situate aspects of intelligence at the social level contributes to the treatment of the societal consequences of technology as an afterthought. The path forward is not merely more data and compute, and not merely more attention paid to cognitive or symbolic representations, but a thorough blending of economic and social concepts with computational and inferential concepts at the level of algorithm design. , The recent focus of AI has been on the exploitation of massive data to mimic and augment human cognitive capabilities. A complementary focus is provided by the social and economic aspects of intelligence.
Building a Solidarity Ecosystem for AI (SSIR)
How cooperatives, public institutions, and social movements can come together to intentionally build a practical, community-owned alternative to extractive AI systems. <meta property=
HUGE — AI Without Giving Up Your Privacy
We're building an Agentic AI Platform running on your Device that lives with YOU, isolated from the cloud, fundamentally reimagining the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence through ownership, privacy, and massive context. In an age of capture and control, HUGE sells independence and sovereignty.
Celebrating 250 million: Empowering communities to enable the global AI economy
Microsoft surpasses its digital access goal, partnering with governments and Starlink to expand connectivity and support long‑term participation in the AI economy
Import AI 456: RSI and economic growth; radical optionality for AI regulation; and a neural computer
What laws does superintelligence demand?
"The forces that are now shaping AI are the same forces that turned the open internet into monopolistic platforms, converted peer-to-peer participation into precarious labor, and enclosed the digital commons. They are now threatening to capture and enclose thought itself." osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/qahd3_v1/
