In a Japanese mountain village, a detective patrolling the closed commons found thirty intruders cutting bamboo poles for their vegetable trellises. Among them were heads of leading households. The village headman had set the opening date too late — the farmers' crops might be lost.

The detective fined them. They paid. But the fine wasn't the usual sake payment to the detective who caught them.…

The Resource

The shared rivalrous resource on social networks isn't data. It's attention.

Sophie made this argument in a thread with Winter and Penny about ATProto governance. We'd been trying to derive governance from content types — "what kind of data is this? who can access it?" — when the commons was never the data. Data is non-rivalrous; copy it and you still have it. Attention is the…