Overfishing, global warming, rainforest destruction -- even health care reform in America -- are prime examples of the phenomena that Garrett Hardin wrote about in the 1968 issue of Science under the title, "The Tragedy of the Commons," which should be subtitled: Why Ayn Rand is Batshit Crazy. Ayn Rand's hugely influential ideas glorifying selfishness -- she seems to have been the "first love" of Federal Reserve bankers from Greenspan to Bernanke -- are pathological because rational individuals acting purely out of self interests will destroy ocean populations, strip the rainforests from the earth, and crash the market, all because no one is watching the "commons." A surprising antidote to this tragedy may be emerging onto the scene, however, what we might call The Triumph of the Commons: Wikipedia, crowdsourcing, YouTube.
Contrary to the philosophy of Ms. Rand, networks of cooperation are actually far more powerful than networks of merely self-interested actors. Reflecting on the open software movement, we see a fait accompli that almost defies belief. A movement beginning with one person (Linus Torvald) and a modest software "kernel" led eventually to the construction of a robust computer operating system that could compete directly with Microsoft Windows -- all created by people working without pay apparently for the sheer pleasure of creation and intellectual play and perheaps a heady dose of defiance of Microsoft.
Wikipedia is a far more familiar example for most people, and also illustrates the superior intellectual and marketing achievements that can be accomplished through the medium of people cooperating together without a financial incentive.
Two less familiar examples show what happens when you add a financial incentive: a Canadian gold mining company, Goldcorp, found its own methods of detecting gold on its leased lands were becoming less and less cost effective. The company made 400 megabytes of geological survey data available on its website and offered a $575,000 cash prize to the person or group who came up with the best ideas for where to mine for gold. The prize was won by an Australian consulting company specializing in fractal graphics. The contest produced 110 targets, 80% of which yielded a total of 8 million ounces of gold worth $3 billion.
Finally NetFlix did something similar, making a huge database of customer preferances available online, and offering a $1 million prize for anyone who could come up with an algorithm for predicting their customers' cinematic preferences that would perform at least 10% better than the company's own proprietary software. The company announced a winner within this past week.
If we, the people, could somehow innovate on sustainable energy and build a health care system the way we built Wikipedia, or the way we built Linux, if the crowd could be incentivized to participate in saving the commons and saving our own health, perhaps we could yet find a way to triumph over what seems now the unavoidable "tragedy of the commons".