Anti-rivalrous work is more valuable but less valued

First, we need context. Digital reproduction and distribution are dramatically cheaper and faster today than any previous reproduction and distribution in history. On the internet, anyone can upload information that can be seen by everyone else an instant later, and it costs almost nothing. No, that information can’t drive you to the doctor or fill your stomach — these are bytes with a “y” — but it gets closer than you might think. Information can teach you spanish, let you see a street across the world, remember your schedule, and yes, order you a ride and a pizza. Cyberspace isn’t a second world, it’s the first one’s nervous system.

As the internet gets bigger and faster, digital reproduction’s power will grow, and the cyber-physical world integration will deepen. When reproduction and distribution are so easy and vast, information that benefits from sharing has a natural strength. Information and other sharing-positive products are what Steven Weber calls “anti-rivalrous”: the greater the number of people using them, the more valuable they are to everyone involved. They’re typically free and easy to share. Wisdom, customs, and language are examples of anti-rivalry. Contrasted are traditional rivalrous goods, which are bought and sold in defined quantities and depend on scarcity to make them valuable. Pizzas and cars are rivalrous; spanish, geography, and mathematics are not.¹

The rivalrous/anti-rivalrous metaphor may not be perfect, but the breathtaking takeover of public attention by anti-rivalrous products in the past two decades makes a strong case for its utility. Of the big four US tech firms, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, at least three can be argued to have made their way with anti-rivalrous products. Google search and email, Facebook’s main platform, and even Amazon’s marketplace are all free-access, sharing-positive platforms. And they’re big. Over 240 million people bought something on Amazon in 2013. At the end of last year, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users. Google’s getting about 2 trillion searches a year. The list of popular anti-rival platforms goes on: Wikipedia reports 15 billion page views per month. Look into Twitter, reddit, and Youtube if you’d like. For comparison with rivalrous products, about 400 million Harry Potter books have been sold all time, and Rubik’s Cubes are at 350 million, apparently. Paid tech service numbers are higher: Netflix had 117 million paying subscribers last year and Spotify 50 million, but their extremely low cost to content ratios probably puts them in a hybrid category.²

Despite the recent preponderance of anti-rivalrous platforms online, our societies still value rivalrous work much more highly. You probably spend more time on free sharing platforms, while you get paid to work on expensive, for-sale products. Nearly all occupations in the US produce rivalrous goods, and even those that might not naturally, like scholars, programmers, or artists, often make their products rivalrous artificially by introducing an expensive access price (eg. software or music licensing fees, journal subscriptions). If you can’t get paid to do it, it can’t be your focus, and there’s not much paid anti-rivalrous work to go around right now.

We compensate by grafting profitable rivalrous products to massively impactful anti-rivalrous ones

Tech giants built from a kernel of anti-rivalry have flourished by growing rivalrous buds off their free core products. Google and Facebook leverage their legions of users by selling their attention through ads (and their data in general through other data-developed products). Wikipedia is more pure but still of a kind: they ask all their users to donate to them directly, a sort of self-advertising.³

These revenue schemes aren’t natural outcrops of their company’s anti-rivalrous core product, and working on these rivalrous add-ons probably means these companies are producing less public good. No one uses Google or Facebook for the ads or Wikipedia because they love donation drives so much. It’s more accurate to say we view ads and asks for donations as the costs we pay to use these free platforms. All this energy spent developing unwanted profit-focused offshoots might be better directed toward creating more popular anti-rival goods, which so many of these companies were founded on. To redirect that energy, we need to create more systems that value anti-rivalry.

Anti-rivalry (Creative Commons logo)

Better incentives for anti-rivalrous work are coming

Eric Von Hippel points out that there are a number of built-in reasons to share rather than sell your innovations. Free sharing can:

Boost your reputation

Increase the information’s usefulness if it has anti-rival properties

Popularize a product that you’re best suited to, since you built it

Improve or replace the product with even better versions for free as others work on it

Avoid the worse situation of an inevitable information leak

How motivating are these natural incentives? To answer that, look at open source software, a classic example of anti-rivalrous free-sharing. It’s been around for a few decades, and while it’s flourishing in business-to-business uses, few popular consumer programs are open source. There have been major successes — WordPress, Linux, Apache, and Mozilla are a few — but all of these sustain themselves just as Google does: they glue something rivalrous and sellable, like support services or expensive enterprise packages, to their core product.⁴ To encourage anti-rivalrous work without requiring these grafts, we need even stronger motivators.

Strong incentives for anti-rivalrous work should focus on development costs instead of access costs. There’s lots of evidence today that charging for access to anti-rival platforms doesn’t work. Concretely, Google search, Wikipedia, Facebook, Youtube, reddit, etc. are all free to use (ignore the hidden costs of ad-viewing and data extraction): presumably they’d love to charge if they could. For a more abstract explanation, I’ll try out some economics jargon I’m utterly unqualified to use. In economics, a good’s price is related to its marginal cost of production and elasticity of demand. If the good we’re selling is “letting one more person do a google search,” the marginal cost approaches zero, a special quality of digital goods.⁵ Anti-rival goods typically have relatively elastic demand: raising prices reduces revenue, because so many consumers stop buying at the higher price. These factors together should push the price of anti-rival platform access toward zero, and though we can’t be sure they’re the cause, that’s exactly what we see.

If access needs to be free, creation might not. There is reason to believe people would pay to create anti-rival platforms, complete with the communities that make them valuable. If Google starts charging for search, I’ll use a different search engine, but if we go back to 1990, before search engines exist, I might pay to have the first one created. The marginal cost of the 1,001st search might be close to zero, but the cost of the first search includes building the search engine. Consumers can wait and hope someone builds a useful, new anti-rival platform, or they can push the process along with their dollars.

I’m calling systems that invest in the creation of anti-rival platforms “commons funding,” mostly because anything with “anti-rivalry” is a mouthful of marbles. Designing commons funding presents a few predictable issues:

Consumers don’t like risk, and funding a platform that hasn’t been built yet will have a pretty high fail rate.

Consumers also don’t like waiting, and in this case, they’ll have to wait for a whole product to be developed.

The likely answers:

Risk: Lessen consumer risk by spreading the cost over the whole community, funding more than one idea at a time, and giving more of the funding to successful projects.

Waiting: We can’t time-travel, but the success of crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter provides a relevant example of consumers willing to wait for something they care about.

Given this, there seem to be three guiding rules to commons funding: 1) pay for the creation of the commons, not access to them; 2) spread the risk out over many funders and many projects; 3) borrow ideas from crowdfunding to help motivate the community to contribute. (Note on operating funds⁶)

For the leaders of hierarchies like most companies and governments, commons funding is one decision away, and for every community large enough to benefit from network effects, it’s probably a smart decision. The program might look something like this:

Budget some money towards commons funding each cycle. Create the criteria for receiving funds, eg. 1) build a new anti-rival platform or do anti-rival work for the community; 2) have success getting the community to adopt it; 3) confirm the work’s relevance and usefulness via community feedback. At the end of each cycle, decide who receives how much money depending on their success meeting the criteria. The more transparent this process is the better.

The system could be calibrated to reward everyone who does legitimate anti-rival work for the community, while those whose work catches on would get much more. With commons funding like this, a teacher’s union might fund a new collaborative lesson planning platform. A town might get a local exchange market that upgrades garage sales. A software firm might fund a real-time writing platform that increases team coherence. Initially, each commons fund will only encourage work that serves its community specifically, but successful work will inevitably spread, either on its own, or because it gets gobbled up by Facebook or Google. Even if the latter happens, the funding can still be considered a success: it created brand-new anti-rival work.

Decentralized groups, perhaps soon to be much more common, can follow a similar recipe. Members can vote or use any decentralized decision-making process to assign the funds, create the criteria, and award deserving work.

A single anti-rival fund per community is just a starting point. Communities might focus the work by creating multiple commons funds, each with a specific purpose: collaborative coding tools, online research coordination, fiction writing, workplace training, customer support, etc. Taking a step further, a decentralized community could create a crowd-sourced market of commons funds, each fund a user-submitted proposal like “Let’s fund a collaborative customer support platform.” Each community member could say how much they’d contribute to each fund in single or repeating payments. To juggle so many funds, more of this system would need to be coded, but it might paint the fairest picture of the community’s needs and so produce successful projects at a higher rate. Plus, it has the added benefit of being able to fund regular rivalrous projects, too.

Commons funding is closer than you might think. Employees of major software companies do lots of open source work, though it’s unclear if its in their job descriptions to do so. Better ways of giving to open source projects are emerging, too. Over in crypto-land, we’re living through an explosion of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and some of them are already implementing commons funding-like structures. Job bounties, competitions, and proposals are all ways for DAOs to encourage open work ecosystems. Dash might be the closest to functional commons funding right now: anyone can pay a fee to a submit a proposal, which will be voted on by Dash’s stakeholders and funded if it passes. If you clicked on any of these links, however, you’ll see that nearly all the work being offered and done this way, including Dash, is advertising in some form. That’s not anti-rivalrous. But anti-rivalry is in the plans for oscoin, which aims to support open-source projects and cites Dash as an influence, and DAOstack, which aspires to directly incentivize anti-rival work and launches a budgeting app this month.⁷ If this essay’s analysis is close to the mark, every large network will be driven towards anti-rivalrous work as the internet grows, and commons funding may be the best engine to take them there. (I’m certainly not the first to claim open source is the future.)

The Tower of Babel (James Thurlow): our destination?

Where are we going?

We’re probably heading towards a world with a lot more anti-rival work because of how unreasonably effective it is. As more communities decentralize, will we all find ourselves in a rat race to complete job bounties? Will competition drive everyone to overwork? What will happen to those who are left behind? Switch out a few words and these are familiar nightmares. It’s probably a safe bet that people will find a way to be about as happy as they are now, and humanity as a whole will continue it’s ascent to power. Let’s hope our collective conscience steers us well.