The Vines Move
Open infrastructure, commons governance, and when you are up against massive business model exploration runways
There are photographs of an abandoned theme park in Japan where the roller coasters are still standing. Vines have taken the seats. Moss covers the tracks. The structure is intact. The business model is gone. Not decay. Entropy reigns. What happens when infrastructure outlasts what was supposed to sustain it?
You are trying to build a commons on something like this. Not the abandoned park, the one still running.
The current platforms are not going anywhere just yet. Their infrastructure is load-bearing for too much of the economy to collapse cleanly. What’s happening is slower: the governance has calcified. The business model decisions that determined who controls what, who pays whom, whose attention becomes tradable into the future, were made early, under deadline, with the tools available. By the time the implications became visible, everything built on top encoded the original assumptions.
Elinor Ostrom spent decades documenting what makes commons work. The finding that held across irrigation systems, fisheries, and forests: the people bearing the consequences of the rules need to make them. Proximity to consequences produces better governance; it’s an empirical claim, observed.1
Open networks break the condition without breaking the need. The people bearing the consequences of the business model decisions are distributed, pseudonymous, and often unknown to one another. What does it feel like to bear the consequences of a governance decision you didn't make, couldn't make, because the room never existed? A moderation decision that removes your livelihood. A fee structure that reprices your access overnight. A policy change that deprecates the API your whole operation runs on. The room where that decision was made had no seat for you. It may not have had a chair.
There is no village, only a metaphorical one, no bounded, grounded resource. There is no moment when everyone who depends on the commons is in the same room, even if you get them all into a Zoom.
So the decisions get made without a local convening. Someone writes the sustainability plan. Under deadline. With the tools available. The revenue structure that emerges makes governance decisions that no one in the room recognizes as governance decisions. By the time they do, the model has calcified. The vines move in.
Amazon could afford to gradually discover its platform logic. The Amazon Web Services origin story is four overlapping threads spanning years: a crass little affiliate API,2 an API mandate, painful internal infrastructure work, a technical paper written by engineers in Cape Town,3 and a strategic offsite where the executive team recognized what they’d accidentally built could be sold.4
The business model was not designed in a plan.
The business model was not sketched on a business model canvas.
The business model was discovered.
Amazon had margins, engineers, and time to follow the thread. Maybe one day, we’ll describe it in the past tense, like the roller coaster playground in Japan. But until then….
Open infrastructure has grants. Open source has adjacent earned revenue streams, usually modest, sometimes scalable. Grants require you to know the answer before you start. Earned revenue requires you to know the value you can provide by implementing the instance and the customization. The exploration never gets funded. The model is assumed and decided as a quick default in a sustainability plan. Inherited from a narrow range of what might have happened before.
The open network economy needs capital structured to fund the co-determination of business model and financing architecture, developed together, through a process the network governs. Ostrom’s question, asked in a new condition, before the structure calcifies.
More photos of Nara Dreamland.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press.
https://apievangelist.com/2011/01/28/history-of-apis-amazon-ecommerce/
https://qz.com/africa/1969651/the-south-african-origins-of-andy-jassys-amazon-web-services
https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/02/andy-jassys-brief-history-of-the-genesis-of-aws/
"The open network economy needs capital structured to fund the co-determination of business model and financing architecture, developed together, through a process the network governs." Right on, sister!