Tragedy of the Commons

[madanthony]

Essentially:
When a good (decentralized) thing is available to anyone, it is inevitably destroyed by unstoppable resource usage by the population which is attracted to it without any technical (scientific, political, etc) solution. To halt or slow it requires a conscious moral effort on the part of it's benefactors. The people using exploiting the awesomeness of whatever this common space or resource may be must come together and choose not to destroy it.

Example:
We were discussing this in my Integrated Social Sciences class (Essentially a class where the professor teaches whatever the hell they want, and toss some sociology in) during a brief lecture on early Hip Hop - Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash, etc. Hip hop began as a decentralized genre of music, anyone anywhere could get in on it. It evolved free of the music industry. Then came Public Enemy, who popularized the style and brought it to a national scale. After that, we see the Tragedy of the Commons in action, where the music style degrades and twists into the arguable crap we have on the radio today. Obviously, there are independent and small scale acts where this may not be true, but in terms of what the majority of listeners hear, hip hop degraded from a performance art where musicians played for the sake of playing to commercialized rap with materialistic dogma.

Application:
Internet, large scale.
Has the internet already been devastated a la Eternal September? Is the worse yet to come should 3rd world citizens find the ability to get online? Other scenarios?

Small scale
I didn't really look around Sleepywood for a two month stretch until about 2 weeks ago, and holy pomegranate. The explosion of idiocy, ignorance of game features and forum decorum is mind blowing. Another example being Gaia (I swear to god, it was a great forum 5 years ago) where I can now only stand the members of one small guild that's hidden off in a corner where no one really goes. Hell, Maple as well.

Other
Tell me more. Would you say the planet on a whole is bound to fall to the Tragedy of the Commons? Where else do you see this happening?

[Schrodinger]

These examples aren't isolated enough to be considered a "Tragedy of the Commons." When a situation involves "Tragedy of the Commons" it is often a zero-sum game where if one side gains a resource, the other side loses something in the process. For example, two people fishing in a lake trying to catch fish or two people playing chess.

It was a creative try. And I do enjoy liberal spins of philosophical theory. But an example would be if on this forum board, there would be a limit of 500 posts a day. If one person posts, they would taking away the opportunity from other people. Therefore resulting in a "tragedy of the commons" example.