Systems can be different because they were chosen to be this way. This is not the inevitable structure of human nature. It is not the only mathematics that works. It is not written in stone.
Nobody required it. Not the neighbors who built the irrigation ditch together and wrote down the rules for how it would be maintained. Not the medieval commoners who upheld the customs of the common fields across generations. Not the women who built mutual aid networks during the Depression, pooling resources across households that had almost nothing to pool. Not the volunteers who built the free encyclopedia most of the world now uses. Not the tens of thousands of contributors who wrote the code that now runs most of the world’s computers.
Nobody made them. They chose.
The choice that was made
The commons is older than capitalism. It is older than the state. The management of shared resources through collective governance is one of the oldest human social technologies we have evidence for — in irrigation systems, in common grazing lands, in shared fisheries, in the governance of forests and watersheds. Elinor Ostrom spent a career documenting this and won the Nobel Prize for it.
What capitalism did was enclose it — systematically, over several hundred years, using legal instruments and state power to convert what communities held in common into private property that could be owned, bought, sold, and extracted from. The enclosure of common land in England drove people off fields their families had worked for generations. The enclosure of reproductive knowledge reorganized care from a shared community function into unpaid private labor. The enclosure of colonial territories redirected the surplus of entire continents into the hands of a small number of European states.
None of that erased the impulse to build the commons. It was suppressed, legally constrained, made economically precarious, and in many cases violently destroyed. But wherever people had the freedom and capacity to organize, they built it anyway.
What the choice actually involves
The choice to build the commons is not a choice to sacrifice. The people who built mutual aid networks in the Depression were not martyrs — they were people trying to survive, who figured out that survival was more achievable together than alone. The contributors who built open-source software were not giving something away — they were building something they wanted to exist, in a way that matched their values about how knowledge should work. The members of a credit union are not making a political statement — they are choosing a bank that works for them instead of one that extracts from them.
The choice is not between self-interest and collective good. That framing is itself a product of the enclosure — the ideological work of making private accumulation seem like the only rational behavior. People are not naturally atomized competitors who must be coerced into cooperation. They are social animals who cooperate constantly, across every domain of life, and who have been building institutions of collective governance for as long as there have been institutions of any kind.
The proof of concept
The reason open-source software matters to this argument is not that it’s inspiring. It’s that it’s unambiguous. Private capital had every advantage: money, marketing, established distribution, the entire infrastructure of the technology industry. The commons won anyway. Not as a niche alternative — as the dominant form. The software that runs the world’s servers, smartphones, and supercomputers is software that nobody had to write, governed by rules that nobody had to follow, built by people who chose to participate in something shared.
That is a proof of concept for the model, not for the domain. The same structural logic applies to housing, to finance, to healthcare, to the governance of artificial intelligence — to every domain where the question is who controls the resources that communities depend on, and in whose interest.
Community land trusts hold land in common so it can never be re-enclosed for speculative profit. Credit unions are governed by their members and oriented toward their financial wellbeing. Community health networks distribute care through relationships rather than through market transactions. These are not pilot programs. They are proven institutions, with track records, that work precisely because the people who built them made the choice to build something governed by the people who use it.
The choice is available now. And it is always the same choice: to build something governed by the people who use it, for the benefit of the people who need it, rather than to build something that extracts from those people for the benefit of someone else.
Nobody has to make that choice. That is exactly the point. The commons has always been built by people who didn’t have to and did anyway — because the thing was worth building, and because the mode of building mattered as much as the thing itself.