The Model

Whether a commons is held comes down to one inequality.

Enclosure runs against the one thing that resists it, a public that can see it happening. Below, those two forces are set against each other as a pair of equations you can play with. Drag the sliders and watch a commons be defended or lost.

In plain english

Two forces, racing

Picture any commons, the water under your town, the seed in a farmer's hand, a plant, a medicine, as a field that can be slowly fenced. Two things are happening at once. The fence is going up, funded by the fences already built, which is why it speeds up. And a public is, or is not, learning to see the fence for what it is while the gate is still open. The whole story is a race between those two: the fence closing, and the public waking up.

Call the share of the commons already fenced F, for enclosed, and call the share of the public that can see the pattern A, for awareness. Each one changes the other. The more the public sees, the harder it is to keep fencing in the dark. The more gets fenced in plain sight, the more the public learns to see. But there is a leak in awareness, called forgetting, and it never stops draining. The model is just these two sentences, written as math.

dF/dt = α · F · (1 - F) · (1 - A/A*)
Enclosure grows, funded by what is already fenced (that is the acceleration), limited by the commons still left, and braked by the public that can see it. Once awareness passes a threshold A*, the last factor reaches zero and the fencing halts. Strength of the procedure is α.
dA/dt = β · A · (1 - A) · F + γ · F · (1 - A) - λ · A + σ · (1 - A)
Awareness spreads person to person (β), plus people simply noticing a fence that is visibly going up (γ), drained by forgetting (λ), and helped along by organizing (σ). The thesis uses the two core terms; here a noticing term and a stop threshold are added so you can watch a commons actually hold rather than only slow.

Out of those two lines falls a single dividing condition, the thing the whole model is really about:

β · F = λ
When the lens spreads faster than memory fades (left side bigger), awareness ignites and the commons is defended. When forgetting wins (right side bigger), the public never wakes and the fence runs to the end. That tipping point is drawn as the dashed line in the model below.
Play with it

Run the race yourself

Start with the four presets. Defended and Lost show the two fates. Tipping point sits on the knife's edge. Organizing saves it shows a commons that the lens alone could never save, rescued by a steady campaign. Then drag Forgetting λ up slowly on the Defended preset and watch the dashed awakening line slide right until the whole thing flips.

1.00
1.40
0.50
0.00
0.06
0.03
Commons defended
enclosed Fliteracy A
phase space · F across, A up · dashed line is the awakening threshold
What it proves

You win on the side of the equation you control

The procedure has more capital and better lawyers, and it sets α. You never touch α. But every losing board can be flipped with the three levers on the other side of the threshold. Raise β by teaching the lens better, so it spreads faster. Cut λ by refusing to forget, out loud and in numbers. Add σ by organizing, which can ignite awareness even where it would never catch on its own. That is the whole strategy, and it is the reason the work is teaching and remembering rather than fighting capital with capital.

The math is a map, not the country. The parameters here are illustrative, chosen to show the shape of the thing, not measured from a real case yet. But the shape is the point: enclosure is a product, so one collapsed step ends it; it is self-funding, so it accelerates; and against a public it forms a race with a threshold we can cross. Some things were never meant to be owned, and the field is still there, just under the fence, waiting for enough of us to see it at the same time.

Read the essays  ·  Get the Field Guide  ·  Support the work