The founding dream of the digital revolution was that of a digital commons. It sounds romantic after we have watched the commons being sliced, packaged, sold, and commodified. And yet, it is a dream I want to hold on to.

There were extraordinary visions of what digital technologies could do if they were built as public infrastructures. Public does not mean free or outside power. The QR code was patented but made publicly usable; Linux, open protocols, and community-maintained code still hold up much of the digital economy. The giant private economy of the internet was powered by infrastructures it did not fully own.

For a long time, however compromised, the digital commons rested on three sides: The people who built and maintained its infrastructures; the publics who used, adapted, contested, and animated its applications; and governments, which were supposed to regulate, safeguard, and hold these systems accountable to collective progress.

Large language models have destabilised all three. These systems are built on public infrastructures, public data, public labour, open technical cultures, and decades of shared digital experimentation. Their governance, however, is black-boxed and negotiated behind closed doors. Their financial logic is no less alarming.........

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