Do you know what a commons is? It's an economic resource that's managed by it's participants and is not owned privately by an individual or corporation or the state. Protocols are commons, bitcoin is a commons.

When a community wants to organize itself, it might decide between private ownership and state control. David Bollier has spent decades arguing that that’s a false binary, and that there is a better way: The commons.

"The commons is as old as humanity," David says. "It's kind of the default setting for coordination and governance. It's just in the past 200 years or so, we've tricked ourselves into thinking that we're isolated individuals and that the social context and the Earth is irrelevant."

In this week's episode of revolution.social, i sit down with leading researcher and author about the commons, David Bollier.