From Commons to Negative Commons
Source
Translated from excerpts of a French-language interview with Alexandre Monnin, by Yannick Bole-Richard, published on LinkedIn. The original questions have been replaced with descriptive headings, while the substance of the answers has been retained.
* Article: « L'IA générative s'appuie sur un commun qu'elle est en train de dégrader » - Entretien avec Alexandre MONNIN.
Section title: From the Commons to Negative Commons
Additional details:
Alexandre Monnin is a French philosopher and researcher, and one of the initiators of ecological redirection, alongside Emmanuel Bonnet and Diego Landivar. His research began with the philosophy of the Web, its architecture and standards, before turning to the ecological conditions on which people depend. His work on negative commons examines how societies can collectively take responsibility for inherited infrastructures, dependencies and harms, and organise the transformation or closure of activities that undermine habitability.
The interview was conducted by Yannick Bole-Richard, a consultant and trainer in responsible digital technology, for his interview series De la Tech à la Terre. Recorded on 31 August 2026 and published in French on LinkedIn on 15 October, it explores Alexandre Monnin’s trajectory from the philosophy of the Web to ecological redirection, connecting digital infrastructures, commons and generative AI. The French text was reviewed by Monnin before publication.
The Text
1. Returning to the Fundamentals: What Is a Commons?
I first became interested in commons by contributing to places where people were actively creating them, notably La MYNE, a collaborative third space in Villeurbanne that I frequented quite regularly between 2015 and 2020.
In Elinor Ostrom's characterization, which restored the concept of the commons to its rightful place in political theory, commons are resources or other realities managed collectively by communities that establish democratic rules for themselves. There is a three-part structure: resources, communities, and governance rules. The idea is to ensure the continued existence of resources, particularly environmental ones, through collectives that establish appropriate rules for their management. A typical example would be medieval peasants grazing their animals on land that belonged to no one individually and establishing collective rules to prevent the destruction of the pastures.
This is the opposite of Garrett Hardin's theory of the tragedy of the commons. Hardin argued that we needed to move away from commons because each individual had a rational interest in extracting as much as possible for personal benefit, meaning that the common resource would quickly be destroyed.The solutions he considered included private property and regulated access to publicly owned resources.
Through historical studies and research into governance, Ostrom demonstrated that collective institutional arrangements existed throughout the world and that, under certain conditions, particularly with regard to scale, common management was possible.
2. The Role of Digital Technology in Reviving Commons Theory
Digital technology has played a role in bringing this theory back into contemporary discussion. This was done through free software and open source, and through Wikipedia, where contribution rules are clearly established by the community, even if they are not particularly accessible and only a small minority of people actually contribute.
However, I have serious reservations about free software and open source. They are limited instantiations of the commons paradigm because openness alone does not ensure that those who benefit from a commons contribute to sustaining it. .
The commons is not something that should be open to everyone without conditions. There needs to be a form of reciprocity: rules, obligations, and graduated sanctions when those rules are violated.
These elements are central to preventing actors from plundering a resource that is freely accessible and exploiting it for their own benefit without contributing to the commons in question. This is precisely what we are seeing today with generative AI.
3. The Emergence of the Concept of Negative Commons
In 2015, I came across Sauver le monde (Saving the World), a book by Michel Bauwens with a preface by Bernard Stiegler. Saving the world — that's quite a claim! At the time, the commons seemed to be presented as the solution to all our problems. But can we really place that burden on the shoulders of people who contribute to commons in practical, everyday ways? It's wonderful what you're doing: you're saving the world. That seems a little complicated to me.
So I approached the question from the opposite direction. We should no longer see the commons as the solution to everything, let alone as the solution to the Anthropocene. I'm not particularly drawn to solutionist thinking.
Instead, the questions become: What happens to the commons in the Anthropocene? And what kinds of commons do we inherit in the Anthropocene?
I wasn't aware that the term negative commons already existed, but it was very rarely used, almost a one-off occurrence. Around the same time, Sabu Kohso used the expression in relation to nuclear waste. In 2017, I gave a presentation at the Saint-Étienne Design Biennale, where I spoke about it publicly for the first time.
The idea is that certain realities are problematic, nobody wants them, yet the burden of dealing with them risks becoming a collective responsibility. Rather than leaving those who happen to live nearby to take care of them, we need a genuine process of commoning these realities.
This connects with an understanding of the commons based on commoning: commons are not simply things that already exist and that we take care of. Rather, there are realities that we elevate to the status of commons and institute as such.
In the same way, there are problematic realities that we will need to turn into commons in order to manage them in the future: dried-up rivers, polluted land, and abandoned or deteriorating infrastructure.
4. Two Types of Negative Commons: Ruined Ruins and Ruinous Ruins
What I have just described are primarily what I call ruined ruins: ruins that look like ruins, things that we already recognize as problematic.
But there may also be things that undermine the conditions for habitability even while they are still functioning. These too are problematic, and perhaps we should treat them as negative commons to prevent their proliferation and further development.
Perhaps smartphones, given their production conditions and obsolescence. Perhaps generative AI. Perhaps digital technologies in general, which are highly problematic from an environmental perspective. These would belong to the category of negative commons, not as ruined ruins, but as ruinous ruins: things that actively produce ruin.
Their development is exponential, which is unsustainable over the long term. Moreover, it depends on labour conditions that are far from acceptable. Foxconn's production lines are hardly an example of corporate social responsibility or a good quality of working life.
5. The Material Characteristics of Digital Negative Commons
Digital technologies are what José Halloy calls zombie technologies: technologies whose metabolism is fundamentally incompatible with what we have learned over recent decades about how the Earth system functions.
We can characterize them in several ways.
First, they rely on stocks of non-renewable materials — minerals, metals, and metalloids — that must be extracted from the Earth's subsurface. This is already difficult and is likely to become increasingly so. It is very difficult to determine precisely when extraction will become impossible, because exploration continually reveals new reserves. Known mineral reserves change with exploration and with the technical and economic conditions of extraction. This does not mean that geological stocks are replenished. So at some point, this process may become increasingly difficult. We should be relying more on renewable resources rather than finite stocks.
Second, these technologies have relatively short functional lifespans, despite requiring extraordinarily sophisticated technical processes to manufacture them. Producing semiconductor chips, for example, is an extremely high-tech activity. It has even become the subject of geopolitical conflict: the United States does not want the expertise of a Dutch company to be transferred to China. These devices are certainly not products of low technology.
Finally, these components are manufactured using gallium, germanium, indium, and many other metals from the periodic table that do not participate in the major biogeochemical cycles, such as the carbon cycle. They therefore persist as waste for years and years, especially because recycling remains very limited, particularly for metals dispersed throughout digital equipment.
We talk about recycling materials that are not entirely recyclable, or that require energy to recycle. This is a false circularity: circularity that is possible only by investing substantial amounts of energy. And when materials are used in a dispersed way, as metals are in digital devices, even more energy is needed. Otherwise, recycling simply does not work, and we do not do it.
Taking materials from beneath the Earth's surface, making them function for a very short period, and then returning them to the environment in a form that will persist for tens of thousands of years is the opposite of the cycle we ought to establish. It is the opposite of a cyclical metabolism. When this process is scaled up to an enormous level, it becomes problematic in every respect.
This is not viable at the civilizational scale of thousands of years — the timescale on which José Halloy tries to think, and one that is generally absent from our own thinking.
If our civilization becomes digital, while we know that we cannot realistically project the continued existence of digital technology over thousands of years, there is necessarily a contradiction somewhere.
6. The Civilizational Contradiction of Digital Dependence
This is the central question.
When I speak of attachment, I do not mean merely psychological attachment, although that dimension is important. We are becoming increasingly attached to these technologies in a material and infrastructural sense.
This civilization cannot last for thousands of years. And the development of these technologies undermines our ability to remain within planetary boundaries.
So what are we to do with this relatively recent inheritance — this shift towards a civilization that is so deeply connected to digital technology?
We can say that we should stop. We can say that we should abolish it. But once all our infrastructures depend on digital technology, such proposals do not work in material terms. We are bound hand and foot. I would also add that this does not necessarily require a moral condemnation of digital technologies, particularly a condemnation of computation itself. Heidegger's condemnation of calculation is entirely consistent with his Nazism. These are not the intellectual resources I would draw upon to criticize digital technology, even though this kind of argument frequently appears in technocritical thinking."
More information
References:
• Emmanuel Bonnet, Diego Landivar et Alexandre Monnin, [Héritage et fermeture. Une écologie du démantèlement](https://www.editionsdivergences.com/livre/heritage-et-fermeture/), Divergences, 2021.
• Alexandre Monnin, [« Planetary Negative Commonses communs négatifs planétaires »](https://shs.cairn.info/journal-multitudes-2021-4-page-117?lang=en), Multitudes, no 85, 2021.
• Alexandre Monnin, [Politiser le renoncement](https://www.editionsdivergences.com/livre/politiser-le-renoncement), Divergences, 2023.
• Alexandre Monnin, [« Negative Commons. Between Ruin, Attachment, and Redirection »](https://www.losquaderno.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/losquaderno71.pdf), lo Squaderno, no 71, 2025.
• Alexandre Monnin, [Distinguishing Sustainability from Durability](https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ey4aj_v2), prépublication, 2026.