In basic terms, compeerism aims to harness the digital revolution to unleash the general intellect, hence triggering a gradual shift from a mode of production aimed at engineering scarcity to one committed to serving the most pressing needs and wants of humanity. Yet, capital's continuing efforts to privatize knowledge/information via intellectual property protections and the pilfering and coopting of the digital commons has thus far stymied any designs on blowing the foundations of capitalism ‘sky high’, as per the early Marx. This chapter, therefore, explores the proposition that a compeerist-aligned movement can still succeed in creating a digital commons that could serve as a repository and incubator of a capital-challenging, liberated general intellect. Before delving into such potential, and the various barriers that need to be overcome to realize it, we must review in more detail the current state of commons-based digital value production and its relation to capital.

The digital commons and copyleft

In conceptualizing the digital commons, it is important to distinguish between labour-derived, curated content, on the one hand, and raw, collected data, on the other. Digitized data, which is still unprocessed, is a different form of information that we will deal with in the next chapter. For now, we can stay focused on labour-derived, intentionally assembled digital value, which is entangled in a number of other pivotal issues that require our attention, including property and remuneration for work. We begin by considering code and other creative/cognitive media, which gave rise to the first commons-oriented property protections, before turning to the challenges and promise entailed in commons-based research and applied knowledge (design).

Code and software offered the first glimpse of an organized demand for the creation and protection of a digital commons. Richard Stallman, a pioneer of the hacker movement, developed the idea of the ‘four freedoms’ of code, namely that code should be open and free to use, study, manipulate, and distribute (GNU, 2021). These freedoms then became the rallying call for the free open-source software (FOSS) movement. Since its inception, there have been many widely cited cases of successful FOSS projects in which a community of ‘geeks’ comes together to collaboratively develop a particular code which not only is free and open-source but is of equal or superior quality to any proprietary options (Benkler, 2006).