An important aspect of the blockchain is that it is a public commons. No one really owns it because, well, everyone owns it. As a creation becomes digital, it tends to become shared; as it becomes shared, it also becomes ownerless. When everyone “owns” it, nobody owns it. That is often what we mean by public property or the commons. I use roads that I don’t own. I have immediate access to 99 percent of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them, since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.
The decentralized web/internet is now the central public commons. The good of the web serves me as if I owned it, yet I need to do very little to maintain it. I can summon it anytime, with the snap of a finger. I enjoy the full benefits of its amazing work—answering questions like a genius, navigating like a wizard, entertaining like a pro—without the burdens of ownership, simply by accessing it. (I pay its taxes with my subscriptions for internet access.) The more our society decentralizes, the more important accessing becomes.
Platform Synergy
For a long time there were two basic ways to organize human work: a firm and a marketplace. A firm, such as a company, had definite boundaries, was permission based, and enabled people to increase their efficiency via collaboration more than if they worked outside the firm. A marketplace had more permeable borders, required no permission to participate, and used the “invisible hand” to allot resources most efficiently. Recently a third way to organize work has emerged: the platform.
A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. It is neither market nor firm, but something new. A platform, like a department store, offers stuff it did not create. One of the first widely successful platforms was Microsoft’s operating system (OS). Anyone with ambition could build and sell a software program that ran on the OS that Microsoft owned. Many did. Some, like the first spreadsheet, Lotus 1–2–3, prospered tremendously and became mini platforms themselves, birthing plug-ins and other third-party derivatives for their product. Levels of highly interdependent products and services form an “ecosystem” that rests upon the platform. “Ecosystem” is a good description because, just as in a forest, the success of one species (product) depends on the success of others. It is the deep ecological interdependence of a platform that discourages ownership and promotes access instead.
Later, a second generation of platforms acquired more of the attributes of markets, so they were a bit of a market and a firm. One of the first of these was iTunes for the iPhone. Apple, the firm, owned the platform, which also became a marketplace for phone apps. Vendors pitched a virtual stall and sold their apps on iTunes. Apple regulated the market, weeding out junky, exploitative, or nonworking applications. It set rules and protocols. It oversaw the financial exchanges. You could say Apple’s new product was the marketplace itself. ITunes was an entire ecosystem of apps constructed on the capabilities built into the phone, and it boomed. Since Apple kept adding ingenious new ways to interact with the phone, including new sensors such as a camera, GPS, and an accelerometer, thousands of novel species of innovations deepened the iPhone ecology.
A third generation of platforms further expanded the power of the marketplaces. Unlike traditional two-sided markets—say, a farmers’ market that enables buyers and sellers—a platform ecosystem became a multisided market. A good example of this is Facebook. The firm created some rules and protocols that formed a marketplace where independent sellers (college students) produced their own profiles, which were matched up in a marketplace with their friends. The attention of the students was sold to advertisers. Game companies sold to students. Third-party apps sold to advertisers. Third-party apps sold to other third-party apps. And so on in multiple-way matches. This ecosystem of interdependent species keeps expanding, and will keep expanding as long as Facebook can manage its rules and its own growth as a firm.
The wealthiest and most disruptive organizations today are almost all multisided platforms—Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook. All these giants employ third-party vendors to increase the value of their platform. All employ APIs extensively that facilitate and encourage others to play with it. Uber, Alibaba, Airbnb, PayPal, Square, WeChat, Android are the newer wildly successful multiside markets, run by a firm, that enable robust ecosystems of derivative yet interdependent products and services.
Ecosystems are governed by coevolution, which is a type of biological codependence, a mixture of competition and cooperation. In true ecological fashion, supporting vendors who cooperate in one dimension may also compete in others. For instance, Amazon sells both brand-new books from publishers and, via its ecosystem of used-book stores, cheaper used versions. Used-book vendors compete with one another and with the publishers. The platform’s job is to make sure it makes money (and adds value!) whether the parts cooperate or compete. Which Amazon does well.
At almost every level of a platform, sharing is the default—even if it is just the rules of competition. Your success hinges on the success of others. Maintaining the idea of ownership within a platform becomes problematic, because it rests on notions of “private property”; but neither “private” nor “property” has great meaning in an ecosystem. As more is shared, less will act like property. It is not a coincidence that less privacy (constant sharing of intimate lives) and more piracy (disregard of intellectual property) are both breeding on platforms.
However, the move from ownership to access has a price. Part of what you own with ownership is the right—and ability—to modify or control the use of your property. That right of modification is sorely missing in many of today’s popular digital platforms. Their standard terms of service forbid it. You are legally restricted as to what you can do with the stuff you access versus what you buy. (To be honest, the ability to modify is also squeezed from classic retail purchases as well—think of those silly shrink-wrap warranties.) But the right and ability to modify and control are present in open source platforms and tools such as the Linux OS or the popular Arduino hardware platform, which is part of their great attraction. The ability and right to improve, personalize, or appropriate what is shared will be a key question in the next iteration of platforms.
Dematerialization and decentralization and massive communication all lead to more platforms. Platforms are factories for services; services favor access over ownership.
Clouds
The movies, music, books, and games that you access all live on clouds. A cloud is a colony of millions of computers that are braided together seamlessly to act as a single large computer. The bulk of what you do on the web and phone today is done on cloud computing. Though invisible, clouds run our digital lives.
A cloud is more powerful than a traditional supercomputer because its core is dynamically distributed. That means that its memory and work is spread across many chips in a massively redundant way. Let’s say you were streaming a long movie and suddenly an asteroid smashed one tenth of the machines that made up the cloud. You might not notice any interruption in the movie because the movie file did not reside in any particular machine but was distributed in a redundant pattern across many processors in such a way that the cloud can reconfigure itself if any of those units fail. It’s almost like organic healing.
The web is hyperlinked documents; the cloud is hyperlinked data. Ultimately the chief reason to put things onto the cloud is to share their data deeply. Woven together, the bits are made much smarter and more powerful than they could possibly be alone. There is no single architecture for clouds, so their traits are still rapidly evolving. But in general they are huge. They are so large that the substrate of one cloud can encompass multiple football field–size warehouses full of computers located in scores of cities thousands of miles apart. Clouds are also elastic, meaning they can be enlarged or shrunk almost in real time by adding or dropping computers to their network. And because of their inherent redundant and distributed nature, clouds are among the most reliable machines in existence. They can provide the famous five nines (99.999 percent) of near perfect service performance.