Starting 24 August, a popup village of builders, programmers, and ecological economists is settling into the Austrian mountains south of Vienna for a month. They are meeting in the Höllental, a valley of steep limestone cliffs and cold rivers, to run the Valley of the Commons: four consecutive weeks, each built around a different theme, commons economics, cosmo-local production, community living, governance and funding, tested against each other in the same physical place rather than argued about in the abstract.

Farmers are accustomed to operating under pressure from both ends of their business. Upstream, four companies, Bayer, Corteva, Syngenta, and BASF, collectively control more than half of global commercial seed sales. Downstream, in Australia, Coles and Woolworths alone account for around 67% of grocery retail volume. The farmer sits in the middle, bearing the operational and climatic risks while having almost zero bargaining power at either end of the transaction. The Treadmill Nobody Chose covered this squeeze in detail. This piece is about the third pressure point layered on top of it.

Ask most people when farmers started cooperating and they will picture the grain co-op down the road, or a barn raising in a period drama: something quaint, something that grew up alongside the tractor and the telephone. The real answer is older than writing. For most of the roughly nine thousand years since people first settled down to grow food, cooperation was not a value farmers held. It was the machinery. A shared irrigation channel, a shared plough team, a shared calendar for who grazes which pasture and when: none of it worked without a standing agreement among neighbours about who did what, when, and what happened if someone broke the rule. Take the agreement away and the technology stops functioning, not because anyone lacked the tools, but because nobody had a way to run them past the scale of a single household.

A three-part series on licensing and the economics of digital sovereignty was planned: how the commons got built, how Europe is choosing to defend it, how the AI stack could be governed as one. Then Martin Owens, an Inkscape developer and member of its project leadership committee, replied to part one on Mastodon, in two posts stitched together by the character limit, and pointed straight at something the series had missed entirely.

A vocabulary has been metastasising through environmental policy. It did not arrive as a position to be argued with. It crept in quietly, one term at a time, through grant applications, government white papers, and conference panels, until it had colonised the language before most people noticed there was anything to resist. We are told that the central challenge of our warming, degrading world is to make nature investable. We hear about biodiversity credits, green bonds, and nature-based financial instruments. The premise is simple: public funds are scarce, the cost of ecological restoration is vast, and therefore we must design financial structures that allow private institutional capital to flow into conservation.

There are two dominant ways to think about who should govern artificial intelligence.

The market frame says: the data, the models, and the compute are private goods, owned by the organisations that assembled them, exchanged through contract and property rights. Governance follows ownership. OpenAI owns GPT-4. Google owns Gemini. These are products. Markets will sort it out.

The state frame says: AI is too consequential to leave to markets, so regulators must impose rules from above. The EU’s AI Act is the most developed version of this: binding requirements, conformity assessments, registration databases, penalties for violations.

€264 billion. That is how much European organisations spend annually on digital technology from non-European companies. And that number increases by roughly 10% every year, not because the products are getting better at the same rate, but because licence agreements are structured that way, and because the switching costs are designed to make leaving expensive. Some vendors have raised prices tenfold. The organisations paying them have, in most cases, no meaningful governance over the systems they depend on.

In 1976, Bill Gates wrote an open letter to hobbyists accusing them of stealing. What they were actually doing was sharing software they had written for each other (modifications, tools, documentation), the way people had shared knowledge since the first person showed another how to do something useful. Gates reframed mutual aid as intellectual property theft. It was not a philosophical claim. It was a property claim, backed by lawyers, Congress, and eventually the World Trade Organization.

A commercial telco and a mesh network are not different ways of solving the same problem. They are built on opposite assumptions about how infrastructure works. Understanding why that matters is the key to understanding why regional Australia keeps getting left behind, and what to do about it.

The Economics of Absence

In regional and rural areas, the connectivity gap is not a failure of effort or ambition. It is the predictable output of a particular economic model.

Every few months, Australia’s business press discovers a new emergency. Right now it’s the capital gains tax. According to the usual commentators, founders, VCs, and their aligned media, Labor’s move to replace the 50% CGT discount with inflation-adjusted indexation is an act of vandalism against Australian ingenuity. Entrepreneurs will flee. Talent will dry up. The unicorns won’t come.

I’ve been working in and around Australian agtech and startups for the better part of two decades. I’ve watched the same arguments recycled through every policy debate: the R&D tax credit, the ESVCLP scheme, the startup visa. The answer is always the same: give us more upside, or we’ll take our toys elsewhere.

I’ve spent 30 years watching tech cycles come and go, from the first dial-up modems in rural Austria to the mesh networks I’m currently stringing across the Australian bush. Each time a “next big thing” arrives, we see the same pattern: a frantic rush to centralise, followed by a slow, painful enclosure of what should have been a common resource.

The current noise around AI in open source feels different. It feels heavier. There’s a justified fear that AI-generated code is hollowing out our commons. Maintainers are being buried under a drift of unvetted, mediocre pull requests, while a handful of platform monopolies strip-mine decades of community work to feed their proprietary black boxes.

I’m tired. Not the kind of tired that a good night’s sleep or a weekend off the grid can fix. It’s a deeper, more pervasive exhaustion, the fatigue of living in a culture of relentless, performative positivity. In the tech world, we’re told to “crush it,” to “move fast,” and to embrace every new “game-changer” with uncritical enthusiasm. If you’re not a believer, you’re a “naysayer” or, worse, a “blocker” of progress.