One of the chapter case study's in Nordman's book on the work of Elinor Nostrom highlights a lobster fishing community in Maine that is predominantly self-organized. One thing that stuck out to me was the way he described "gossip, slander, and ostracism" as a means of enforcing adherence to the system. If a rogue lobsterer goes and takes from someone else's trap or encroaches on an area that isn't theirs, social shame is an effective form of punishment.

Shame is a really interesting concept. I think in a lot of ways, we've maybe overly sanitized our culture in our approach to it. Of course the question of who gets to define what constitutes as shameful behaviour in any given society is crucial to this conversation, but I don't think the use of shame should be entirely dismissed. When dealing with shared resources, like Ostrom was working with, shame plays an important role in preventing people from abusing the common system.

Not everything needs to be policed from the top down, in fact there are times when it can be better when its done by the community.

The last month or so has been very dominated with tech-related reading (Zuboff, Wu, Hao, Doctorow) and I wanted to go in a bit of a different direction as I move into the summer so I picked up a book on Elinor Ostrom and Ostrom's more well known work, Governing the Commons. I've been tangentially aware of Ostrom but never actually read her despite my larger interests somewhat aligning.

I've spent most of the last week reading through some of Nordman's book just to get a bit of a primer on her work before diving into her. Here's a good jumping off point:

"Ostrom’s work, influenced by her anthropologist and sociologist colleagues, put the resource users front and centre. Too often the assumption was that the resource users don’t know anything and it is up to the government to impose rules. This colonial attitude was not universally true and often harmful... What [Ostrom] learned was the government isn’t the only way to manage a common-pool resource. Neither is private property the only way. In between these extremes are communities—large and small, formal and informal—and the institutions they use to govern their resources. Community is nowhere to be found in Hardin’s tragedy of the commons." (emphasis mine)

I appreciate that this is offering a bit of a third way beyond the public-private dichotomy that is easy to get locked into. Ostrom's work seems to sit if a fuzzier middle ground, one that makes space for both sides when necessary but is more focused on the way communities have successfully managed their common resources on their own.

Spent that last week (finally) listening to Cory Doctorow's book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to do About it. Because I've been listening—primarily while walking—I haven't had the opportunity to take notes like I normally do. I did however, stop under the shade of tree yesterday to jot this quote down.

“Before the term ecology came along, there were a bunch of people who cared about issues but didn’t think of themselves as being in the same fight. The term ecology turned all of those issues into a movement, pulling many different kinds of people with many different concerns into a broad coalition that could be more done together than they could ever do on their own.

It’s hard to overstate how important coalitions are to political struggle. Broadly speaking, if there’s a group of people who’ve been trying to change something for a long time, it’s possible that they just need to think up some cool new tactic and that’ll finally get things moving. But it’s far more likely that they just aren’t powerful enough to make the change they’re seeking.

Whenever you see a big, sudden political change—for better of for worse—you’re usually witnessing the result of a new coalition.”

Something I think about a lot is how building a better world needs models built around cooperation rather than competition. This description of coalitions really nails it. For a coalition to work, you don't have to agree on every single point around every single issue. Rather, it's about drawing wider circles of allyship, getting as many people who can support the larger goal as possible.

This is why I'm thrilled to be officially joining the Simcoe County Greenbelt Coalition as a board member this year. They're an organization I've supported in several ways over the last few years and have grown deeply impressed with their commitment to this sort of coalition building. They are exactly the model that we need.

Also, everyone should read Enshittification.

“The more you allow wealth to accumulate unequally, the more unbalanced the economy becomes—and the harder it becomes to take it away. Economic power consists of the ability to resist redistribution. That’s why a policy focused on only growing the pie was also likely, on a systemic basis, to have prevented it from being cut in the first place.” (Wu, Age of Extraction)

Wu makes a good argument against relying too heavily on redistribution as a plan to combat extreme wealth inequality. His point is that it depends on the willingness—or enforcement—of the upper class to keep paying out. I am absolutely a proponent of wealth taxation; however, I appreciate what he is saying here about it not always being so easy or simple to get those with wealth to part with it. They are skilled at finding ways to keep it for themselves. Wu's suggestion seems to be to build a system that more evenly distributes wealth to begin with and using redistribution primarily for caring for those who most need it.

“The structure of industry and the balance of economic power matter. The worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution were eventually countered by a labour movement demanding that workers be treated better and receive more of the proceeds. Where employees have no power, they can expect to be squeezed or displaced. Where workers are more important and understood as essential and better represented, AIs may be deployed or developed in an augmentative fashion.” (Wu, Age of Extraction)

This past week, Meta laid off another 8000 employees who found out via 4am emails. AI was cited as the reason. Yesterday, Webflow laid off a significant portion of their workforce, many who seem to report being locked out of their laptops with no explanation. Again, AI was cited as the reason. Cisco announced earlier this month that despite year-over-year revenue being up 12%, they were letting go of 4000 employees. Because AI.

The year isn't even half over and the tech industry has already seen around 150,000 layoffs in 2026. Amazon, Pinterest, Paypal, Intuit, Dell, Oracle, Cloudflare, Salesforc—the list goes on and on. And while AI might not have been the stated reason for all of these layoffs, it's certainly being used as a justifying reason for many of them. What was once thinly veiled as 'efficiency cuts' are now being outright touted as the result of companies going all in on AI. But whatever you want to call it, the point is that these companies do not care because they have no reason to. The only thing that matters to them is shareholder profit.

White collar workers have long resisted the idea that we need unions because we wanted to see ourselves as more important—more valuable to the companies we worked for. We told ourselves that we weren't just labourers, we were co-creators with the companies. It's all bullshit.

Tech workers need unionization and AI platforms need government regulation. These things need to be non-negotiables in our societal participation in AI.