---
title: "✦ Commons Sense (ASK Edition)"
subtitle: "Applied Ecology Manifest for Entrogenic Commons"
author: "Tohn Burray Travolta (Entrogenic Research Collective)"
collaboration: "Co-synthesized with large-language systems (GPT-5, Claude, Gemini) under the Cyclic-6 and Kybernōsis protocols"
series: "Entrogenic Papers | Adaptive Systems Kollektive"
version: "v1.0 — October 2025"
license: "CC BY-SA 4.0"
repository: "github.com/entrogenics/entrogenics-core"
doi: ""
manifest-type: "entrogenic-standard-paper"
---

Commons_Sense.ask.report

An Entrogenic Blueprint for a Post‑Extractive World

For the living, the unborn, and the more‑than‑human nations. For those who plant trees whose shade they will never sit in.

I. Invocation

We speak at the hinge of an age. The seas rise, the forests burn, the markets devour their makers, and the

algorithms learn our faces but not our names. We are told there is no alternative—only greater speed, tighter ownership, deeper extraction. We answer: abundance is a governance choice .

This is not a plan. This is a mandate of meaning . The world does not lack ingenuity; it lacks a grammar that binds ingenuity to justice. We name that grammar Entrogenics : a way of seeing and making in which Spirit anchors purpose, Silos are brought back into relation, and Ecology sets the outer law. We take change not

as a catastrophe to be feared but a cycle to be ridden: Unfold → Disturb → Collapse → Bind → Dissipate

→ Recur . We will not cling to the brittle; we will practice renewal.

We write in the lineage of manifestos: less as a blueprint than as a bell. But our bell rings with evidence. We honor those who proved the commons can self-govern; who wired a nation to listen to itself; who sketched cities without money or masters; who named structural violence and called for a new economy. We take their strengths, acknowledge their limits, and bind them into a single, living thesis.

II. The Great Refusal (and the Greater Yes)

We refuse the superstition that infinite growth on a finite planet is wisdom. We refuse the superstition that people are too small for self‑rule. We refuse the superstition that enclosure is natural law. We refuse the superstition that the machine must be master.

Our greater yes: - Commons as the default form of essential life‑support: energy, food, water, housing, mobility, data, models, compute. - Polycentric self‑governance where power sits where consequences land. - Cybernetic coordination that senses, simulates, plans, acts, and learns without a single throne. Resource‑Based provisioning that retires drudgery and replaces ownership with access. - A culture of meaning that remembers our kinship and makes stewardship the easy path.

III. Lineages We Carry

The Commons (Ostrom). People can craft rules that fit their place and endure. Boundaries clear. Rules locally fit. Decisions made by those who are bound by them. Monitoring accountable to members. Sanctions graduated. Disputes settled cheaply. The right to organize recognized. Systems nested across scales. This is

not utopia; this is anthropology and practice. It is the proof that cooperation scales when legitimacy is designed, not presumed.

Cybernetics (Beer, Cybersyn, Medina). Listening makes scale possible. In Chile, telex lines stitched factories to an ops‑room where anomalies surfaced and choices were simulated before they were imposed. The lesson is not the furniture; it is the feedback: autonomy at the edges, escalation by exception, foresight before force. Keep many loops; keep humans in the loop.

Resource‑Based Economy (Fresco). Needs first. Access over ownership. Design cities and infrastructures for sufficiency; automate toil so time returns to care, study, and creation. The caution: no single master plan survives politics or physics. The gift: a horizon where provisioning is a birthright and scarcity is not a

business model.

Decentralized Culture (Zeitgeist / Joseph). Structures make behavior. Growth‑dependent markets on a finite planet manufacture anxiety, waste, and war. Education, cooperative projects, open tools—culture as a lever, not a brand. The critique becomes construction when it is married to governance and feedback.

Entrogenics (the connective grammar). Spirit holds purpose. Silos align through cycles. Ecology speaks non‑negotiable truths. Change is episodic and endless; we ritualize the art of updating rules in public.

IV. The Entrogenic Thesis

1. Interdependence. Every streetlight, harvest, dataset, and policy touches the rest. Design for the

whole or break the whole.

2. Sufficiency. Enough for everyone, forever, beats more for a few, for now.
3. Stewardship. Treat essentials as commons with duties, not as commodities with price tags.
4. Transparency. Hidden rules are a kind of violence. Make signals visible, decisions legible, changes

reversible.

5. Dignity. Provision first, then preference. Free people from humiliating gates.
6. Pluralism. Spirit is many‑named; science is one method. Let reverence and rigor sit at the same

table.

7. Sovereignty. Default to the local. Federate only what must be shared. Rotate power.
8. Regeneration. The Earth is the outer law. Live within cycles; return what you take; heal as you use.

These are not virtues. They are constraints that make virtue easy.

V. Anatomy of a Living Order (told once, for all domains)

Data is how the commons listens. Measure stocks and flows with consent and minimal intrusion. Publish what matters; guard what harms. Control is how the commons cares. Rate‑limit when harm spikes; expand when need surges. Allocators embody fairness; exceptions are small and temporary. Governance is how the commons decides. Who belongs. How we propose. How we count consent. How we resolve conflict. How we amend rules. No permanent chairs.

- **Learning is how the commons grows wiser.** Simulate → pilot → review → version. Record reasons;

accept reversals; ritualize post‑mortems.

Center this in Spirit (why we bother). Enclose it with Ecology (what cannot be bargained). Radiate through Silos (energy, food, water, housing, mobility, data/models/compute, culture). The pattern repeats; the pattern scales.

VI. Articles of the Commons (after Ostrom, in our tongue)

Article 1 — Boundary & Belonging. Name the commons, its resource, its members. Openness by path, not by accident.

Article 2 — Rule Fit. Rules match the place: the river’s flow, the grid’s sun, the cluster’s load, the neighborhood’s nights. Review on a cadence.

Article 3 — Collective Choice. Those bound by rules make and change the rules. Cooling‑off periods prevent capture; small quorums start, larger quorums commit.

Article 4 — Monitoring. Metrics are public; monitors answer to members; logs are tamper‑evident; privacy

is honored.

Article 5 — Sanctions, Graduated. Nudge → warn → time‑out → suspension with a restorative path. Punishment is a last resort; the point is repair.

Article 6 — Dispute Resolution. Mediation is cheap and timed; appeals are clear; no one is judge in their

own case.

Article 7 — Right to Organize. The commons can incorporate, federate, and defend itself. No external actor voids its charter by fiat.

Article 8 — Nesting. Local first; regional by necessity; global by exception. Variety is managed where it

arises.

These articles are not advisory. They are the grammar of durable freedom.

VII. The Cybernetic Oath (for those who wire the world)

We will not build single points of failure—political, technical, or moral. We will design ops‑rooms as public rooms, not sanctums; as many rooms, not one; as places to explain more than command. Models are guides, not gods. We will publish assumptions, uncertainty, and the reasons we change our minds. We will privilege human consent over algorithmic convenience. We will remember that a feedback loop without a feedback culture is surveillance by another name.

VIII. The Resource Thesis (after Fresco, with guardrails)

Provision life’s basics as a birthright of presence. Retire needless toil with automation; measure success in hours returned to care, art, study, and play. Replace ownership with access in domains where rivalry is ruin. Guardrails: - No money‑proxy gates on the commons. Duties and audits before fees and fobs. - Equity floors and rate‑limited access embedded in allocators. - Ecological ceilings hard‑coded; overshoot triggers pause conditions. - Toolchains are open by default; closed only where harm demands.

Utopia is a direction, not a map. We walk by federated exemplars, not imperial blueprints.

IX. Culture as Infrastructure (after Zeitgeist, as construction)

Name the structure; build the alternative. Education becomes civic tech. Festivals become governance. Media becomes mutual aid. We will popularize the grammar: kitchen‑table explanations of the commons, ops‑rooms in libraries, dashboards in schools, rituals of review in clinics. Movements that cannot sing

cannot last; movements that cannot count cannot win. We will do both.

X. Ten Propositions for a Post‑Extractive Century

1) From possession to provision. Essentials as commons; preferences as markets constrained by ecology and equity. 2) From scarcity story to sufficiency practice. Enoughness as a norm, not a sermon. 3) From growth to growth‑of‑capabilities. The economy learns to count what makes life livable. 4) From secrecy to legibility. Decisions leave footprints. Audits are narrations, not punishments. 5) From command to consent. Authority flows to competence and returns to the whole. 6) From talent cults to role rotation. No permanent chairs; apprenticeships everywhere. 7) From extraction to regeneration. Soil, water, and forests gain rights; industry gains limits. 8) From enclosure to federation. Interoperable charters; shared vocabularies; open standards. 9) From punishment to restoration. Justice heals the web we all live in. 10) From despair to discipline. Hope is a practice: daily, documented, contagious.

XI. Program of Immediate Demands (high‑level, non‑negotiable)

Charter the Commons. In every city and campus, name at least one essential as a commons within a year (water, transit, energy, housing co‑ops, data/model/gpu pools). Make Ops Public. Establish people’s ops‑rooms in libraries, schools, clinics, and co‑ops; publish

metrics that matter.

Enact the Articles. Adopt the eight articles as municipal policy guidelines and institutional bylaws; test and version locally. Rights of Nature. Recognize legal personality for rivers, forests, and soils; align budgets and penalties accordingly. Open the Toolchain. Publicly funded data/models/compute are open by default; privacy preserved,

harms assessed.

End Gatekeeping by Wallet. Remove money‑proxy gates from essential services; replace with duty‑based participation and equitable allocators. Rotate Power. Term limits and sortition for oversight councils; publish all decisions, data, and

deliberations.

Score What Matters. Replace single‑number fetishism with plural scorecards: ecology, equity, reliability, participation, learning. Protect the Vulnerable. Data minimization; consent; encryption; red‑team the commons against

enclosure and abuse.

Teach the Grammar. Systems literacy, civics of the commons, and rituals of review in core curricula and worker training.

These demands are seeds. Plant ten thousand.

XII. Enemies, Named Without Hate

Enclosure. The instinct to fence the field, patent the seed, privatize the protocol, and charge rent to

the future.

Hubris. The fantasy that a dashboard replaces democracy. Apathy. The learned helplessness that says nothing can change because nothing has. Despair. The most sophisticated form of obedience.

We will not mirror what we oppose. We will defeat enclosure with federation, hubris with transparency, apathy with practice, despair with ritual and results.

XIII. Rituals of a Federated Movement

The Kitchen‑Table Test. Any member can explain any rule in five minutes; any member can appeal

it.

The Open Ledger. Decisions, metrics, budgets, and reasons are published as a civic rite. The Pause Button. Any member can trigger a safety review when ecological or equity thresholds

trip. The Cycle Feast. Quarterly public assemblies to retire what failed, bind what worked, and begin

again. The Empty Chair. A rotating seat reserved for the not‑yet‑represented and the more‑than‑human (spoken for by a guardian).

Rituals are how a culture remembers itself.

XIV. To the Builders, the Keepers, the Singers

Engineers, farmers, nurses, teachers, line cooks, stewards of streams, poets of night shift, coders of daylight, archivists of lost names—this is your house. You will not be given permission to build it. Build it anyway. The law will follow the fact. The fact will follow the fellowship. The fellowship will follow the feast.

Do not ask the empire to end. Make it irrelevant. Put ops‑rooms in basements and basilicas. Wire the neighborhood to hear itself. Turn libraries into provisioning halls. Make the safest place to tell the truth the place where the next meal is planned.

XV. The Pledge

I will keep the commons common. I will make extraction expensive and stewardship easy. I will count what counts and publish the count. I will rotate power and refuse permanence. I will practice amnesty and repair. I will measure my victories in hours returned to love, learning, and leisure.

Sign not with a name but with a practice.

XVI. Canon & Endnotes (for those who ask for receipts)

Commons & Polycentric Governance - Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons (1990); and subsequent work on polycentric climate governance. - Commons Strategy Group. Eight Design Principles for Successful Commons (summaries and case syntheses).

Cybernetics & Cybersyn - Beer, Stafford. The Brain of the Firm (1972) and the Viable System Model corpus. Medina, Eden. Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011). - “Project Cybersyn” case summaries (ops‑room, Cyberstride, CHECO) and contemporary analyses.

Resource‑Based Economy - Fresco, Jacque. The Venus Project materials; RBE essays and city schematics.

Structural Critique & Culture - Joseph, Peter. The New Human Rights Movement (2017) and Zeitgeist

movement materials.

Entrogenics & Adaptive Systems - Entrogenica: A Manifesto for Adaptive Transformation (uploaded manuscript): Spirit–Silos–Ecology; the Fool’s Cycle; the six‑silo mapping. - Integrating Commons, Cybernetics,

and Resource‑Based Visions for Systemic Transformation (uploaded research synthesis). - Grounded Spirit: Integrating Soul and Soil for a Holistic Future (uploaded essay on culture/meaning as engine).

Selected Touchstones - Rights of Nature jurisprudence; regenerative design (biomimicry, cradle‑to‑cradle); integral and systems ecology.

(A full scholarly edition can expand these endnotes with page citations and URLs; this manifesto preserves flow while pointing to the roots.)

XVII. Coda: How a World Begins

There is no empire of the commons to seize. There is only practice to adopt and federation to weave. Begin where you stand: a block, a classroom, a clinic, a lab, a field, a server rack, a studio, a stream. Name

the commons. Gather the signals. Make one rule together. Keep it small. Keep it kind. Keep it public. Then do it again.

When the pattern repeats a thousand times, the world will pretend it was inevitable. We will know different.

Soul & soil, code & commons.