What are negative commons?
Negative commons designate what we inherit collectively without having chosen it: waste, polluted soils, power plants to be dismantled, obsolete infrastructures. A notion developed by Alexandre Monnin, Emmanuel Bonnet and Diego Landivar — and an anthropic reading of these legacies.
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Negative commons designate what we inherit collectively without having chosen it: nuclear waste, polluted soils, power plants to be dismantled, industrial ruins, obsolete infrastructures. The notion was developed by the philosopher Alexandre Monnin with Emmanuel Bonnet and Diego Landivar (Héritage et fermeture. Une écologie du démantèlement, 2021 — in French; title translated here as “Legacy and Closure: An Ecology of Dismantling”): no longer common goods to be preserved, but common burdens to be managed, closed or dismantled — sometimes over generations.
The inversion of a classic figure
Elinor Ostrom’s “commons” rehabilitated the idea that a community can durably manage a shared resource — pasture, irrigation, knowledge — without the state or the market. Negative commons invert the figure: the shared thing is no longer a resource one wants to make last, but a reality nobody wants and which must nonetheless be taken care of. A polluted soil is not tended like a pasture — it is monitored, contained, cleaned up; an end-of-life power plant is not made to yield value — it is dismantled, over decades.
The reversal is also a reversal of the economic gaze: to think in negative commons is to take the problem backwards — starting from what is already there, installed, inherited, rather than from projects and promises alone.
Why “externality” is not enough
Standard economics files these realities under the category of externality: an unbilled cost, which the analysis imagines can be corrected by a price — a tax, a quota, a market in rights. The notion of negative commons challenges the sufficiency of this reading. A stock of radioactive waste is not a price discrepancy: it is a material reality installed for millennia, which demands institutions, skills, labour and vigilance — not only a monetary internalisation. The question is no longer “how much does it cost?” but “who takes care of it, how, and for how long?”
This critique echoes K. William Kapp’s cost-shifting tradition, which had already challenged the concept of externality: shifting costs is not a market failure but a systemic mechanism — and correcting it takes more than a price.
The anthropic reading: transfer turned into matter
The framework of anthropy offers a genealogy of these legacies. A social system produces its order by displacing its disorder — toward other places, other times, other groups. When the receptacle accumulates and saturates, what remains on the ground, in the water tables, in end-of-life infrastructures is the anthropic transfer crystallised in the materiality of the world: a negative common is a displacement of disorder that has become an inheritance.
This reading links the two notions without conflating them: negative commons describe what remains; the anthropic loop describes the route — displacement, accumulation, saturation, return. And it sheds light on the question of responsibility that Guillaume Vuillemey raises about the firm: when limited liability separates action from accountability, damages slide toward common goods — the firm disappears, the inheritance remains.
The coming textbook case: digital technology
The working paper AWP-06 — Digital Infrastructures and Technological Debt (2026) ranks digital technologies among the candidate negative commons: data centers sized for decades, short-lived equipment with unresolved recycling, networks whose dismantling will cost more than anyone has provisioned. Digital technology presents itself as immaterial; its remains will be very material — and shared. To think the cloud in negative commons is to ask today the question that polluted soils taught us too late: who will inherit the infrastructure, and who will take care of it?
Frequently asked questions
Are negative commons a pessimistic notion? No — it is a notion of action. It shifts attention from promises alone (building, innovating) to neglected gestures: maintaining, closing, dismantling, cleaning up. Whole trades, institutions and know-how rest on this “care of remains”.
Who introduced the notion? It stabilised around the work of Alexandre Monnin, Emmanuel Bonnet and Diego Landivar (Héritage et fermeture, 2021; article “Les ‘communs négatifs’”, journal Études, 2021 — both in French), in the field of the ecology of dismantling and of ecological redirection.
Where is it applied in the anthropic corpus? In AWP-06 (digital technology as a candidate negative common), in the glossary, and in the background of technological debt: a debt whose creditors are the generations that will inherit the equipment.
Further reading
- AWP-06 — Digital Infrastructures and Technological Debt (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20025421, open-access PDF) — where digital technology joins the candidate negative commons.
- What is technological debt? and What is the anthropic loop? — the neighbouring pages of the framework.
- The book ANTHROPY – A Big History of Civilization’s Hidden Costs (2026, 632 p.) — the general framework, of which negative commons are one of the meeting points with the ecology of dismantling.