Digital Commons

Jodson Graves

Sullivan University

English 102: Composition II

5/5/2026

Josh Simpson

Forward

My name is Jodson Graves, the founder and president of NTARI. I wrote this for an entry-level English course I'm taking at Sullivan University. The goal was to use the classical model to make an argument. The whole reason I'm back in university is to study the pedagogical approach of their information technology courses, so naturally I used this class as an opportunity to talk about what I'm really passionate about.

I've studied mass media my entire life, from being a paper boy, serving in the United States Postal Service to the pedagogy of information technology systems. I'm a graduate of the Conservatory of Recording Arts and Sciences and the Defense Information School. I studied mass media at Bellarmine University and sampled a CodeU computer science course CodeLou.

As a result I have a fair sense of information theory. When I took to learning about software development, I wasn't interested in how information flowed through it. I was trying to make a living, but when I noticed how we exchanged information through this medium it chaged my life. I now believe we can coordinate the world freely without the need to hegemonize it first. Finally, through beauracracy, copyright law and international relations we can cultivate the planet everyhwere all at once and without any person or any particular group holding all the power.

The Essay

I present to you the Magnificent Seven—Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, and Tesla (Mendelson, Brad, 2025). These technology companies are valued at a staggering $27 trillion in a national economy worth only $32.38 trillion (Mendelson B. et. al., 2025). How do seven corporations come to dominate the economy of the world’s richest and most powerful nation? The answer is a long and complicated story. It’s not all bad but a small insight into the problem is the plight of gig workers. We know that gig work is associated with inconsistent income and limited benefits, but few realize the significance of large portions of every local transaction being exported to Silicon Valley. 

Before the internet, most of taxis, deliveries and administrative service revenues stayed local, sustaining the users and owners alike. Today, the small collection of communities where tech expertise is concentrated are increasingly disrupting this balance in their favor. Money inevitably flows out of these capitals, but with AI and robotics automation just on the horizon, might we begin to see even less of the nation’s GDP emerge from sources outside of Silicon Valley? 

There’s even more at stake than national GDP. In December 2015, a budget dispute in rural New England gave the world a glimpse of the future. Volunteer firefighters—community members who already serve at personal expense—discovered software licensing costs were skyrocketing, inflating their budgets and by extension, the tax burden on the people they served (Baker, 2025). Silicon Valley increasingly owns the digital infrastructure that governs civic life, the question is at what cost to non-technical communities? 

Since the 1770s, social contracts have established nations through open documentation (Funk & Wagnalls, 2018). This form of governance has potently established bonds across diverse cultures since the French and American Revolutions, but today open documentation is being replaced by a regression to feudalism. Instead of land, the lords of tech develop, deploy and maintain social coordination platforms. Despite being for public use, the code of these platforms, their documentation, is hidden behind proprietary rights that state so much as looking at the code is an infringement. User communities are thus trapped perpetually renting solutions from Silicon Valley with few options for release. 

The Network Theory Applied Research Institute is working against this kind of encroachment on communal liberty. NTARI is a 501(c)(3) based in Louisville, Kentucky. Made up of technologists, communicators, creatives and everyone else, their mission is to improve the internet by maximizing user’s ability to collaborate. They do the same things a traditional technology company does– study big problems and test solutions until they’ve crafted an application of digital technology that meets the market need, but there are two things they do very differently than for-profit enterprises. (Kentucky Secretary of State, 2023)

NTARI’s approach to this problem is technical, but in a very different way than you might expect. Instead of focusing on a fight against machines, they’re creating a parallel system of resources that works outside of traditional economics. Enter the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL-3). Users of AGPL-3 software may alter it, redistribute it, make money with it the same way its creators do; just share it as freely as you received  (Frantsvog, D. A. 2012). This applies to literally anyone encountering a properly copyrighted and labeled AGPL-3 project, including corporations. Several corporations including CISCO have had to release solutions worth millions of dollars to the public completely free because of the presence of AGPL-3 in the design stack (Naughton, E. J. 2011). Today most for-profit companies avoid AGPL-3 like the plague. While there is one way to get around the license, it clearly violates the most basic business ethics as demonstrated by the satirical website malus.sh. This technical poison pill for proprietary ownership places AGPL-3 software in a digital commons, to be freely shared and maintained by everyone, everywhere in perpetuity. No fire department or civic organization will need to rent software to anyone ever again. Instead, they will host and maintain it in a community of technicians, communicators, and everyone else. 

NTARI’s second approach to solving the problem of techno-feudalism is political. A user interface is a social contract. If we do not allow drivers on a rideshare platform to message one another, our interface influences their user experience. Platforms make decisions like these in the name of efficiency. Drivers aren’t distracted, consumers aren’t comparing prices they receive, and the whole operation works in the favor of platform ownership. To avoid this kind of decision making they capitalize on the commons itself. NTARI involves communities of users, technicians, students, and volunteers in every step from idea, to maintenance, to forking a program in an entirely different direction. In a for-profit, proprietary software environment this standard would spell the end of the host company, but projects like Linux maintainer Red Hat proves that with valuable solutions and overlapping communities of maintainers, stakeholder and users, such a strategy could be worth billions (Borden, M. 2000). 

Volunteers from communities in India, Brazil and the United States are already exchanging code to build market systems for distributed agriculture, cloud computing, quantum organization and self governance in digital commons. The Network Theory Applied Research Institute is positioned to create thousands of Red Hat-inspired communities supporting one another in a global cooperative, improving social and economic well being everywhere the internet touches. 

The supreme rulers are hardly known by their subjects.

The lesser are loved and praised.

The even lesser are feared.

The least are despised.

Those who show no trust will not be trusted.

Those who are quiet value the words.

When their task is completed, people will say:

We did it ourselves.

Tao Te Ching, Chapter 17, by Lao Tzu

References

1. Mendelson, B., Fanderl, H., Homayoun Hatami, Segel, L. H., Chang, A., Olive, A. S., Gnanasambandam, C., Mendelsohn, E. M., Kamplade, V., Kuentz, J.-F., Chand, N., Roberts, R., Frazier, S., & Saha, S. (2025). Building a superpower: What can we learn from the Magnificent Seven? McKinsey Quarterly, 1, 110–123.

2. Baker, M. (2025, January 14). Private equity finds new source of profit: Volunteer fire crews. The New York Times, A14.

3. Frantsvog, D. A. (2012). All rights reversed: A study of copyleft, open-source, and open-content licensing. Contemporary Issues in Education Research, 5(1), 15–22.

4. Social contract. (2018). In Funk & Wagnalls new world encyclopedia (p. 1).

5. Naughton, E. J. (2011). Complying with Source-Disclosure Obligations. Intellectual Property Litigation, 23(1), 26–33.

6. Borden, M. (2000). Wall Street Doesn’t Get the Cult of Linux. Fortune, 142(3), 44–46.

7. Kentucky Secretary of State. (2023, March 17). Network Theory Applied Research Institute Incorporated [Business entity profile]. Kentucky Business Entity Search. https://sosbes.sos.ky.gov/BusSearchNProfile/Profile.aspx?ctr=1279987 

*Note:

My next assignment is a feature in which I will cover the GNU Affero General Public License. STAY CONNECTED