Much has already been said about the fate of Games and Economic Behavior. One aspect, however, is missing: how to create sustainable institutions that permanently prevent enshittification.

During my career at various esteemed institutions, I have fought attempts to “outsource” services for this very reason. Outsourcing, much like selling a celebrated journal to a commercial publisher, creates incentives that fundamentally change the nature of the product. Whether giving up that control is fine depends on the context. And let’s not make the mistake of believing that the interests of those who push for outsourcing are identical to our interests as academic researchers.

Preventing enshittification is the main challenge. We face it with uproot, too. How can we prevent uproot from degrading in the future? Holger and I have put tremendous effort into answering that precise question. We concluded that plain, standard, copyleft licenses like uproot’s LGPLv3+ play a key role. uproot belongs to the community. It is institutionally guaranteed by the license’s Four Freedoms that it can never be enshittified.

As few people know, Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest Ivan Illich has had the greatest intellectual influence on me. One of his most precious insights is the idea of “vernacular” values and activities. Illich envisioned forms of life that could make selective use of modern tools while preserving people’s autonomous competence rather than making them dependent on professionals, institutions, and commodities. I believe we need vernacular journals in precisely this spirit: scientific journals that are home-grown and sustained by everyday academic life, that make use of modern infrastructure, but that remain outside the logic of commodification.

Take the new Journal of Free Speech Law: a completely independent law journal run by leading American scholars on the First Amendment. It has the crucial autonomy needed to sustain a commons of knowledge. It is up to us economists to start something similar.