Congestion Pricing for Waves: How Surfline Cameras and Digital Access Created a New Form of Enclosure
The Democratization of Swell Information Has Crowded the Lineup — and It Is a Warning About What Surveillance Does to Commons
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
Surfline’s Cameras and the Tragedy of the Surveilled Commons
MALIBU, CA — The economist Garrett Hardin described the tragedy of the commons: when a shared resource is open to all and unregulated, individual rational actors will overexploit it until it is degraded for everyone. The surf break is a commons. Surfline’s high-definition cameras, transmitting live footage to 11 million subscribers, have accelerated the tragedy by solving the information problem that previously limited crowding: you didn’t know if it was good until you drove there.
This is not an argument for Surfline’s cameras to be banned. It is an observation about what happens when surveillance solves information asymmetries in commons that depend on friction for sustainability. The friction of not knowing whether the break was working, of having to drive down and check, of local knowledge being genuinely local — these frictions were inefficiencies in an economic sense and they were also the mechanism by which the surf commons self-regulated. Remove the friction and you remove the regulation.
The Libertarian Analysis
The libertarian solution to commons problems is typically either privatization or clearly defined property rights that allow market mechanisms to allocate the resource. Neither applies cleanly to surf breaks. You cannot own a wave. You cannot charge for the right to ride one. The existing informal system — local priority, knowledge of conditions, the social norms of the lineup — constituted a spontaneous order that emerged without regulation and allocated a scarce resource with reasonable efficiency.
The camera system disrupted that spontaneous order by removing information asymmetry that the order depended on. The Mises Institute’s analysis of spontaneous order describes how markets and informal social systems generate efficient outcomes through price signals and local knowledge; Hayek’s insight that local knowledge cannot be centralized applies with particular force to surf: the knowledge of when a specific break is working under specific conditions was genuinely local, genuinely tacit, and genuinely functional as an allocation mechanism. Surfline centralized it. The lineup congestion is the result. Capitalist solutions to resource allocation problems are not always wrong; in this case the product solved a customer problem while creating a commons problem that the product itself cannot solve. The camera will not uncrowd the lineup. The lineup will not regulate itself without friction. The friction is gone.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/capitalists-solve-grocery-crisis/
