When a Public Good Turns Into a Legal Subject

Rinat Enikeev

Rinat Enikeev

— 1 min read
When a Public Good Turns Into a Legal Subject

Robotic networks and on‑chain protocols are no longer merely things that people use; they are testing the waters of electronic personhood.

  • DAO‑driven robots are already petitioning regulators as quasi‑autonomous “electronic agents” (Novelli et al., 2024).
  • Legal scholars such as Shawn Bayern show that U.S. LLC statutes can be stretched to create “zero‑member” companies whose only director is an algorithm (Bayern, 2021).

If courts accept even a fraction of this argument, software can move from being property to becoming a property‑holding subject.

🗽 The Capitalist Lens

  • Vitalik Buterin & E. Glen Weyl re‑engineer public‑goods funding with Quadratic Finance: no taxes, just mathematically optimized matching pools.
  • Waymo is already floating the idea of selling robo‑taxis as P&L‑positive assets; recent corporate‑law essays (Rhee 2025) go a step further, allowing an all‑algorithm board of directors.

From this viewpoint a self‑driving cab is simply the newest, leanest market actor—another capitalist player that writes its own paychecks.

☭ The Communist / Commons Lens

  • Trebor Scholz’s Platform‑Cooperativism and Michel Bauwens’s P2P futurism imagine the same robot as a “machine‑comrade.” Revenues cycle back into a community treasury, while governance runs through a DAO.
  • Critical theorists such as Christian Fuchs (2024) warn that “autonomy” can mask new forms of labor exploitation at the network’s periphery.

From here the robo‑taxi looks less like a shareholder asset and more like a collectively owned utility.

🎯  The Unifying Insight

When a good—whether transport, energy, or plain “software‑as‑infrastructure”—

  • earns its own income,
  • pays for its own upgrades, and
  • publishes an open ledger of every transaction,

the old standoff of market vs commune changes tone:

🗽 The market applauds a hyper‑efficient competitor.

☭ The commons cheers a self‑financing public service.

🚀  Beyond Ownership

The real issue is no longer “Whose asset is it?” but rather “Which protocol guarantees that an economically and functionally autonomous robot slots into existing divisions of labor while actually raising collective welfare?”

❓ The Open Question

Who will build and bankroll these new “autonomous public goods” — and with what incentive structure?

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