The Fragility of the Digital Commons: Navigating AI Layer Impacts

The Layered Reality Commons Conundrum

Situation:

Multiple “world layers” compete over the same streets. Your mobility layer routes you through back alleys, your commerce layer shows prices others do not see, your safety layer filters sounds and signage. Each layer optimizes for its subscribers, which creates cross‑layer interference. As with traffic networks, local improvements can worsen the whole. Add a shiny new shortcut and the city slows down for everyone.

The conundrum:

Do we enforce a single public baseline layer with hard interoperability rules, sacrificing speed and private advantage to keep the commons coherent, or do we allow competing private layers to fragment experience and accept coordination failures, inequities, and system‑level slowdowns as the price of choice and innovation.