Rather than seeing the commons as something that exists outside of drives to dominate and control, there is no commons without the antisocial tendencies that animate it.
As a file is shared between two computers, a disc burned and handed to two individuals, there is always a third, the owner of the network, or the hardware, that profits from it. This leads Pasquinelli to declare, along with, Vercellone, that “rent is the new profit.” (Pasquinelli also develops this idea through a discussion of this essay by David Harvey). This new form of rent operates in terms of speed and time rather than space.
If it is true that ‘the multitude is to the metropolis, as the working class is to the factory,” then the multitude must in some sense produce the skyrocketing rents of gentrification.