"The law locks up the man or woman / Who steals the goose from off the common / But leaves the greater villain loose / Who steals the common from the goose." - 18th century protest rhyme against the Enclosure Acts.
Between 1760 and 1820, wealthy English landowners systematically fenced off millions of acres of common land that rural communities had used collectively for centuries. Fields where peasants had grazed cattle, gathered fuel and grown food suddenly became private property, guarded by law and violence. The Enclosure Acts, as they became known, dispossessed entire populations and drove them into the factories of the Industrial Revolution.
We are living through the digital equivalent of those enclosures.
Where 18th-century landlords stole physical commons, 21st-century tech billionaires are stealing something far more fundamental: the commons of human creativity and our intelligence itself. Every poem, every line of code, every piece of human insight that has ever been made public is being fenced off and privatised through AI systems controlled by a handful of companies.
Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and their peers are systematically enclosing human creative capacity and renting it back to us as a service.
Yanis Varoufakis calls it "technofeudalism", a system where tech platforms extract rent from human activity rather than creating genuine value. The AI enclosures go deeper than platform monopolies. They represent the privatisation of thinking itself.
Under the old feudalism, serfs worked lords' land and kept a portion of the harvest. Under technofeudalism, we generate content for platforms and receive algorithmic crumbs in return. But under the emerging AI feudalism, our very capacity to create, think and solve problems becomes the enclosed commons.
The pattern is always the same:
Appropriate the Commons: Train AI systems on the collective output of human creativity, e.g. all the code on GitHub, all the art on the internet, every scientific paper and textbook, in fact all the writing ever published
Privatise the Infrastructure: Lock these capabilities behind proprietary systems controlled by a few companies
Rent Back What Was Stolen: Sell us access to our own collective intelligence, repackaged as AI services
Eliminate the Alternative: Replace human creators with AI systems, making us dependent on renting back our own stolen capacities
Cory Doctorow's concept of "enshittification" describes how platforms decay over time, while the AI enclosures represent something more totalitarian: the preemptive elimination of alternatives to corporate-controlled intelligence.
The digital enclosures are systematically privatising human capacities far beyond economic disruption:
Human Creative Capacity: Every story, song, image and idea becomes training data for systems that will replace their human creators. Artists, programmers, musicians and scientists become unpaid data workers for the companies that will make them obsolete.
Intellectual Problem-Solving: Programmers train AI systems on their code, then watch those systems replace them. Researchers feed their insights into models that will automate research itself.
Cultural Memory: The entire history of human expression becomes the private property of AI companies, repackaged and resold without attribution or compensation.
The Ability to Think: As we become dependent on AI for writing, reasoning, and creating, we risk losing these capacities ourselves, just as GPS dependency has weakened our spatial navigation abilities.
Most insidiously, they're enclosing the future itself. When AI systems can only recombine existing patterns, they lock us into current ways of thinking. The next Einstein or Hendrix might never emerge because the systems replacing human creativity can only optimise within existing paradigms.
The original enclosures created a landed aristocracy that extracted rent from basic necessities like food and shelter. The digital enclosures are creating something more powerful, digital landlords: a cognitive aristocracy that extracts rent from thinking itself.
These new digital landlords aren't content with owning platforms or data, they want to own our intelligence. They're building a world where human creativity becomes redundant and they control the only alternatives.
Sam Altman speaks openly about AI replacing human labour across the economy. He's building sophisticated pattern-matching systems that can replicate human outputs without human insight. The goal is to replace human capability with systems his company controls, not to augment it.
Meanwhile, they sell us utopian visions of "AI for everyone" while building infrastructure that ensures AI remains anything but universal. OpenAI, despite its name, has become one of the most closed companies in tech. The AI future they promise will supposedly benefit all humanity but will actually benefit only whoever owns it.
In the 1640s The Levellers (no, not the band) emerged demanding political equality and economic justice. They understood that true freedom required both democratic rights and economic independence. When the enclosures came, they organised resistance.
Maybe we need New Levellers for the digital age. Who might they be?
Open source developers building truly open AI systems that can't be enclosed or controlled by corporations. Projects like Hugging Face, EleutherAI, and others fighting for democratised access to AI capabilities.
Artists, writers, scientists and musicians who resist and refuse to feed the systems designed to replace them. Who organise collective action to protect their work from unauthorised training data harvesting.
Academic researchers who reject the corporate capture of AI development and fight for public research, transparent models and genuine scientific progress over profit.
Digital commoners, anyone who believes that human creativity and intelligence should remain a commons rather than becoming the private property of tech billionaires.
Platform co-ops building genuine alternatives to extractive platforms: cooperatively owned, democratically controlled, designed to empower rather than replace human creators.
The original Levellers wrote "The Agreement of the People" demanding democratic reform. What might the New Levellers demand?
The Right to Creative Commons: Human cultural output should remain in the commons, not become private training data for corporate AI systems.
Democratic Control of AI Development: Critical AI infrastructure should be publicly owned and democratically governed, not controlled by tech billionaires.
Universal Basic Assets, Not Universal Basic Income: As Cory Doctorow puts it, we must seize the means of computation. Instead of accepting UBI crumbs while tech lords own everything, we demand Universal Basic Assets: public ownership of the computational infrastructure that powers the digital economy. Give people stake in the platforms and AI systems, not just handouts to keep them quiet.
The Right to Human Agency: People should retain the capacity to create, think and solve problems, not become dependent on AI services that rent back their own stolen capabilities.
Transparency and Accountability: AI systems that affect public life should be open to scrutiny, not hidden behind proprietary walls.
Economic Justice: If AI systems profit from human creativity, those profits should flow back to the creators and communities that made them possible.
The original enclosures created industrial capitalism by forcing people off the land and into factories. The digital enclosures threaten something far more totalitarian: a world where human creativity itself becomes redundant and a few companies control all the alternatives.
If we let them succeed, we'll wake up in a world where psuedo-thinking, psuedo-creating and psuedo-problem-solving have become services we rent from our digital landlords. Where genuine innovation dies because LLM-style AI systems can only recombine existing patterns. Where the commons of human intelligence becomes the private property of whoever can afford the compute.
The New Levellers might well understand that at stake are power, democracy and human freedom itself.
The enclosures are happening now. Will we fence the technofeudal overlords out, or let ourselves be fenced in?
More next time!
Thank you for reading,
Bern
Further Reading
On Enclosures and Historical Parallels:
Peter Linebaugh: "The Magna Carta Manifesto" (Commons and resistance)
E.P. Thompson: "The Making of the English Working Class" (The Levellers and popular resistance)
Karl Polanyi: "The Great Transformation" (How markets enclosed social life)
On Digital Capitalism and Technofeudalism:
Yanis Varoufakis: "Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism" (Platform rent extraction)
Cory Doctorow: "The Internet Con" (Platform enshittification and monopoly)
Shoshana Zuboff: "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" (The extraction of human experience)
On AI, Power, and Alternatives:
Safiya Noble: "Algorithms of Oppression" (Bias in AI systems)
Cathy O'Neil: "Weapons of Math Destruction" (Algorithmic accountability)
Nathan Schneider: "Everything for Everyone" (Cooperative alternatives to tech platforms)
I imagine a metaphor for our current reality: Capitalism and algorithmic governance is a steamroller flattening all of society to enable the vehicles of extraction and control to operate at peek efficiency. Ai certainly offers a magnifying effect, but will it be used to create cracks and upheaval in the capitalistic infrastructure in spite of that infrastructure being a whole new and previously unimagined level of private enclosure of the commons?
This is a key addition to the technofeudalism discourse. Thanks!!