Enclosure is covered thoroughly in commons literature, but to make a long story short enclosure is the process of denying access to resources to part of a population in order to make them buy access to those resources instead. This usually implies forcing people into wage labor or forcing them to work more hours. Some might argue that nobody is forcing anyone to do anything in the system of wage labor but when the other option is deprivation or even starvation, it can’t be legitimately called a choice. A famous example of enclosure happened in England in the 17th century with the Inclosure Acts which barred peasants from using the land to meet their basic needs as they had been doing for centuries, and made them “choose” to go to cities to work long hours under horrible conditions in factories to earn a wage which allowed them to buy their basic needs at market prices. The new relationship that resulted from the political decision of enclosure, the wage labor relation, was the foundation of capitalism and ushered production and social organization into a new era. It’s important to note, however, that although enclosure barred peasants from accessing things like woodlands and rivers, those woodlands and rivers were still there in the very same form as before enclosure. That is, enclosure created artificial scarcity in order to modify human behavior. What we are seeing today with generative AI within a capitalist framework uses much the same logic.
First we should clarify some terms. Artificial intelligence is “the capability of computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making.”i This includes several branches of computer science, like machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, robotics, and generative AI. Modern chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT are a form of generative AI, called large language models, that focus on language tasks. Other forms of generative AI are programs like DALL-E for image creation and Copilot for writing code. Generative AI (genAI) has been built using material from the internet commons and is now generating private profit. When we ask DALL-E to make us an image, it does so based on all the images available on the internet, even those that are not licensed for commercial use. When we ask Copilot to complete our code, it does so after being trained on countless lines of open source code; the labors of love of thousands of programmers and hobbyists. When we ask Claude how to solve a particular problem, it responds with the language of people helping eachother on a forum for no other reason than mutual interest and a desire to help. All those human interactions have been captured and distilled into language models that use statistics to predict what the next word in a sentence should be and generate plausible sounding paragraphs. As more and more people turn to chatbots instead of forums, the knowledge and wisdom generated from those interactions becomes siloed in proprietary databases belonging to AI companies instead of being added to the common wealth of the internet. This impoverishes the public by stopping the free flow of information and communication on the public internet while enriching a few private actors by diverting the flow of information wealth to their private databases.
GenAI companies train their “models” (the engine of genAI software) by downloading and processing huge amounts of data, both freely available and proprietary. Although normally very enthusiastic about copyright and patents, these companies downloaded massive amounts of art and literature to make their computer programs, for example, Meta downloaded almost 82,000 GB of pirated booksiii to make it’s chatbot, and Suno pirated musiciv from countless artists to make it’s music generation software. In this regard, genAI goes further than enclosure because it takes not only the shared wealth and knowledge of open-source software and publicly available art (the commons), but also protected intellectual property (private property) in order to generate private profit for the AI companies.
Not only that, but these same AI companies want to take all the water, electricity, and computer components available and put them in the service of their business model, come what may to people, the economy, and the environment. It’s at such an absurd level that just one company, OpenAI, in late 2025v purchased 40% of the world’s production capacity of memory chips for the coming years! This will cause shortages and price increases for every other sector besides AI, including critical sectors like healthcare, education, and national defense. That manufactured scarcity is the exact logic of enclosure: instead of providing those things for themselves, communities and countries will have to instead purchase a subscription to an AI company to meet those needs. Depriving a section of the population of access to resources in order to sell them access to those very same resources is enclosure, but this time it’s on a global scale and the section of the population that is blocked from accessing resources is the vast majority of people; everyone on Earth except the AI companies.
In order to have a meaningful analysis of any phenomenon we must take it’s context into consideration. In this case, the context is capitalism. One of the threats that AI poses within a capitalist milieu is that it will enclose the vast wealth of accumulated human knowledge on the internet and sell us a subscription to access the information we previously managed ourselves and provided for each other. That carries an implication that again resonates with the English enclosures- just as people, after generations, who moved from the countryside to the city as a result of the Inclosure Acts lost most of their knowledge of plants, farming, natural cycles, traditional wisdom and culture etc., so too will people forget how to live effectively in the information age when Big Tech replaces forums and web search with a quick AI answer. Shifting human curiosity from forums and message boards to chatbots makes it so that the questions and answers people used to exchange in the pursuit of progress now become private- an information silo in the hands of AI companies. In order to access the information, one must then buy a subscription to a LLM to get the same thing they were getting before, and to top it all off the LLM is trained on all the free exchanges of knowledge from those very same forums and message boards! When it comes to searching the web, the ability to evaluate sources of information and dig deep when trying to come to a conclusion about something is critical in the modern age. This habit is lost when search is replaced by an instant AI answer. Not to mention the potentially destructive effects on culture, or the active de-skilling of workers. In fact, genAI evangelists are so lost when it comes to anything outside of quarterly metrics that they brag about how quickly musicians can make music with genAI… as if the time spent making music is a waste and the only thing of value is the commodity that results from the process! Focusing solely on exchange value and ignoring social and mental health is a recipe for disaster, especially when armed with such powerful technology. It has to be used in a more responsible way than Spotify distilling the works of thousands of musicians (without paying them) into genAI which then produces tracks that Spotify pays no royalties on to fill playlists with and maximize profits.vi Is that really the best use of all that energy and water? Is that really what the world needs at this point in time?
Part of the magic of the capitalist system is that a tiny minority of people make decisions that affect the majority without their input or consent. For example, Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, in 2024 opened a data center in Tennessee, USA. Within two years they were getting sued:
“The lawsuit explains that xAI is illegally operating 27 gas turbines without an air permit in Southaven, Mississippi, effectively building a power plant for its Colossus 2 data center, which powers the company’s chatbot, Grok. The company’s failure to get a permit for its power plant — which is located near homes, schools, and churches — creates added health risks for families in North Mississippi and Memphis and is a clear violation of the Clean Air Act, which requires major sources of pollution to obtain air permits before being constructed or operated.vii”
Just like Meta pirating hundreds of thousands of books and simultaneously raiding the open source world is part of it’s business plan, xAI broke the law and raided the commons of breathable air in Tennessee in it’s pursuit to make a buck. The controlling figure of xAI is Elon Musk, and major investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, BlackRock, and Nvidia, plus sovereign wealth funds from Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. All of those parties get the profits and none of them live in Tennessee or are exposed to the pollution of the venture they voluntarily undertook. None of the people near the data center got to have a say in the decision of how their air is used, but they get all of the pollution and none of the profit. To top it all off, the U.S. government is defending the party that broke the law: “The Justice Department, in a motion late Monday, sought to intervene in the case and dismiss the lawsuit, arguing that the plant is needed to power an artificial intelligence data center that is ‘critical to the economy’ and the U.S. militaryviii”. Just like what’s happening in Europe (summarized below), in the U.S. the government goes against the interests of the majority in order to cater to a very small minority of extremely wealthy individualsix. It is clear that this social arrangement is described more accurately as a dictatorship of capital than a democracy; the people must adjust to the needs of capital, not capital being used as a tool to meet the needs of the people. This is just about as far as one can get from commoning, especially when one considers what exactly it means to “adjust to the needs of capital” when capital is taking your water and poisoning the air you breathe.
Commoning relies on people participating in the decisions that affect them, while, as we have seen, capitalism relies on people not having a say in the matter. If people did have a say, those decisions, like blasting residential neighborhoods with carcinogens and other toxins, would never be made. Unfortunately for the 1%, neither would those private profits. Commoning is a good method for ensuring that access to the things we need is not taken out of our hands and rented back to us. Healthcare cooperatives, community supported agriculture, and timebanking are methods communities can use to provide for eachother within the system of state and market, but independently of those systems. With the ongoing “leadership crisis” (a euphemism for corruption and crony-capitalism) it is clear that we the people must ensure our well-being, since our supposed representatives are busy making backroom deals with institutions that would rob us of our freedom and agency, like instituting digital mass surveillancex (again euphemistically called “Chat Control”) against the will of 80% of respondents. Or the EU leadership’s dumbfounding inaction with regard to the live-streamed and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, in direct contradiction to the EU’s purported support for the Genocide Convention. This Convention is especially relevant to Europe, as it was ratified in 1948 in the wake of the destruction of WWII and unanimously supported by EU member states at the 2005 World Summitxi where they boldly claimed: ‘On the list of actions to prevent atrocities: “invoke the ‘human rights clause’ in EU co-operation and assessment agreements”, “the involvement of the International Criminal Court”, “the adoption of an EU travel ban, a trade or arms embargo or/and the freezing of assets”, and “the imposing of diplomatic sanctions”xii’. None of those were meaningfully carried out against Israel, while at the exact same time round after round of sanctions were put on Russia for Putin’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, proving that the capacity to do so was there. With leadership serving a cause other than international law and the well-being of the people, it is up to the people to ensure their own well-being. It works if we work together, and commoning is a way of doing just that.
Hopefully it has been made clear that AI is not the problem. The problem isn’t even just generative AI as such. The problem comes when people break laws and customs in the pursuit of profit while others foot the bill and suffer the consequences. In short, the problem with AI is capitalism. Generative AI in a capitalist framework exists to generate a return on investment, not to help people. This is the reason why AI in the form of chatbots are allocated far more resources than AI in the form of machine learning to spot tumors before they get big; the profitability of reducing headcount in a business is much higher than that of saving lives. In some particularly backward societies where healthcare is privatized, spotting tumors before they get big is actually a net negative for business, especially considering how far health insurance companies will go to deny claims. For sane people that’s hard to believe, but Goldman Sachs analysts asked in 2018, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?ii”. As for how it relates to AI: Why don’t we make data centers that run on renewables? Why don’t artists who contributed to the data training sets get royalties for their work? Are large language models the most efficient use of scarce resources to meet currently existing needs? Why don’t we charge AI companies a carbon tax and impose binding emissions quotas? Is society’s most pressing need really the ability to write emails faster? Shouldn’t we have a job guarantee for people who are displaced from the labor market because of this technology? No-one can deny that there is plenty of work to do, not just paid work but work in general. The answer to all these not-so-rhetorical questions is that those things would reduce profits, so as long as we live in a capitalist milieu they are off the table. AI can, as it’s boosters claim, be a tremendous boon to society if it is deployed and managed responsibly and in the interests of the many, not just the few in some faraway country. To do that, it is critical to get input from all parties affected by this technological leap, and commoning is a way to do this. As we commoners grow in numbers and work together, we build the political power needed to replace the ghouls managing states in the interest of money, with well-developed citizens leading states, guided by the will of the people. Every individual matters, so join us!
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ihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence
iihttps://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
iiihttps://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/meta-staff-torrented-nearly-82tb-of-pirated-books-for-ai-training-court-records-reveal-copyright-violations
ivhttps://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/suno-and-udio-face-another-lawsuit-from-indie-artists-accusing-them-of-stream-ripping-and-market-harm/
vhttps://bizety.com/2025/12/28/the-dirty-dram-deal-how-openai-just-locked-up-40-of-global-ram/
vihttps://midnightrebels.com/why-is-spotify-full-of-ai-generated-music-the-answer-is-money/
viihttps://naacp.org/articles/naacp-sues-xai-illegal-pollution-data-center-power-plant
viiihttps://apnews.com/article/musk-xai-data-center-memphis-pollution-naacp-0e981ca0508d7e4144662392d9d66ab2
ixThis modus operandi has been in place since the founding of the country, as politician James Madison said in 1787: “In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders [the 18th century equivalent of ‘private owners of productive assets’] ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.“
xhttps://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
xihttps://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/newyork2005
xiihttps://www.irishtimes.com/world/europe/2025/09/02/why-is-eu-deadlocked-on-israeli-sanctions-despite-genocide-risk/
Image: https://www.nintendolife.com/games/snes/teenage_mutant_ninja_turtles_iv_turtles_in_time
