RE: https://mastodon.social/@hannorein/117484899534152804
This post is not getting enough tracking. So I'm upgrading it to from "worth a read" to "best thing you'll read on the internet today"!
I just saw this new paper on the arxiv:
AI and The Enclosure of the Scientific Commons
Very interesting and worth a read!
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251
@hannorein
I come at this from a broader historical perspective. The English 'enclosures' are often regarded as the founding 'privatisation' of capitalism, because they represented not just the theft of common land, but a change in the legal and ideological understanding of 'property'.
Property is, in fact, only ever a set of legal rights and obligations - which were different in pre-capitalist societies, and in fact still differ in different legal systems, and in the 'common sense' of different societies today.
But there has been a continuous struggle in almost every aspect of life over privatisation. It is still live in any English village where the 'village green' is threatened by 'development' - or indeed in cities where what were once public roads and squares are incorporated into shopping centre developments that have 'security' men on the doors and close when the shops close (revealing their true purpose: to take your money).
Slavery and colonialism were and are forms of privatisation: theft of what nobody previously 'owned' to enable private profit; the first mass slave traders and colonisers were not states, they were the first joint-stock companies.
Moreover, the fundamental mechanism inside the capitalist form is the exploitation of 'externalities': taking what nature and society provides for free and turning it into private property. No major industry today would be profitable if it paid for its true environmental costs - not to mention its use of public infrastructure (roads, schools, police, etc...).
Most hidden of all, perhaps, is the 'externality' of labour: the love and care exercised in family homes and communities, freely, with no cost/benefit analysis, that actually produces the labour force, the 'human resources', as they say.
The battle rages on, in the confrontation between open source, the open web, and the privatising tech giants, and now, of course, around AI: take what was once a common treasury - I use the words of the first rebels against English enclosures - and turn it to private profit.