Enclosure, once limited to land privatization, now extends to food, health, housing, and knowledge, forcing people into market dependency. Intellectual property laws increasingly enclose thought and creativity. Capitalism justifies these enclosures by presenting them as progress, but this relies on reductive evaluation, which focuses on short-term gains while ignoring systemic consequences. Ecological evaluation, by contrast, reveals that enclosure-driven solutions create deeper crises. Undoing enclosure requires rejecting consumerist dependency and reclaiming collective capacity through counter-enclosures like commons-based knowledge, mutual aid, and decentralized systems. The Communitarium Project is part of this effort, working to restore autonomy and resist further enclosures.
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Introduction
Imagine a world where you never had to pay for food, where health and care were simply part of the fabric of daily life, where knowledge was freely shared, and where community wasn’t something you had to search for on an app.
That world isn’t a utopian fantasy. It’s how most humans lived for most of history.
But something happened. Over centuries, people were
severed from their ability to meet their own needs. They were
disembedded from the relationships that sustained them. They became
dependent on systems that profit from their dependency.
This process is called
enclosure, and it is the engine that drives capitalism.
Enclosure: The Hidden Theft of the Everyday
Most people associate “enclosure” with the historical privatization of common lands in early capitalism. But
enclosure is an ongoing process, not a past event. It is a fundamental logic of control:
- Sever people from their ability to meet a need.
- Force them to depend on a system that sells it back to them as a product or service.
This has happened across every domain of life:
- Food: Where once communities fed themselves through subsistence farming, foraging, and reciprocal exchange, industrial agriculture and global supply chains now force dependency on corporate distribution networks.
- Health: Healing and care—once managed through kin networks, mutual aid, and holistic practices—have been enclosed into a profit-driven medical industry that focuses on selling treatments rather than addressing the root causes of illness.
- Social Life: The decline of walkable neighborhoods, communal gathering spaces, and intergenerational households has created a massive loneliness epidemic. Instead of repairing this, tech companies offer commodified substitutes like social media, dating apps, and influencer culture.
- Housing: Shelter, once a collective responsibility, has been financialized—turned into an asset class where millions of units sit empty while people struggle to afford rent.
- Knowledge and Culture: The most intangible yet increasingly dominant form of enclosure is intellectual property (IP)—the conversion of ideas, knowledge, and creative expression into privately owned assets that generate rent rather than public benefit.
In the past, enclosure was primarily about material goods—land, food, housing. But today, enclosure is increasingly focused on information, knowledge, and even thought itself.The Digital Enclosure: When Even Thought Becomes Property
If enclosure originally severed people from
the land, today it severs them from
information, culture, and shared intelligence.
- Intellectual Property as Rentier Capitalism: Corporations don’t just make things anymore—they own the ideas behind things, extracting profit long after production has stopped. Patents, copyrights, and licensing schemes lock up knowledge and innovation, preventing free adaptation and progress.
- The Enclosure of Creativity: Algorithmic platforms enclose not just existing media but creative expression itself—deciding who sees what, who profits, and who gets erased. AI-generated content, based on scraping human-made art and writing, will soon be fully enclosed behind corporate firewalls.
- Network Effect Capture: The internet, once a promised commons, has been enclosed into a handful of monopolistic platforms that control speech, commerce, and even relationships.
- Enshittification and Technofeudalism: As platforms achieve dominance, they strip away user control, forcing people into algorithmically controlled, rent-based systems where their own labor and social life are monetized.
The goal of modern enclosure isn’t just to own things—it’s to own access itself.Why Did People Accept Enclosures?
If enclosure is so destructive, why did people allow it to happen?
The answer is that enclosure never arrives as outright theft—it arrives as a bargain.1. The Promise of Security and Stability
- Many enclosures were framed as necessary solutions to crises—famine, instability, inefficiency.
- When common lands were enclosed, the justification was that “rational” agriculture would feed more people.
- Industrial jobs promised higher wages than rural subsistence work, making factory labor seem like an improvement at first.
- Today, the replacement of organic communities with digital networks is sold as “connectivity.”
Each step
seemed like progress—until people realized what they had lost.
2. Reductive vs. Ecological Evaluation: The Illusion of Progress
Capitalism frames enclosure as progress—but only if you evaluate it reductively.- Reductive evaluation looks at one variable at a time—efficiency, short-term profit, immediate convenience.
- Ecological evaluation looks at how changes ripple across interconnected systems over time.
For example:
-
Reductive evaluation sees enclosure as progress:
- “Industrial farming increases crop yields!”
- “Pharmaceutical patents encourage drug research!”
- “Social media gives people global connectivity!”
-
Ecological evaluation reveals the long-term consequences:
-
Industrial farming destroys soil, reduces biodiversity, and
creates food dependency.-
Pharmaceutical patents make life-saving medicine unaffordable,
slowing medical progress rather than accelerating it.-
Social media monopolies extract profit from engagement while
degrading discourse and increasing loneliness.Breaking the Cycle: Reclaiming What Was Stolen
If enclosure is the process of
severing people from their ability to sustain themselves, then
the antidote is reconnection.
- Food sovereignty: Community gardens, worker-owned food co-ops, and mutual aid food networks.
- Medical autonomy: Decentralized healthcare models, holistic and preventative approaches, direct access to health knowledge.
- Social recomposition: Free, open, and unmonetized spaces for gathering, discussing, and organizing.
- Reclaiming knowledge: Open-access education, skill-sharing networks, de-credentialized learning.
- Digital Counter-Enclosures: Free and open-source software, decentralized communication networks, public-interest AI, and commons-based licensing alternatives.
The
Communitarium Project is part of this effort. It is
a counter-enclosure, a space where people can
rebuild the capacity to sustain themselves outside of market dependence.
To undo enclosure, we must stop thinking like consumers and start thinking like communities.
