Opinion: The Modern Theft of Our Intellectual Commons

In the 12th century, the peasants of England grazed their animals on common land — fields held collectively, managed by custom, open to all who belonged to the community.

Over the following centuries, through a series of parliamentary acts and private maneuvers known as the Enclosures, that common land was seized, fenced and transferred to private owners. The peasants were driven off. The land that had sustained communities for generations became the property of a few, and the many became laborers for hire, entirely dependent on those who now owned what had once been shared.

Historians regard the Enclosures as one of the most consequential — and most brutal — economic transformations in human history. It created the conditions for industrial capitalism: a landless working class with nothing to sell but its labor. Karl Marx, writing two centuries later, called it “primitive accumulation” — the violent, extra-economic seizure of common resources that made capitalist accumulation possible. Before capital could grow, it first had to steal.

Something very similar is happening now at a scale the enclosers of the 12th century could not have imagined. The commons being seized is not land. It is the accumulated intellectual output of human civilization itself — every book ever written, every scientific paper published, every conversation digitized, every piece of art, music, law and philosophy that humanity has produced and recorded across thousands of years.

A handful of corporations has taken that inheritance, trained their machines on it and are now extracting wealth from it at a velocity unprecedented in history. They did not ask permission. They did not compensate the creators. They are not sharing the proceeds.

This is the defining political and moral question of our time: who owns the value that artificial intelligence generates? And the failure of both the left and the right to answer it with any seriousness is a measure of how thoroughly the billionaire class has captured the terms of public debate.

David Hoffman is author of “Citizens Rising: Independent Journalism and the Spread of Democracy” (2013).