In 1829, when Englishman Thomas Peel tried to establish an agricultural colony on Australia, something unexpected happened: his workers simply abandoned him en masse; a 19th century style Great Resignation. Despite Peel's large amount of capital brought over from England, these workers didn't need to subordinate themselves to Peel's capital, as they could just... move over to the next plot of land and continue to go into business for themselves. Peel's capital had no command, as labourers still had access to The Commons. The enclosing of The Commons was the necessary to shift the power from landowners to owners of capital, and for capitalism to bloom.

Similarly, today, frontier AI labs command no control, unless they enclose The Commons:
- I have no reason to go to Claude or ChatGPT if I can readily find the information I need in an online encyclopaedia
- I don't need to reach for Claude Code if collaborative QA platforms thrive (yes, I'm aware StackOverflow had it's share of issues even before AI)

Resisting AI today is the modern battle against enclosing our Digital Commons. I don't think that protections from scrapers are going to work, as they're most likely going to damage to discovery of content and knowledge.

#Capitalism #DigitalAutonomy #TheCommons #AI #LLM #Socialism #Labour