Alongside this: the enclosure of common land, happening in the same centuries, converting shared fields and forests into private property, displacing peasant communities, creating the landless workforce capitalism needed. The two enclosures were part of the same transformation. The enclosure of land made communities dependent on wages. The destruction of communal care knowledge made communities dependent on the market for the things they had produced themselves. The domestic sphere was never outside the economy. It was the economy's unacknowledged foundation.
The enclosure made care invisible — a private problem, a personal obligation, the natural duty of women who love. The commons makes it visible — shared, social, the organizing principle of communities that intend to sustain themselves.
The enclosure looks like this.
The threat to these territories is enclosure in its operational form. Global Witness documented over 200 killings of land and environmental defenders in 2020 — the majority in Latin America, over a third of them Indigenous. These deaths are not incidental to the ecological crisis. They are the ecological crisis at its operational level: the physical enforcement of enclosure against the governance holding ecosystems together.
In 2019 the city of Norfolk had no mixed-use occupancy designation that covered what we were trying to build: a restaurant with two Airbnb rooms above it. Two short-term rental rooms above a restaurant didn't fit any existing category. And if something isn't explicitly permitted, it's disallowed — the absence of a category is itself a decision. The city eventually designated us a bed and breakfast, which was functionally absurd — bed and breakfast zoning requires a minimum of four rooms, and we had two. But it was the closest box the code contained. It took over a year.
I kept thinking about how many arrangements — businesses, households, community spaces — had simply never come into existence because no one had named the category yet. Ostrom's work on the commons is partly about this: one of the conditions that allows commons governance to function is the right of communities to devise their own institutions. When the legal framework doesn't recognize the arrangement, the arrangement can't happen, no matter how well it might have worked. This is enclosure operating through absence rather than force — not taking what exists, but preventing what could.
You have already watched it work. The web was given away — no owner, no fee, the rules let into the public domain; a proprietary web would not have been the web at all. Then the gate moved. What had been the commons became the platform, and the platform set the price. The thing was never destroyed. It was captured while everyone still called it free.
Then the demon fed. Everything freely made — the code, the encyclopedia, the writing, the talk between strangers — was gathered into engines no outsider could open. The commons went in. What came out had a gate. This is corruption in its pure form: not the theft of a thing, but the capture of everything freely given.
And here is the argument's sharpest edge: this doesn't end. Every outside absorbed creates the need for the next one. Every commons enclosed generates the conditions requiring the next enclosure. When the geographical frontier closes, the machine finds new outsides — debt, intellectual property, the privatization of water and seed and genetic code, the digital enclosure of attention and behavior. The frontier moves. The need for a frontier never disappears.
The outside is wherever the accounting stops. And the commons, in every form, is perpetually at risk of becoming the next outside.
This is why the commons was not enclosed because it failed. It was enclosed because it worked. The commons that works is the commons that is worth enclosing.
The disenchantment of the world is the enclosure of that knowing.