CONCEPT
Primitive Accumulation in the AI Age
The enclosure of the creative commons through training data appropriation — millions of human creators' work scraped without consent, converted into proprietary models reproducing five-century-old patterns of dispossession.
Primitive accumulation, in Marx's original formulation, was the founding violence of capitalism — the enclosure of common lands, the dispossession of peasant communities, the creation of a landless proletariat with no option but wage labor. Marx treated it as a historical episode. Federici demonstrated it is an ongoing process: every expansion of capital requires new enclosures, new commons to appropriate, new communities to dispossess. The training of AI models represents the largest enclosure of a commons in human history — the appropriation of humanity's collective creative and intellectual output, scraped from the public internet and converted into proprietary systems owned by a handful of corporations. The dispossession follows the same logic as the original enclosures: common resources are seized, collective knowledge is privatized, and the communities that produced the commons are excluded from governance and compensation.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The enclosure operates at civilizational scale. The datasets training frontier AI models contain trillions of tokens