CONCEPT
Cognitive Capitalism
The mode of capitalism Gorz analyzed in <em>L'Immatériel</em> (2003) that employs abundant human intelligence to produce artificial scarcity through the enclosure of knowledge — the direct intellectual ancestor of the AI platform economy.
Gorz argued that cognitive capitalism perpetuates itself by converting a structurally abundant resource — human intelligence and accumulated knowledge — into scarcity through mechanisms of enclosure: intellectual property rights, proprietary platforms, data monopolies, and corporate control of the infrastructure through which knowledge circulates. Knowledge that could in principle be shared freely is enclosed, commodified, and sold back to the people who produced it, generating profits for those who control the enclosures rather than benefits for those who generated the knowledge. The AI economy reproduces this pattern with remarkable fidelity: models trained on the collective knowledge of humanity are owned by a handful of corporations whose pricing decisions and terms of service determine who has access.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The large language models powering contemporary AI tools were trained on billions of texts, millions of code repositories, and the distilled output of centuries of scientific, literary, artistic, and technical production. This knowledge was produced collectively, by countless individuals working across generations,