AI and the Enclosure of the Scientific Commons

Scientific literature is treated as an information commons - an intangible, widely shared resource whose value rivals humanity’s greatest achievements. A historical primer contrasts this robustness with the fate of preindustrial English agricultural commons, which ceased to exist not through overuse but through deliberate enclosure (circa 1600-1800) that converted shared land into private property and is widely judged as large-scale theft. Economic and political frameworks for commons management are reviewed to show why information commons have been resilient and what social norms and institutions sustain them.

The central argument is that artificial intelligence now supplies mechanisms that make enclosure of the information commons practicable. Although digital enclosure differs from physical land capture, it reproduces the key outcomes: privatized wealth extracted from shared resources and erosion of the social systems that enable sharing. Mechanisms include mass automated harvesting, proprietary model-building on collectively produced knowledge, and what is termed “slop spam” - low-quality or manipulative automated outputs that swamp channels of trust and degrade communal curation. These dynamics threaten to shift scholarly infrastructures toward concentrated private control, and the concepts offered create a framework for interrogating that existentially consequential shift.