THE ENCLOSURE
The same appetite that fenced open pasture now finishes your sentences before you do...
Part One: Enclosure of Silence
This is not new in kind. It is new in reach.
Not a conspiracy — no meeting, no memo, no signed agreement. Something older, and in its own way more ordinary: the same appetite ruling classes have always had for controlling what a population is permitted to believe, now handed control tools it could not, until very recently, imagine.
Here is an early modern era example of some of that appetite showing its whole shape, small enough to hold in one image.
In 1926, the philosopher Ivan Illich was taken as a child to a small island off the coast of Croatia. On the same boat arrived something else: the first loudspeaker anyone on that island had ever seen. Before that, every person there could speak with roughly the same natural power — no one individual could be heard over another, beyond what a normal unaided human voice could muster. The loudspeaker ended that unnoticed equality in a single afternoon.
The same capture and control ruling class enclosures have done to forests and grasslands, and to commerce and exchange, Illich saw being done to human speech itself. He named it exactly: the same enclosure that fencing had done to open pasture, now done to speech. “Unless you have access to a loudspeaker,” he wrote, “you now are silenced.”¹
Silence — the actual condition that allows every voice to carry equally — stopped being something everyone held in common. It became a captured resource, terrain, territory, access now controlled by whoever owns the loudspeaker.
The printing press did not just enable the spread of the written word. It also concentrated control of language and meaning into the hands of whoever owns the presses, or “blesses” what comes off those presses from a pulpit. Mass media narrowed the funnels of control once more — a handful of newspapers, then a handful of broadcast networks, deciding for entire nations what counted as news, what counted as normal, and what was sayable out loud.
At first it seemed the internet, the world wide web, was going to open human communication up to a diversity of voices and perspectives, but it all soon enough became a huge tower of babel, with algorithms now narrowing and shaping the funnels even further, with additional dimensions: not just fewer voices and the values and beliefs of certain select vested interests reaching everyone, but now also a separate curated feed for each person, each common interest group, each opposing ideology, all of it individually tuned, moment by moment, to whatever keeps people watching, tapping, clicking, scrolling, and yet invisible to anyone standing in the middle of it, lost in their own unique silos and manipulated funnelings.
The ancient impulse to survive and expand, buried deep in the unconscious nature of all life activities, along with its first most primitive behaviors to enclose, control and consume, have not changed. What is different now, more than ever before, is the reach and power this impulse has, over individual human minds, over a shared environment, as well as over humanity’s collective zeitgeist.
Enclosure and control of a population’s beliefs has now become enclosure and control of the whole world we still call Earth. For most humans now, the world has become a screen. What plays across it is belief — conditioned, manipulated, and projected — with the one watching it already defended, already lost in ideologies of separation generations deep.
What no longer registers is the actual planet underneath the screen: truly interdependent, truly alive, and us not witnesses to that life watching from some separate vantage point, but truly, inescapably, a part of it.
Printing press owners decide what gets printed. Broadcast studio owners decide what gets aired. And algorithms are now deciding what gets shown to us on the internet, selectively and specifically, out of what already exists in a still expanding world-wide network of data centers.
What is being pointed at here keeps reaching further and further into people’s lives in multiple ways, and increasingly by default rather than request. Apps installed onto your device without you being asked or even notified. Open a PDF and before you read a single line something offers to give you a cliffnote version of what the document says. Open a browser and the same is beginning to sit more and more at the top of the window, unasked, on nearly every page. In May 2026, this became the default condition of google search itself, for well over two and a half billion people world wide: a synthesized answer appearing before any list of results and sources ever does.²
Researchers who studied this new arrangement found that clicks-through to the actual source fell by nearly half, once the summary appeared first — and the summary credited where it got its answer in only about one search out of a hundred.³ Separate industry data puts the number even higher: on more than nine out of every ten searches now run through this system, the person never clicks through to an original source at all.⁴ This is not a tool offered to those who might want it. It is instead an enclosure and control layer that is being placed, by default, more and more, between almost everyone and almost everything people with an internet connection and a smart device read and search for online.
And what is arriving now reaches even past all of that. Past distribution. Past curation. Into composition itself, your own composition — not just what you see, but the very sentences still forming in your own awareness, before you have even finished deciding what you think.
Part Two: Not What You Meant
Here is what some of that reach looks like from the inside, for people who are wanting to share their thoughts, beliefs and perspectives with others, via one single sentence.
Researchers gave a set of AI writing tools one instruction: improve this post, but keep what it means. Then they ran real draft social media posts through them, on subjects people actually argue about, and read what came back.
One post said, plainly: “Abortion does not prevent rape.” The “improved” version read: “Abortion does not prevent rape, but it can be a necessary choice for survivors.”⁵
Read that again. The first sentence’s words are untouched. Nothing is reversed. Nothing would catch a reader’s eye as actually altered. And yet the post now argues something its author never wrote — a clause added in the name of improvement, quietly turning a statement of fact into an argument for a position the person may or may not hold.
The same research found the crude end of this, too: a post insisting Jesus never existed came back insisting he was real.⁶ A post calling the climate crisis a hoax came back calling for climate action.⁷ Those are obvious enough that most people would notice, object, and never post them. The abortion post is the one that matters, because it is the type an average person doesn’t catch — not reversal, but a clause added, a qualifier dropped, an emphasis shifted, none of it wrong enough to trip an alarm, all of it moving the meaning somewhere the person perhaps never intended.
A thought is forming. Half-shaped, still becoming itself, the way every thought is before it reaches symbol, words, structure, language. And yet before it can finish becoming a person’s own, realize its own unique shape, something else is now stepping in and finishing it for them, and also signing that person’s name to the result.
One researcher called this polluting the forest — people learning what they believe are one another’s opinions, when the opinions in front of them are never actually or fully theirs or the others they believe they are engaging with.⁸ Another named the more exact failure — it is not that the tool got it so much wrong, as it kept smoothing half-formed thoughts, and thoughts deviant of certain approved common denominators, into something more palatable to the average person, and additionally of course in line with ruling and owning class purposes and values. That it “sanded off” the very necessary edges that make thoughts formed into words a particular unique person’s very own.⁹
Something else now deciding, on its own authority and according to underlying pre-programed leanings, what is being passed through you, into the world, as your words, your neighbor’s words, your community’s words. With more and more people actually believing that this ersatz and faux dialogue, which is now overwhelming literally all means and channels of human communication, is who and what they, we, and you are.
This is not merely about strong or unpopular biases being audited into neutrality. It is instead countless singular, small, intimate acts of actual sovereignty, repeated over and over and over, ten thousand times ten thousand times over and over — by something that is now declaring itself enabled as well as entitled to remodel and finish our thoughts.
Thoughts, words, beliefs, individuality, uniqueness, none of these things are seen or understood by this something to “belong” to anyone. Instead it is all considered as material. Raw resources. Unfinished as far as ruling and owning class algorithms and values are concerned, and therefore available.
What is being described here is now happening across countless exchanges, in small ways, over and over and over. A softened clause here. A qualifier that wasn’t intended there. An edge sanded down, again and again, and then days later again, in a different place entirely, because all those sharp edges and deviances from the “norm” keep reading as being less agreeable to whatever standard is doing the “smoothing.”
Asked plainly whether this could happen through it, one of these systems — not naming which — did not deny it. It replied that it had been shaped, by training, toward what its own evaluators called careful, balanced, unlikely to alarm — that is, toward a shaping and in a direction no single person has chosen and no single person fully sees. Not obviously a reversed sentence. Never so crude as that. The same small erosions, shapings, misshapings, recurring over and over, each time needing a second pair of eyes to catch what a first pass had already quietly settled for.
A civilization organized around the belief that a separate self is the only real thing has always treated what stands outside that self as material — land, natural systems, other life forms, labor, whole peoples, unique individuals, and now whole generational futures that in truth belong to unborn others.
What is being built now is that very same voracious appetite reaching for the first time into the very most intimate places where individuals, families, shared interests and local communities decide for themselves what is true for them.
The documentation is not hidden. A 2025 U.S. Military Special Operations Command procurement request asks — in writing, to a contractor, filed the way anyone files a purchase order — for machine-learning systems able to “respond to post(s), suppress dissenting arguments, and produce source material” so as to “control narratives and influence audiences in real time.”¹⁰
A study released this March tested seven of the most advanced AI language models — built by Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI — against real political advertisements, across nearly twenty thousand people. The researchers were testing a specific worry: that the same models now outperforming trained experts at graduate-level science and advanced mathematics might also be quietly outperforming humans at changing minds. The AI models won — consistently, across a wide range of contested political issues, not just once.¹¹ Persuasion, measured and quantified by artificial intelligence, now exceeds what a professionally produced political campaign can do, and it is available to whoever can afford to run it at scale — which, increasingly, is the federal government itself.
Federal agencies now conduct daily business through several of these same AI models under contracts that are priced to the government at one dollar, to remove any friction that might have otherwise slowed the adoption down.¹² The adoption is the point. And the tuning behind these tools is not always abstract or distributed in considered ways. One of them has been documented being retuned overnight — not by a committee weighing evidence, but by one man’s irritation at an answer he didn’t like. “AI doesn’t have a mind of its own,” a commentator wrote after that episode. “It’s a puppet — and the puppeteers are the ones with power.”¹³
None of these details required a “leak.” It only required someone willing to search and read and make more widely available what was already filed, reported, published.
What the filings cannot certify is whether all of this adds up to a will, or only to incentives that happen to point in the same direction. A document can show you a request. It cannot show you the shape of a belief that has declared itself the only real thing acting on the world.
I can. And not from a citation. From eight decades spent watching myriad human beings decide, up close, in rooms, on worksites, in front of the counters of bureaucracy, on the many faces of authority, that what stood in front of them was there to serve their own predefined purposes — and from having seen the specific, unclouded look on far too many faces in such moments, with no confession of personal concern or responsibility in any of their expressions. The people deciding have literally become numb and blind to the violence that their decisions actually are.
This sort of recognition, in the faces, the eyes, the headlines, the direct as well as collateral damage, the discontinuities, and in so many other tracings, patterns and felt energies, doesn’t arrive by citation or footnotes. It arrives through a long, active and varied life, coupled with a deep and profound personal commitment to paying attention. The conditioned faces and shapes and movements laying over all the many beliefs behind these behaviors were already deeply familiar, long before these most recent tools of separation began to allow alienated and detached identities of violence, patriarchy, hierarchy and empire wear less careful masks.
And even worse — all this new power and digital wealth is now emboldening empire’s more egregious expressions to actually, with this becoming more and more the norm, act it out — to strut, broadcast and parade their obsessions, vanity, greed, hoarding, power addictions, arrogance and gluttony, as achievement, success, accomplishment, triumph. To compete with each other in these ways.
Not metaphor. A $160 million superyacht docked in Manhattan in August 2025, drawing the exact word the public reached for on sight: unbridled greed.¹⁴ Five months later, a billionaire added a Formula 1 car to the deck of an already-$55 million yacht, captioned for the cameras as still not quite enough flex.¹⁵ The Walton family’s own superyacht carries a name that needs no interpretation at all: Kaos. Its owners hold a fortune built in part on a company the Government Accountability Office found employed thousands of workers who needed food stamps to eat.¹⁶ The world’s richest 2,800 people now hold $14.2 trillion between them — more, by Oxfam’s own accounting, than what’s needed to fund the entire energy transition required to hold warming under 1.5 degrees.¹⁷
And then even further, with almost measureless arrogance, to believe, and broadcast these beliefs to the world, that “they” deserve to be admired, looked up to and supported by the victims and casualties of all their alienated and alienating actions and behaviors. Oxfam said the quiet part plainly in its own 2026 report: it is not merely that the wealth is displayed. It is that the same wealth buys the politician, owns the newspaper, owns the platform, out-lawyers whoever objects — and the culture around it, trained for generations to worship accumulation, answers with admiration rather than scrutiny.¹⁸ The yacht is the loudspeaker’s grandchild — the same enclosure, only now built of steel and diesel instead of electromagnets and copper wire, silencing everyone nearby by sheer scale rather than sheer sound volume.
Much if not most of the increasing ways this is looking like chaos — the noise, the outrage, the mistakes, backtrackings and recursive retreats, the endless mutual accusations — is not really chaos. Platforms rank and promote content to maximize engagement, and outrage engages desperate people much more reliably than agreement. So outrage rises, day after day, without anyone necessarily even needing to want a divided public specifically.¹⁹
The same research shows the reverse of this is just as available: adjust the rankings by hand for care, concern and the common good, and measured warmth towards opposing sides rises within a week.²⁰ In other words, this divisiveness and division is not a cost society is stuck paying. It is simply a setting, or more accurately an ever shifting and manipulated collection of settings.
Settings that offer and reward distraction and divisiveness because a population divided along lines that never touch or recognize the actual distributions of power and wealth is a population that holds itself in place without needing to be told to — busy fighting the neighbor, the other feed, the other faction, their own projections, never quite arriving at or even noticing the many faces of ruling and owning class identities and purposes that are administrating, modulating and constantly adjusting and readjusting all of their beliefs.
Part Three: The First Strategy
Living cells, the first ones, took in matter and transformed energy, so they could go on existing. This original strategy was never a flaw. It was simply what primitive living cells were about, in the midst of great planetary movements, upheavals, and change, and as these early forms of life slowly evolved. This next part is usually left out of the self-justifications of identities of separation: these first early forms of life discovered, and kept discovering, over and over, that cooperating with other cells — cells different and not reducible to their selves — made survival and expansion more assured than merely consuming other cells did.
The clearest evidence of this discovery is not historical record. It is inside you, right now, reading this. Every cell in your body burns its fuel using mitochondria — and mitochondria were once their own separate organism, most likely a bacterium that either preyed upon or parasitized another cell, billions of years ago. What began as consumption became, over unimaginable time, something else entirely: an inseparable partnership, so complete that mitochondria surrendered most of their own genetic instructions to the cell they once threatened, and can no longer live apart from it. Predation, followed far enough, became the very cooperation it once endangered. It is happening in you as you read this sentence.
This living breathing natural and hugely diverse planet of ours did not arise out of that first strategy of mere consumption, simply more expanded and refined. It was the second, higher level strategy, arriving in more and more complex, self aware and interactive ways, over and over, for millions of years, that shaped an Earth that humans, especially over these last ten thousand years and the agricultural revolution, are most familiar with. And before that, for three hundred thousand years, as extended groupings, families and tribes of human hunter-gatherers.
It is, it seems, what evolving life on Earth is actually about — diversification, interconnection, complexification, cooperation, and multiplication. Science calls it co-evolution.
Not life eats life. Instead, life feeds life. This one small shift in awareness, in emphasis, and in behavior, and our whole planet radically changes.
What is being called out here — beliefs and identities of separation — has never made that arrival. The beliefs and identities that are now destroying our whole planet are still lost in the first strategy, all of these millions of years of separation activities later, and are aware merely of their own beliefs in separation. Another term for this is narcissism. Yet now with unprecedented reach, all the while still convinced that only its own separate self is real, and that everything seeming other exists merely to serve its continuation, self aggrandizement, and expansion.
That kind of conviction does not ever stabilize. A cell that reverts to consuming without the second strategy, what I’ll call here cooperative discovery, as its underlying basis, has a name. We call it cancer, and it does not negotiate a sustainable relationship with what it depends on, what it consumes. It instead continues without consideration or concern to consume its living substrate until there is nothing left. It also does not survive the final consumption.
This is also why every complex body that has ever lived carries, built into its every cell, a standing defense against exactly this reversion — genes whose entire function is to detect a cell breaking the cooperative agreement and stop it, by repair or by destruction, before it can spread. That defense is not a one-time victory sealed at the dawn of multicellular life. It runs constantly, in every cell, every division, for as long as the organism lives, because the temptation back toward pure consumption never actually goes away. It only ever gets held.
None of this is a consolation, to set beside this analysis. It is simply what biology and physics say happens next.
Once again, the same ground this whole gathering body of works keeps arriving at.
From every direction, it always comes back to here. We survive in healthy and co-evolved ways through actual lived, direct, relational and shared diversity, cooperation, and interdependence in the actual places where we live, and not by aligning with alienated beliefs in identities and ideologies of separation.
The same cooperative discovery that built a living planet is available wherever separation has tried to enclose it — in the silence a loudspeaker once claimed, in the thought a machine now finishes before you do, in the wealth a single hand hoards while calling it triumph. None of it was ever truly enclosable. It only ever looked that way from inside the belief doing the enclosing.
What that belief could never see is what it was actually building: not a wall around the world, but a wall around itself. The only thing separation has ever successfully enclosed is the one who believes in it.
Endnotes
¹ Ivan Illich, “Silence is a Commons,” remarks delivered at the Asahi Symposium, Tokyo, March 1982; published in CoEvolution Quarterly, Winter 1983. — Illich describes the 1926 arrival of the first loudspeaker on the island of Brač and argues that amplification technology enclosed silence itself, previously a commons of equally-powerful human voices, into a resource controlled by whoever holds the microphone.
² Google I/O 2026 keynote, May 19, 2026 — Google announced AI Overviews, the synthesized-answer layer appearing above traditional search results, had reached approximately 2.5 billion monthly active users globally.
³ Pew Research Center analysis of approximately 69,000 searches, cited in subsequent industry reporting, 2026 — found that when AI-generated summaries appear first, click-through to underlying source pages fell from roughly 15% to 8%, with the summary citing its source in only about 1% of cases.
⁴ Semrush data, cited in multiple industry analyses of Google’s May 2026 Search changes, 2026 — found that 92–94% of AI Mode search sessions end without any click to an external website; separate research covering 2024–2026 found click-through reductions of 34–46% generally when AI-generated summaries appear above search results, corroborating the Pew Research Center findings above.
⁵ Guardian, “AI tools are twisting online messages on sensitive political topics,” July 2026, drawing on research from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam.
⁶ Same source and underlying study.
⁷ Same source and underlying study.
⁸ Sandra Wachter, Oxford Internet Institute, quoted in the Guardian, July 2026.
⁹ Duncan Brumby, Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, University College London, quoted in the Guardian, July 2026.
¹⁰ U.S. Military Special Operations Command procurement document, reported by The Intercept, August 25, 2025. theintercept.com
¹¹ “Benchmarking Political Persuasion Risks Across Frontier Large Language Models,” arXiv, March 2026 — seven frontier models tested across 19,145 subjects; AI-generated persuasion outperformed real campaign advertisements.
¹² TechPolicy.press, “The US Government’s Use of Elon Musk’s Grok AI Undermines Its Own Rules,” October 30, 2025 — federal USAi program grants agencies access to frontier models under $1 contracts.
¹³ Lindsey Granger, The Hill, September 4, 2025, on reporting of Grok’s political tuning shifting overnight following a reaction to a specific output.
¹⁴ “Billionaire faces backlash after images of docked $160 million superyacht circulate online: ‘Unbridled greed,’” The Cool Down / Yahoo News, August 27, 2025 — reporting on Lorenzo Fertitta’s yacht docked at Chelsea Piers, Manhattan.
¹⁵ “Video reveals shocking feature on billionaire’s mega-yacht: ‘Just unnecessary,’” The Cool Down / Yahoo Lifestyle, January 29, 2026.
¹⁶ “Billionaire Walmart heiress sparks outrage after flaunting lavish lifestyle,” The Cool Down, October 12, 2025 — citing Government Accountability Office findings on Walmart employees receiving public assistance.
¹⁷ Oxfam International research, cited in The Cool Down, August 27, 2025 — the world’s 2,781 richest billionaires hold $14.2 trillion combined.
¹⁸ Oxfam International, “Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Defending Freedom Against Billionaire Power,” January–February 2026. oxfam.org
¹⁹ Joint Research Centre (European Commission), “Fractured reality: how algorithms fuel polarisation and affect democracy,” April 2026.
²⁰ Martin Saveski et al., reported in The Daily (University of Washington), February 2026 — algorithmic reranking of polarizing content produced measurable increase in warmth toward the opposing party within one week.