In 13th Century England and Wales, the first enclosure of common land by the wealthy began a process that would reshape the countries for centuries to come. Land owned by nobody and everybody, land that had been held and worked collectively, land held for grazing, foraging, and subsistence, was fenced off and turned into private property and a resource for private profit. The people who had worked and depended on it were dispossessed. They did not consent, and they were rarely compensated. What had been shared became owned, and the logic of profit replaced the logic of community.
The impact of these enclosures is not ancient history. To this day, half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population, with only 8% of all England’s land open to public access. Aristocracy and gentry alone continue to own 30% of England.
And now, the same enclosure logic is at work today on our data.
The raw material of 21st Century capitalism is not soil or timber, but the continuous stream of information that human beings generate almost every minute of every day, from the medical appointment you attend, the online searches we make, the travel route we plot, and the messages we send.
And data is our new commons, a rich seam of resources that could be harnessed for our benefit in the form of public knowledge, better public services, collective self-governance, and a digital infrastructure as open and sustaining as any forest, field, or waterway that communities have ever held in common.
But like the commons of the 13th Century England and Wales, data is being enclosed, captured, privatised, and turned to profit.
What are the commons?
The idea and defence of the commons has a long intellectual and radical history, most notably by radical groups like the Levellers and Diggers of the 17th Century.
But, more recently, the most prominent academic influence comes from the American economist Elinor Ostrom. In her 1990 book Governing the Commons, Ostrom showed that across history and across cultures communities have successfully created their own community-led institutions for managing shared resources like water, fisheries and forests, without those resources being either privatised or controlled centrally by the state.
While Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” argued that shared resources are inevitably over-exploited, Ostrom demonstrated that communities are capable of governing commons sustainably, provided certain principles are built into the management institutions: clear boundaries, rules adapted to local conditions, collective decision-making, and meaningful accountability.
The digital world similarly has its own commons (and radical) tradition, stretching back to the early internet: open-source software, freely shared code, protocols built on public standards rather than proprietary systems. Organisations like MySociety built tools like TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem that made democratic data openly accessible. These were not commercial products. They were public goods, governed by the principles of openness and shared benefit that Ostrom, in a very different context, had described.
21st Century enclosure and data colonialism
What happened next is familiar to anyone who has watched the slow privatisation of a public resource. Like a forest that suffers death by a thousand marginal developments, the digital commons did not disappear overnight, abolished by legislation or seized by force. Instead, it is being absorbed over time, privatised and hollowed out by platforms whose business model depended on the capture of surveillance data at scale, its transformation into predictions about human behaviour, and the sale of those predictions to advertisers, security agents and other clients.
But Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, in 2018’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, argued that surveillance capitalism is not simply about mining data for advertising. It is actually a new economic logic in which human experience itself is the raw material: extracted, processed, and sold without our knowledge or meaningful consent. What’s more, it is the companies at the heart of this system that have claimed the right to decide “who knows, who decides who knows, and who decides who decides who knows” (Zuboff, 2019).
In doing so, these companies have seized a extraordinary form of power over our lives that nobody elected them to hold. Indeed, Zuboff described this in a 2021 New York Times article as ‘The Coup We Are Not Talking About’.
Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias pushed this argument further. In 2019’s The Costs of Connection, they argued that what is happening to data is not merely an extension of existing capitalism, but something that deserves to be understood as a genuinely new form of colonialism.
European colonial forces appropriated land, natural resources, and the stolen bodies of people forced to work them. Data colonialism, on the other hand, appropriates human life itself, converting the flow of daily existence into a raw material, ready for sale to the highest bidder. And just as colonial powers once declared vast territories in the Global South and beyond as belonging to no one and therefore available for the taking, Couldry and Mejias argue that digital corporations treat personal data as an “open resource for extraction that is somehow ‘just there’ for capital”, freely available for extraction.
Palantir and the privatisation of public knowledge
This analysis has a very concrete expression in the United Kingdom right now, in the form of Palantir.
Palantir was seeded by the CIA’s venture capital arm. Its founders have been explicit about the company’s ambitions: in its own manifesto, Palantir has proclaimed that war based on AI is the coming form of geopolitical power, and that software is, in effect, a weapon.
It is, of course, worth repeating that Palantir is a US arms company that supplies weapons tech to the Israeli Defence Force used in the Gaza genocide, while also working with ICE in the US in the Trump administration’s racist deportation programme.
This same company also currently holds contracts worth over £670 million across some 12 UK government departments, including a deal to run the NHS Federated Data Platform. This deal gives Palantir access to the health records of me, you, and everyone else who uses the NHS in England.
Palantir’s entry strategy follows a pattern its own executives describe as ‘land and expand.’ The company offers free trials, subsidised pilots, and below-market bids. Once a dependency is established, once an institution has restructured its workflows around Planter’s proprietary systems, the company is in a position to extract any value that it sees fit. As Sian Berry MP, one of the most persistent parliamentary voices on this issue, put it in a recent Green Isles interview: “This is how to create an unnatural dependency on something, which is essential when you have much more to gain from a long-term association than just simply winning the contract. That’s why they offer so much for free.”
This, right here, is the new enclosure.
It is the conversion of what was, or could and should have been, a public digital commons, into a proprietary system. And one that the public funds, but does not own, control, consent to or, it would seem, largely want; 48% of adults in the UK would opt out of the FDP if they knew a private company was running it, according to a 2023 YouGov poll commissioned by Foxglove and the Doctors’ Association UK.
Meaningful consent has not been sought. Meaningful transparency has not been offered.
From monocultures to ecosystems
James Baker of the Open Rights Group (ORG) has proposed a compelling ecological metaphor in building a case for an alternative. In a recent essay for Green Isles, he argued that our current digital landscape resembles agricultural monocultures: vast, efficient-looking, controlled by a handful of corporations, and deeply fragile. Like a field planted entirely with a mono-crop, a digital infrastructure dominated by a small number of proprietary platforms is vulnerable to catastrophic failure.
And like monocultures, it achieves its apparent efficiency only by displacing the diversity and resilience that a healthier system would provide.
The alternative Baker proposes is what he calls ecological digital sovereignty: systems that are diverse, interoperable, locally adaptable, community-oriented, and not controlled by any single point of power. Open standards. Open-source code. Public digital infrastructure funded as civic infrastructure. The right to repair and modify the software systems we depend on.
What might be surprising is that this almost utopian vision actually mirrors principles that already exist within UK government policy: in the Government Digital Service; in councils that share open-source code; in the long tradition of civil society digital tools that were built for the public good, not for profit.
And Baker’s ecological model echoes Ostrom’s insight: the choice does not have to be simply between privatisation and centralised, state control. Communities can govern digital commons, provided they have the tools, the standards, and the political will to do so.
Our political task
Right now, as we speak, the enclosure of the data commons is not inevitable. Like many things, it is a political choice, and as a political choice it can reversed by political means. The fact that a small number of parliaments, city governments and public bodies have begun to push back is encouraging. For example, when, in May 2026, the London Assembly was prompted to re-examine their city’s data policy in light of Palantir’s free trial to the Metropolitan Police, it was because a clear set of prior public commitments to data autonomy, open source and transparency gave the Mayor of London the grounds to say no.
The existence of a public commons framework, even an imperfect one, made resistance possible.
More terrifyingly, meanwhile, the US CLOUD Act gives the US government the legal authority to compel American tech companies, like, say, Palantir, to surrender data that they hold, regardless of where it physically resides or which jurisdiction it falls under. As Berry, ORG, and every other single person paying attention have shouted from the rooftops, this is a sovereignty risk: a foreign state has a legal mechanism to use our data.
Calling this a national security issue is a precise description.
(A pertinent question for those who campaigned for Brexit under a banner of UK sovereignty is whether they will campaign against actual foreign interference in our public services with the same vigour as they did against the inflated accusations of EU interference in 2015 and 2016.)
The contribution of progressives to this fight is, first, to name what is happening accurately. This is not a procurement story. It is not even really a technology story. It is a story about enclosure, extraction, privacy, rights and the privatisation of a commons, a commons of shared public data and collective public infrastructure.
And second, it is to insist publicly, loudly, that alternatives exist. The digital commons is a set of real practices, already operating, that can be scaled and defended. What it needs is what every commons has always needed: governance, public investment of both money and interest, and political will.
The enclosers of the 13th century onwards acted quickly before most people had the means or awareness to stop them.
The question for our moment is whether we act now, while the digital commons can still be reclaimed.
