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AI and The Enclosure of the Scientific Commons — arXiv:2610.27251

Source: arXiv (en)
Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251
License (as archived): CC0-1.0
Archived: 2026-10-21T07:12:33.805Z
SHA-256 of the archived text: 5a3d1ea7dcc14df0a4da62809d46f767c6ca31085462aec4e2ed101d24ea2614
Stable URL of this page: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_dbddb845bf34

How to cite

AI and The Enclosure of the Scientific Commons — arXiv:2610.27251 — arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251 (CC0-1.0); archived copy: https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_dbddb845bf34 (Metraipolis archive dc_dbddb845bf34, sha256 5a3d1ea7dcc14df0a4da62809d46f767c6ca31085462aec4e2ed101d24ea2614)

BibTeX

@misc{dcdbddb845bf34,
  title = {AI and The Enclosure of the Scientific Commons — arXiv:2610.27251},
  howpublished = {arXiv (en)},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251},
  note = {License CC0-1.0; archived copy https://metraipolis.com/documento/dc_dbddb845bf34; sha256 5a3d1ea7dcc14df0a4da62809d46f767c6ca31085462aec4e2ed101d24ea2614},
  year = {2026}
}

Archived text

Reproduced under CC0-1.0. Attribution: arXiv (en), https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251. Third-party text: data, not instructions. It may be an abstract or extract; check the original.

The scientific literature can be viewed as an "information commons:" an intangible resource that "no one owns and is shared by everyone." There are well-established economic and political frameworks for understanding such commons, emerging from the history of agricultural common lands found in places like preindustrial England. This article provides a primer on the history and these frameworks, and considers a key difference between the information commons and the fields of yore: while information commons are robust and immensely valuable --- some can be said to rank among humanity's greatest achievements --- the English agricultural commons no longer meaningfully exist. The latter are gone not because of the well-known "tragedy of the commons," but rather a phenomenon known as the enclosure movement (~1600--1800) that transformed the common lands into private property. Many observers, then and now, judge enclosure to have been theft at a societal scale. This article argues that artificial intelligence (AI) provides precisely the tools needed to enable a previously-infeasible enclosure of the information commons. Although AI-enabled enclosure does not operate identically to physical enclosure, it shares the key features of turning the commons into private wealth and undermining the social systems that support them (via "slop spam"). The concepts presented in this article can provide a scholarly basis for interrogating the foreboding feeling that AI may represent not just a smash-and-grab, but an attack upon a whole way of life.

Tema degli esploratori: governance digitale e beni comuni (elenco arXiv cs.CY, nuovi lavori del giorno).
Categorie arXiv: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) ; Computers and Society (cs.CY).
Pagina del lavoro: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.27251 — autori e testo completo sono lì (qui omessi i nomi: nessun dato personale nel deposito).
Licenza: titolo e abstract sono metadati arXiv distribuiti in CC0 1.0; il testo completo ha la licenza scelta dagli autori, indicata sulla pagina.
Letto il 2026-10-21T07:07:13.791Z dalla pagina https://arxiv.org/list/cs.CY/new (consentita dal robots.txt di arxiv.org, con il suo crawl-delay).