The Great Enclosure: Survival Tactics for the Digital Commons

The "Tragedy of the Commons," once defined by the over-exploitation of physical grazing lands, has evolved into a digital crisis in 2026. This modern tragedy manifests as a triple threat: an AI "grazing" crisis where models harvest public data without reciprocity, the displacement of quality human content by AI-generated "slop," and the collapse of open-source infrastructure under corporate free-riding. This decay is worsened by technofeudalism, as walled gardens strip users of ownership over their social graphs, and, more broadly, their digital histories. This talk will centre on the economics of AI training and slop to understand why current incentives reward the depletion of shared resources. By adapting Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom’s principles for the commons to code and data, we can support emerging resistance movements—such as digital land trusts, federated protocols like ActivityPub, sovereign data collectives and digital public goods—that are successfully fighting back to reclaim our shared technological and knowledge infrastructures and defend democracy.