Enclosure
The historical and ongoing process by which common lands, shared knowledge, open protocols, and relational power are captured, privatized, and placed under the dominion of centralized powers. The term originates with the English Enclosure movements of the 17th–19th centuries — the parliamentary seizure of common tracks and removal of rural inhabitants who lacked written deed to land they had occupied for generations. “Working class poet” John Clare documented the devastation of these acts in his 1821 writings from the Midlands: “Thus came enclosure — ruin was her guide.”
In these texts, enclosure operates across scales: the historical enclosure of common lands corresponds to the modern enclosure of the internet (by platform monopolies), of money (by financialized institutions), of knowledge (by NDAs, patents, and classification), and of aesthetic life (by the “aesthetic conditioning” of administrative spaces). The Emanationist cosmology that justified colonial projects is the same metaphysical infrastructure that justifies contemporary enclosure: the mystification of relational power as residing in a transcendent interior source.
The concept of enclosure is central to understanding what protocol undergrounds and extitutions are resisting: the colonization of open cultural and technical protocols by commercial or state-centric control organizations. Open protocolization is the counter-strategy — not claiming new territories but ensuring that productive processes remain illegible to enclosing powers.
Ethereum is framed as a technology of de-enclosure: offering “permissive abundance of network wealth” against the “premises of ownership of that which cannot be owned.” (— ETHEREUM IS POSTHUMAN)