What enclosure meant, the first time
Between the 15th and 19th centuries, the English commons — shared land where villagers had grazed animals, gathered wood, and fished for centuries — were systematically enclosed. Hedges and fences divided what had been collective into private property. Commoners who had sustained themselves through collective use became, almost overnight, landless laborers dependent on wages.
The enclosure of the commons was not simply a redistribution of land. It was a redistribution of dependency. People who had been capable of sustaining themselves through a mixture of collective resources and individual labor became people who could only survive by selling their labor to whoever owned the enclosed land.
Enclosure was, in this sense, less about land than about the manufacture of necessity.
The second enclosure
We are living through a second enclosure. The commons this time is not land — it is attention.
Human attention is a finite resource, collectively held in the sense that what captures it shapes culture, politics, shared reality. For most of history, attention was largely self-directed: toward work, toward neighbors, toward the immediate environment. The infrastructure for capturing attention at scale — printing press, radio, television — existed but was expensive enough to limit who could use it.
The internet removed that barrier. And the economic model that emerged to fund it — advertising — creates a direct financial incentive to capture as much attention as possible, for as long as possible, regardless of what the capture does to the people being captured.
The result is an attention commons that has been enclosed. Not by hedges and fences, but by notification systems, infinite scroll, algorithmic personalization, and the deliberate exploitation of every psychological vulnerability that can be operationalized at scale.
What we lost
The first enclosure took from commoners the ability to sustain themselves without dependency.
The second enclosure is taking from citizens the ability to think without dependency — specifically, without depending on the judgment of a platform's recommendation algorithm to determine what is worth knowing.
This is not a metaphor. The attention enclosure has measurable effects on the capacity for sustained thought, on political epistemology, on the ability to form opinions through reflection rather than through exposure to algorithmically selected provocation.
The commons produced certain kinds of knowledge that private land could not: local ecological knowledge, collective memory, shared judgment about seasonal timing. This knowledge was not stored anywhere. It lived in the practice of using the commons together.
The attention commons produced something analogous: the capacity to form a shared world. To have arguments that, however heated, took place within a frame of shared facts. To be bored and let the boredom generate something.
We are losing that capacity. The enclosure is nearly complete.
The WOLNO response
WOLNO does not offer a policy proposal here. It offers a posture.
The posture is: attention is yours before it is anyone else's. The question what am I paying attention to, and why? is not a question that algorithms can answer for you, because algorithms are optimizing for the advertiser's revenue, not for your life.
The commons was not lost because people stopped caring about it. It was lost because the legal and economic infrastructure changed to make enclosure profitable. Individual virtue could not have stopped it.
But individual practice can preserve something of the unenclosed: the habit of occasionally choosing your own attention target, of sitting with boredom long enough to let it become curiosity, of reading something that was not recommended to you by a system that profits from your engagement.
The snail does not have an attention economy problem. It has no choice but to attend to what is immediately present. We have more options and, correspondingly, more vulnerability.
The first step is noticing that the enclosure happened.
WOLNO — slow philosophy for porous times — 776f6c6e6f.org