I’ve been thinking a lot about enclosure, the historical movement to enclose (fence or surround with hedges) common land, which was part of the great sweep of the history of depriving people of various commons (areas of traditional common usage by locals, for grazing livestock, foraging for berries, mushrooms, nuts, firewood, etc.) in the name of profit or efficiency. In fact, enclosure did lead to greater agricultural output, but this was not equally shared. Reading about Jane Austen’s use of enclosure in the plot of Emma in Helena Kelly’s Jane Austen, the Secret Radical earlier this year has had me thinking about how capitalism and empire insist on claiming and monetizing more or less everything.

It has tied into a lot of the thoughts I have been having about generative AI and how the highjacking of humanity by automation and machines seems to be part of the same urge: to profit and to control. I don’t think generative AI is going to turn out to be the same boon to business or culture as enclosure was to agricultural output—I notice that search and voice-to-text have both gone absolutely to shit since genAI was shoehorned into them—but I do think their benefits, such as they are, and their harm, will be unequally distributed in the usual ways.

I’m not convinced that Austen was criticizing enclosure or that she meant readers to be suspicious of Knightley (and modern readers would be much more bothered by what we would see as him grooming Emma since she was 13, than anything to do with agrarian reform, anyway). But I’ve found it helpful to think about and I have started work on an Emma where Knightley, instead of being a proponent of enclosure (albeit much more gently than most real landowners of his time, given he checks that his changes not inconvenience the people of Highbury), is working to put back into common control land that has been seized by corporate interests. I haven’t worked through the logic of how it’ll alter the plot yet but am excited by the entry it gives me into a framework for thinking about it.

Aside from all of this theorizing and plotting, I have spent the past month working at the community health centre I mentioned in my last newsletter, reading (particularly recommend Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night and Rufi Thorpe’s Margo’s Got Money Troubles), and creating promotional images for Aether and Ego, for when the pre-order link becomes available. Here’s a sneak peek:

_{Title is from the poem “New Year” by Joanna Klink. If the title area allowed more I would have quoted this:}

_{Because the year is new and the great change
already underway, we concede a thousandfold
and feel, harder than the land itself,
a complicity for everything we did not see
or comprehend: cynicism borne of raw despair,
long-cultivated hatreds, the promises of leaders
traveling like cool silence through the dark.
My life is here, in this small room, and like you
I am waiting to know}