Artificial intelligence as primitive accumulation: enclosure, extraction, exploitation

Abstract AI systems are imposing escalating calls on the key resources of energy, water, land and minerals and on the hidden labour, often located ‘offshore’, required to build and service them. These demands are the latest episodes in the long history of capitalist accumulation and exploitation organised around enclosure and extraction. This paper suggests that we can usefully begin tracing continuities by revisiting Marx’s analysis of primitive accumulation and David Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession. Marx identified the enclosure of the English commons and the labour and resources delivered by colonial exploitation as the essential foundations of Britain’s leading role in establishing industrial capitalism. The same basic processes have fuelled the unprecedented concentration of control over digital media and AI now exercised in the West by a handful of US corporations. The neoliberal pursuit of marketisation has transferred public resources to private ownership, weakened public interest regulation, and opened new global labour markets for exploitation. The paper reviews these processes, explores their historical roots taking the electric telegraph as a case study and points to the social and environmental harms they cause. It concludes by asking what implications restoring these issues to a central place in analysis has for public policies towards AI.