The Adivasi and the Algorithm: The Oldest Enclosure Meets the Newest

When I think about Adivasi land rights, I do not think first about a courtroom or a statute. I think about a boundary that was never drawn on paper — a forest edge that a community knew the way you know the shape of your own hand, and that a distant authority one day declared to be property. That declaration is the whole story in miniature. Something held in common, understood through use and relationship rather than through deeds, is suddenly measured, titled, and assigned to whoever holds the pen. India’s indigenous and tribal peoples have lived inside that story for a very long time. And the more I watch what is happening to our behaviour, our images, and our words online, the more I am convinced it is the same story, wearing new clothes.

I want to draw that parallel carefully, because it is easy to draw it badly. Adivasi communities are not a metaphor. They are living peoples with specific histories, specific losses, and specific fights that are still going on. I am not going to flatten them into a rhetorical device about the internet. But there is a pattern that runs underneath both the oldest dispossession and the newest, and naming that pattern honestly is a way of respecting both.

What enclosure actually is

Enclosure is the conversion of a commons into property. Broadly speaking, a commons is a resource that a community governs together, by custom, for shared use — grazing land, a fishery, a forest that gives firewood and medicine and food and burial ground all at once. Nobody “owns” it in the modern sense, and that is not a failure of organisation. It is a different, older kind of order, one that can be remarkably durable because it is tuned to keeping the resource alive across generations rather than extracting its value in a single season.

To enclose it is to redraw it as something that can be held by one party and denied to the rest. The classic example, the one that gives the movement its name, is the enclosure movement in England, where common fields were fenced and consolidated over the course of centuries and villagers who had lived off them were turned into people who had to sell their labour to survive. The land did not change. The relationship to it did. What had been a web of rights and obligations became a single line on a map with an owner on one side and trespassers on the other.

Once you see that shape, you start to see it everywhere. And you start to notice that the language used to justify it barely changes across the centuries. The commons is always described as wasteful, backward, unproductive, in need of improvement. Enclosure is always described as progress. The people who lose are always described, in the moment, as obstacles to it.

The forest as the original contested ground

In India, the forest became the battleground where this logic met communities who had governed themselves for as long as anyone could remember. Over the colonial period, broadly speaking, the state asserted ownership over vast tracts of forest, reclassifying land that Adivasi communities lived in and from as government property to be managed for timber and revenue. Customary use — the gathering, the shifting cultivation, the seasonal movement, the sacred groves — was reportedly reframed as encroachment or crime. People who had never thought of themselves as owning the forest, because they belonged to it, were now squatters on it.

That reclassification did not stay on paper either. Over the past centuries and into the present, it has meant mining concessions granted over inhabited land, dams that submerged whole valleys and the villages in them, and displacement justified in the name of a public good that the displaced rarely shared in. The pattern of resistance is just as long. There is a deep history of Adivasi revolt against this dispossession, and figures like Birsa Munda have become emblems of it — of the refusal to accept that a distant authority could sign away a world it had never lived in. I hold those movements at arm’s length here only because I do not want to compress their specifics into a slogan. They deserve their own telling.

The commons is always described as wasteful, backward, in need of improvement. Enclosure is always described as progress. The people who lose are always, in the moment, described as obstacles to it.

In the decades since independence, the struggle has moved partly into law. There have been long fights to recognise, at least formally, that forest-dwelling communities have rights — customary rights, community rights, the right to hold and protect the commons they have always tended. Legislation broadly aimed at recognising forest rights was, as I understand it, meant to correct a historic injustice by giving legal standing to relationships that predated the state. Whether it has delivered on that promise is contested, and I am wary of overstating it. Recognition on paper and recognition in practice are famously different things, and the machinery that granted the enclosures does not dismantle itself just because a new law asks it to.

But notice what the fight is even about. It is not, at bottom, about money. It is about who gets to decide the terms on which a shared thing is used, and whether the people whose lives are woven into it have any standing at all. Hold that question. It is exactly the question the new enclosure raises.

The newest enclosure has no fences

Here is the move I want to make. The thing being fenced today is not a forest or a field. It is behaviour. It is the record of what you do — where you go, what you buy, who you talk to, what you pause on, what you say, what your face looks like, how your voice sounds. In its raw state this is a kind of commons too, though an unusual one. It is produced by all of us, constantly, as the exhaust of ordinary living. None of us thinks of it as property because, like the Adivasi and the forest, we are simply inside it. It is the medium of our lives, not an asset in a ledger.

What I am calling data enclosure is the act of drawing a line around that medium and declaring that whoever collected it owns it. Your movement through a city becomes a location dataset that belongs to a company. Your words become training material. Your face becomes a model. The photographs you posted so a friend could see them become, without your ever agreeing to it in any meaningful sense, the raw ore of a product you will never share in. The behaviour is still yours in the sense that you produced it. It is no longer yours in the sense that matters — you do not decide the terms on which it is used, and increasingly you cannot even see them.

I want to be precise that this is a framing, an analogy, not an identity. Losing control of your browsing history is not the same as losing the forest your grandparents were buried in, and I will not pretend it is. The stakes, the violence, the physical dispossession are of a different order entirely. But the logic is the same logic, and that is worth stating plainly, because the people doing the enclosing benefit enormously from our treating it as something brand new. If it is new, it has no history, and if it has no history, we have no precedent for resisting it. The truth is the opposite. We have centuries of precedent. The object is new. The move is ancient.

The old script, running again

Watch how faithfully the justifications repeat. The commons of our behaviour is described, just like the common field and the forest, as wasted if left alone — inert, unproductive, so much latent value going to nothing until someone comes to “unlock” it. The enclosure is described as progress: better services, personalisation, innovation, the future. And the people who object are described, exactly as before, as obstacles to it — nostalgics, cranks, enemies of convenience, people who do not understand that this is simply how things work now.

The mechanism repeats too. The old enclosures worked partly through law and partly through a quiet redefinition of what counted as legitimate. Customary use became trespass by re-description, not by any change in what people were actually doing. The new enclosure works the same way. You did not start doing anything differently. What changed is that a terms-of-service page, which you did not read and could not have negotiated, re-described your ordinary life as consent to its capture. The fence is a checkbox. The trespass is refusing the checkbox and expecting to use the modern world anyway.

I have written elsewhere about how technology gets captured — how tools that could have widened who holds power tend, instead, to get folded into the hands of whoever already has the most. Data enclosure is that dynamic in its purest form. The technology that could let a community understand and govern itself becomes, through enclosure, the instrument by which the community is understood and governed by someone else. And the same asymmetry that made the forest so easy to take makes this easy too. The community that produces the value is dispersed, busy surviving, unaware of the scale of what is being extracted. The party enclosing it is concentrated, well-resourced, and patient.

Why the parallel is worth the risk

So why insist on the comparison, given how carefully I have had to hedge it? Because the older struggle has taught things the newer one desperately needs to learn, and because those lessons are inconvenient for the people who would prefer we start from zero.

The first lesson is that the frame is decisive. As long as your behaviour is understood as a natural resource lying around for the taking, its capture looks like harvesting rather than dispossession. The single most important act of the forest-rights struggle, as I read it, was insisting that customary relationships were rights — that use over generations created a claim the law had to reckon with, even where no deed existed. The equivalent claim for data has barely been articulated, let alone won. We mostly talk about “privacy,” which is a thin and individual word for what is really a collective question of ownership and governance. This connects to a broader argument about data colonialism in India — the way the extraction of behaviour from populations here echoes older extractive relationships, resources flowing out and value accruing elsewhere.

If data enclosure is new, it has no history; and if it has no history, we have no precedent for resisting it. The truth is the opposite. We have centuries of precedent. The object is new. The move is ancient.

The second lesson is about the limits of paper. The forest-rights fight shows how a law can formally recognise a right and still leave the underlying machinery of dispossession intact, because recognition is only as real as the power to enforce it against parties who would rather it stayed theoretical. Anyone hoping that a data-protection statute will, on its own, undo data enclosure should sit with that history for a while. A right you cannot see being violated, and cannot afford to defend, is a right in name.

The third lesson is the most hopeful, and I do not want to end without it. The commons is genuinely durable. It has been enclosed again and again, and it has also, again and again, refused to disappear. Communities have held forests through generations of pressure. The claim that the commons is backward and doomed is itself part of the enclosing script, and it has been wrong for centuries. That gives me a stubborn kind of hope about our behavioural commons too. The value being extracted from us exists only because we keep producing it — living, moving, speaking, making. That is not a weak position. It is, potentially, an enormous amount of leverage held by people who have not yet understood themselves as holding it together.

What I take from it

I keep returning to that boundary that was never on paper — the forest edge a community knew in its body and a distant authority converted into property with a signature. The whole of enclosure, old and new, is the gap between those two ways of knowing a thing: as a relationship you are inside, or as an asset you can be excluded from.

Our data is being moved from the first kind of thing to the second, quietly, in front of us, with our unread consent. Naming that as enclosure rather than as innovation is not nostalgia. It is the beginning of standing where the forest-dwellers have long stood — insisting that being inside something, having produced and lived it, is a claim, and that the pen which draws the fence is not the only authority in the room. The Adivasi have been saying that against the oldest enclosure for a very long time. The least the rest of us can do, facing the newest one, is learn to say it too — and mean it enough to make it hold.