ESSAY · JULY 2026

Over the past hundred years, people in positions of power have steadily converted pieces of the living world into property, infrastructure, and financial products. Now some of those same people are proposing to meter sunlight and re-engineer the sky — and they are reaching for artificial intelligence to help manage it. That combination is worth pausing over. Not because the technology is the villain. It isn’t. The question this essay asks is about the people making the decisions, and where their choices leave everyone else.

Let me be clear at the outset, because it matters: AI is a tool. It does not want anything, decide anything, or take anything. Every enclosure described below was chosen by human beings — legislators, executives, investors — who could have chosen otherwise. When I point to harm, I am pointing at them, not at the machine they use.

From land to state and corporate control

In the early and mid-twentieth century, industrializing nations asserted what lawyers call “permanent sovereignty over natural resources” — formal authority over land, forests, water, and minerals inside their borders, often displacing older communal or customary arrangements in the process. On paper this was about self-determination. In practice it set the legal stage for governments to hand effective control of those resources to corporations through concessions and long-term contracts. The commons didn’t vanish; they were absorbed into state and corporate property systems.

Big dams, big mines, big agriculture

From the 1950s through the 1980s, “development” often meant mega-projects: dams flooding valleys, industrial farms replacing diverse smallholdings, logging and mining carving up forests. Decisions about rivers and soils were typically made by central ministries and their corporate partners, far from the communities who had depended on those places for generations. Nature became an input to national growth, and the people on the ground were expected to adapt.

Privatizing the basics

By the 1980s and 1990s, a new doctrine took hold: privatization and market reform. Public utilities, especially water and energy, were sold or restructured to make room for private investors. Scholars describe this as a modern wave of “enclosures,” in which access to water or land is sliced into tradable rights. Those without money or political standing are pushed to the margins, while firms gain secure titles and predictable returns.

Turning carbon, genes, and data into assets

As the climate and biodiversity crises deepened, policymakers turned to markets to address them. Carbon-trading schemes converted the carbon-storage capacity of forests into tradable credits. Patent systems turned genes and biochemical compounds into proprietary assets. Technology companies treated human behavior and communication as extractable, ownable data. The logic each time was the same: take a shared or loosely defined domain, assign property rights, and connect it to a market.

The ecological record

The consequences of this century of ownership are measurable. According to the FAO, roughly 75 percent of the genetic diversity of agricultural crops was lost over the twentieth century, as farmers worldwide shifted from diverse local varieties to a handful of uniform, high-yielding ones. Wild vertebrate populations, on average, have fallen sharply since 1970. Many of the world’s major fishing grounds have been pushed to or past their sustainable limits. The point is not only that nature has been damaged, but that the particular forms of control people chose made that damage likely.

A partial counter-current

There is another thread. Over recent decades, international law has slowly acknowledged that Indigenous peoples hold real rights over their lands — including ownership, a voice in decisions, and prior informed consent for extraction. In places this has shifted genuine power back to communities: community-run forests, communal irrigation, and “rights of nature” laws that treat a river as a legal person rather than an object. These gains are real, but they are often fragile, underfunded, and contested by state and corporate interests.

Enclosing the sky

Against that backdrop, a newer proposal has appeared: people who want to modulate or sell sunlight itself. The startup Reflect Orbital has proposed redirecting sunlight from orbit onto chosen locations on Earth after dark — an attempt to turn light into a billable service. Set aside whether it will work. The instinct is the point: to treat the sky and the planet’s energy flows as infrastructure that a small number of firms and officials could govern. If systems like that ever scaled, the question of when a community gets darkness or artificial daylight would become something decided by owners and operators, rather than something simply given.

Where AI actually fits

This is where artificial intelligence enters — and it’s important to be precise, because the easy version of this story is wrong. AI is not enclosing anything. People are, and some of them are using AI to do it faster and at larger scale. AI systems are very good at extending fine-grained control over physical systems — power grids, logistics, agriculture, surveillance. That capability is neutral. Whether it serves a community or is used against its interests depends entirely on who owns it and what they instruct it to do.

The scale of the infrastructure people are building for AI is worth stating plainly, because it lands on real places. The International Energy Agency projects that the data centers powering AI could draw around 945 terawatt-hours of electricity a year by 2030 — a figure the United Nations notes is nearly triple the combined annual electricity use of Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nigeria, home together to more than 650 million people. A 2026 report from the United Nations University estimates that the water footprint associated with this energy use could, by the end of the decade, match the basic annual domestic needs of 1.3 billion people; that the land footprint could exceed 14,500 square kilometers; and that rapid hardware turnover could generate up to 2.5 million tonnes of electronic waste a year. The same report notes that most of this energy is spent not on training these systems but on everyday use — an estimated 80 to 90 percent of the total.

These burdens fall unevenly. By recent estimates, roughly 90 percent of the world’s specialized AI computing capacity is controlled by companies in just two countries, while more than 150 nations host almost none of it — yet may still absorb costs through mineral extraction and water use. The benefits are described as global. The damages are frequently local, and often borne by people who were never asked.

What this means for ordinary people

Put plainly, the risk is not that a machine will take over. It is that a small number of people could come to mediate more and more of the basic conditions of life — water, energy, land, and now perhaps light — through systems the rest of us don’t control and can’t inspect. When essential services are routed through infrastructure owned by distant firms, living outside those systems becomes harder and more expensive, and communities grow more exposed to outages, price changes, and decisions made elsewhere.

But none of this is fated, precisely because it is human choices all the way down. The same century that produced these enclosures also produced the counter-currents: rights-of-nature laws, Indigenous land rights, community-run commons, and ordinary local fights over who gets to decide about land, water, and infrastructure. The tools can be contested too — through environmental impact assessments for data centers, community say over where they’re sited, and public insistence on knowing how much water and power they take.

The choice that remains

The question was never whether we will have technology. It is what kind of arrangements we build around it, and who holds the power to decide. We can continue down a path where nearly every part of nature — land, water, genes, carbon, data, and maybe light — is owned and optimized in the service of a few. Or we can insist that some things stay common, governed locally and openly, with these powerful tools serving those arrangements rather than overriding them.

The proposal to own sunlight is a warning sign. It tells us how far the appetite for enclosure now reaches. What it does not tell us is that any of this is inevitable. Every step was a decision made by someone. The next one is ours.