Preamble
Humanity has never had better tools for sharing knowledge. And yet, more of it is locked away than at any point in modern history. Paywalled. Gated by algorithms that serve ad revenue, not understanding. Treated as a commodity measured in clicks rather than clarity.
This is the new enclosure.
Centuries ago, common lands were fenced off from the people who tended them. Today, the same thing is happening to knowledge itself. Research that the public paid for sits behind subscription gates. Cultural heritage is buried in proprietary databases. Our attention — the hours we spend reading, searching, learning — has become a raw material to be extracted and sold.
We reject this enclosure, and we are building something better.
Principles
I. Knowledge belongs to humanity.
Knowledge produced through public funding, shared inquiry, and collective cultural effort must remain accessible to all. No corporation or government may rightfully claim exclusive ownership over what communities, researchers, and cultures have built together. We respect intellectual property law while advocating for its reform where it fails the public interest.
II. Attention is sovereign.
Every person has the right to direct their own attention without manipulation. Systems designed to hijack attention through addictive loops, outrage amplification, or manufactured scarcity violate that right. Sovereign attention does not imply a right to amplification or freedom from accountability.
The internet was built for dialogue — for people to exchange knowledge, challenge ideas, and learn from one another. Recommendation systems, designed to maximize engagement rather than understanding, have replaced this exchange with endless passive consumption. When an algorithm determines what you see next, your attention is no longer sovereign. It is harvested.
III. Creation must precede extraction.
Systems that produce nothing yet capture everything break the basic agreement that holds the commons together: you contribute before you take. An information economy that rewards enclosure over contribution undermines its own foundation.
IV. Transparency is non-negotiable.
Any system that shapes public knowledge — whether search engine, content platform, or recommendation algorithm — must be subject to meaningful public accountability and independent audit. What cannot be examined cannot be trusted.
V. Access without surveillance.
The price of knowledge must never be the surrender of privacy. No one should be tracked, profiled, or monetized for the act of learning. Reading is not a transaction. Curiosity is not a data point.
VI. Local wisdom, global commons.
Cultural and community knowledge should flow freely across borders while respecting its origins. The encyclopedia of a village — its recipes, its remedies, its stories — belongs to the world. But the world must honor the village, with the informed consent and participation of its people. Open access is not extraction by another name.
VII. Building, not burning.
We construct alternatives within the law. We do not tear down what exists — we build what should exist alongside it. Our tools are transparency, cooperation, open standards, and the patient work of making knowledge accessible.
What We Observe
The enclosure is not abstract. It is specific and measurable:
- Publicly funded research locked behind paywalls that charge those who paid for it.
- Algorithms that amplify division because division drives engagement, and engagement drives revenue.
- Cultural heritage digitized by public institutions, then licensed exclusively to private platforms.
- Educational resources priced beyond the reach of the communities that need them most.
- Personal data harvested from every act of reading, searching, and learning — then sold to shape the very information we receive.
- Platforms originally built for human conversation, transformed into delivery systems where recommendation algorithms determine what millions read, watch, and believe — optimizing not for knowledge but for time spent.
These are not inevitable consequences of technology. They are choices. And choices can be made differently.
Our Commitments
By endorsing this Declaration, we pledge to:
- Create and share openly. Where we produce knowledge, we will make it accessible under open licenses that permit sharing, adaptation, and redistribution.
- Respect the law and work within it. We do not advocate circumvention or destruction. We build legal, sustainable, open alternatives.
- Protect privacy as a condition of access. We will not require surveillance as payment for knowledge.
- Support open infrastructure — open-source tools, open standards, open protocols — that no single entity can enclose.
- Demand transparency from systems that shape public knowledge, and practice it in our own work.
- Navigate machine learning with principle. Open knowledge must not become a loophole for uncredited extraction by automated systems. We support transparent, fair frameworks for how knowledge trains technology — frameworks that respect creators and remain open to scrutiny.
- Stand with those who lack access. The value of open knowledge is measured by who can reach it, not by who already has it.
A Call to Action
We invite every person and organization to endorse this Declaration.
By adding your name, you join a growing community of builders: librarians, educators, researchers, developers, archivists, journalists, and citizens working to keep knowledge open. If your institution, project, or community shares these principles, make it official.