“The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.”
— Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

The story of capital tells us that wealth comes from enterprise, that profit is the engine, and that ownership is simply the reward for risk. But when we map the flows of economic value, we see that the modern world has not been built on profit, but on rent. The story most of us grew up on never bothered to make this distinction.

Profit is what we earn by creating value, by seeing an opportunity to meet others’ needs, and exchanging it for something you need more – normally something that gives you more options, like money. Both parties walk away happy.

Rent is what we extract by controlling access to various forms of capital, including land, money, networks, and infrastructure. But much of what we call “innovation” is actually increasingly novel forms of rent extraction, starting with land, home and building access, and interest on capital, then winding up in storage and compute, data intermediaries, social networks, subscriptions, and platform fees. The institutions of Big Tech build on this time-tested pattern to siphon off your data, your network, your knowledge and your identity – and lease it back to you, forever.

As each supplier covers their base cost, rent becomes hidden in almost every exchange, pushing up prices for everyone, tightens the collar around the neck of creativity and innovation, and feeds a monopoly of control over our collective resources. The end state was broadcast by The World Economic Forum’s prediction for the year 2030: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy.”

Once you see it, a lot of the last two hundred years of “progress” snaps into focus: why housing costs eat income, why platforms feel like toll roads, why perpetual growth must coexist with such pervasive, devastating precarity for our co-existence on our wonderful planet.

This essay untangles the knot capitalism tied between profit and rent, traces the repeated mechanics of enclosure, and asks what it would mean to “compost” capital back into the commons.

Profit is earned through genuine innovation, ingenuity, and craft: we transmute our gifts and those of our planet into things that others want. Rent is extracted by claiming and owning those things, creating dependencies that concentrate power around your bottleneck. These are two very different mechanisms, but for the last two centuries of capitalism, the dominant economic discourse has treated them as though they’re the same.

Profit requires you to keep showing up. It goes to zero if you stop producing or innovating, and yields diminishing returns as others learn to duplicate or improve on your approach – so you have to keep learning and improving, too. Profit “belongs to the living” because it requires flow: you profit by generating value in a game with moving targets. By contrast, rent is about obstructing flow, creating dams and bottlenecks and controlling them with violence. It compounds whether you contribute real value or not, accumulating stock and power at the expense of your society’s well-being.

Landlords didn’t build the cities that make their land valuable. Social media companies don’t create the families and friendships they intermediate and surveil. Patent holders don’t reinvent a drug each time it is prescribed. Yet they all extract value ad infinitum, because they hold positional claims on these resources. The French have a phrase for this absent from English-speaking economics: rente de situation. It’s the benefit that accrues to you, not from what you do but where you stand.

David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill both saw it. Henry George named it “unearned income” in 1879. He spent an entire book explaining how it caused the poverty that progress kept producing alongside wealth, and nearly became mayor of New York on the strength of his argument. But by the close of the nineteenth century, rival economists succeeded in replacing George’s definition of rent with a softer one: “income in excess of opportunity cost.” Notice how it stops pointing at the structural consequences. The definition was not refined – it was defanged.

We seek rent to protect us from the scarcity it creates. Every time we make this choice it only draws us deeper into a logical contradiction and further from a world of abundance.

Rent always comes from the same place. Before something can be rented, it must first be enclosed, owned and therefore excluded. Before it can be owned, it must first be claimed.

The word “capitalism” is younger than most people realise. Louis Blanc coined it in 1850 as a term of critique: the appropriation of common resources by some to the exclusion of others. The story of capital prefers to call this process freedom, or progress, or simply “the natural order of things.” But the most precise language for it comes from its opponents, because it’s easier to exorcise a demon when you know its name.

What historians call “the origin of capitalism” is not a story about clever merchants or innovative manufacturers. It is a story about land. Starting in England in the twelfth century, the commons – the shared grazing land, forests, and fields on which ordinary people relied for subsistence – were progressively divided, sold, and privatised by legal manipulation, economic pressure, and physical violence. This enclosure extinguished common rights that granted even the poorest access to the means of their own survival. For centuries, the careful management of these rights had prevented overgrazing, overfishing, and other forms of degradation by imposing elastic limits that preserved the sufficiency of natural resources. Livestock were taught to feed in small local areas without the need of fences. Manorial courts thwarted excessive logging and mineral extraction as part of an integrated system of collective soil and wildlife conservation. But when Lords were granted exclusive rights to use the land as they saw fit and peasants and villagers suddenly had to pay for dwindling access to the substrate of life itself, everyone – not just the poor – lost the age-old protections that ensured there would be enough for all in years to come. Ideas of collective stewardship declined in favor and ownership became increasingly a matter of one’s freedom to exploit and even destroy their property for short-term gain. The future was sold for parts.

The results were catastrophic for human, societal, and ecological health. The remains of Late Medieval peasants show a steep and sudden drop in average height, loss of bone density, and other evidence of extreme stress and malnutrition throughout life. Destitute masses became forced migrants whose compromised immune systems and overcrowding in urban areas contributed directly to the devastating mortality of The Black Plague. This pattern only intensified over the next several centuries, in step with the contraction of the commons until its peak during The Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, Europe’s mature forests declined over 90% between the 12th and 20th centuries and might have been lost entirely if not for aggressive legislation preserving its last remaining timber. Even with today’s nearly miraculous rebound of forest cover, the continent’s biodiversity never recovered and remains in a state of ongoing systemic crisis. The natural wealth people once “paid” for with honest work has been so thoroughly depleted that present-day Europeans would require several tons of global imports per person per year to maintain the same quality of life.

This is the template. Capitalism lives on commons capture, and every subsequent wave repeats it with different resources: identify something everyone will need, build or claim infrastructure around it, and create dependency. Then turn on the pricing and extract forever. Commons become commodities, made artificially scarce and then leased back to those who cannot do without it. Successive enclosures of the broadcast spectrum, the pharmaceutical patent, the social network, and the cloud all follow the same pattern. Lifestyle consumerism enclosed the “authentic self” described by existentialist philosophers and made identity itself a rental contract, under which the real you is only actualized through continuous acquisition and display. Together, these transformations sowed the seeds for the enclosure of our very thoughts. The next chapter in the story of capital is about how the AI infrastructure under construction right now will provide “intelligence on tap” that massively subsidized tech companies plan to sell everyone on a meter.

The violence becomes more abstract with each iteration, but the geometry stays the same. And with every enclosure, the stewardship of a complex system by the many becomes the unsustainable administrative burden of the few. In the short term, power benefits, but the long-term result is catastrophic loss of wealth for everyone.

Rent does one thing extremely well: it undermines abundance, which begets the need to pay more rent.

Every invoice you have ever paid contains rent you cannot see.

Behind every charge is your supplier’s rent on their premises. Even their landlords paid rent on capital through interest. Every supplier in the chain uses software that carries IP licensing fees. Their logistics pass through platforms that extract a margin on every transaction. Their energy bill contains the return of whoever owns the grid. As John Maynard Keynes argued in 1936, the owner of capital obtains interest because capital is scarce, just as the owner of land obtains rent because land is scarce. There is no more intrinsic reason for the scarcity of capital than there is none for the scarcity of air.

Structural rent is present at every scale, compounding upward through every supply chain – a tax on all human productivity that nobody voted for, nobody can see clearly, and nobody can individually opt out of. It is fractal. The same pattern of extraction repeats at every level of magnification, from your personal bank account to the global economy. When you begin to look for it, it is everywhere.

Keynes believed this would resolve itself. He predicted the “euthanasia of the rentier” – that as capital became abundant, interest would fall toward zero and the class of people living on passive returns would simply fade away, made irrelevant by productivity. He was right about the mechanism, but dead wrong about who controls it. Keynes made a first principle error: he assumed capital scarcity was a natural condition that productivity would cure. But capital scarcity is a political condition, an artificial scarcity that must be actively maintained by the architecture of a system whose most powerful actors depend on it. And the political condition is a consequence of any story’s tendency to justify its own existence.

The economic niche of the rentier does not dissolve when capital becomes abundant. The story persists, and the rentier just builds new enclosures to restore the scarcity that guarantees their returns. They capture the regulatory, legal, and financial institutions that determine what can be owned and what remains common. Fourteen years of near-zero interest rates after 2008 should have been Keynes’s conditions for this euthanasia of the rentier. Instead, rentiers thrived: the enclosures just ascended to the cloud. Now, capitalism is more emboldened than ever because it is playing the game on its home turf: the platforms and information flows that shape the collective psyche itself.

Every claim on human effort that exits the productive system as rent is a claim that cannot circulate internally, cannot pay workers fairly, cannot fund the next big idea or reduce the cost of the next product. Value generated locally leaks out through a thousand cuts and accumulates in pools of private power over your system’s own substrates. And because that leakage eats the productive capacity that could rebuild the commons, the system struggles to recover.

This artificial scarcity is the system’s most stable feature. The more capital concentrates GDP into AI, robotics, and automation – all privately owned, controlled, and leased or licensed back to you – the faster we accelerate into capital’s narrative endgame: a world of Total Rent, where reality itself has become a positional claim.

If you’ve built something real – taken genuine risks, created actual value – you might feel attacked. But the line between profit and rent doesn’t split the world into good people and bad people. It runs through almost every enterprise, every investment, every portfolio. And this line has moved to serve the accumulation of power and control.

The moment of genuine innovation described by Josef Schumpeter is real and defensible. You did something new, and the above-normal returns you earned while others caught up were justified. Reward goes to those who take the risk. Creation deserves incentives. The problem begins when temporary advantage becomes permanent: when profits that would have dwindled under fair market competition are instead locked in by barriers to entry like regulatory capture, vendor lock-in, switching costs, predatory pricing, infrastructure control, and the sheer weight of accumulated position. “Innovation” is the measure of a healthy ecosystem of ideas, just like “biodiversity” is the measure of a flourishing ecology; permanent exclusive rights degrade real innovation in exactly the same way that they reduce the living wealth of land.

This is a well-studied phenomenon. Law professors Michael Heller and Rebecca S. Eisenberg observed that when a resource commons is enclosed by too many private, fragmented intellectual property rights, it creates an “anticommons.” Because multiple owners hold the right to exclude others, negotiating with all of them creates massive transaction costs, and the knowledge becomes wastefully underused. In innovation, this means complex downstream technologies (like life-saving drugs or advanced software) never get built because developers are blocked by a “patent thicket” of upstream owners. Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz and his co-authors similarly argued that current IP law slows societal advancement with the aggressive enclosure of the knowledge commons. And Harvard’s Yochai Benkler puts it even more bluntly: “Complex modern market economies would cease to function were they not pervaded by commons” that allow for low-cost, decentralized experimentation, risk-taking, and rapid adaptation that private ownership models inherently choke out.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s distinction is useful here. He upheld the right to personal property – the ownership of what you actually work with, build, occupy, and maintain – including worker’s shares in the companies that employ them. But he condemned the idea of “productive property” used to extract income from others’ use of goods you didn’t create or steward. No individual or corporation produces anything from scratch. Every act of production is downstream of millennia of collective effort: language, mathematics, infrastructure, social trust, and the accumulated knowledge of every generation before. Any claim of private ownership over any of this is always, to some degree, a fiction.

The problem isn’t that ownership is a fiction. Humans need stories, and even the self is a story we tell for practical reasons. But stories are living things, born from and transformed by entire communities – with one exception: the story of a permanent positional claim on value created by the commons. If public research funding dries up, patents do help incentivize private capital to bring innovations to market. But the prevailing IP frameworks of the 21st century are built on the delusion that ideas emerge whole-cloth from whomever claims them first, and can be treated as rivalrous goods.

As Lewis Hyde recounts in Common as Air, US patent and the copyright laws both started as limited-time monopolies designed to balance private incentive with public enrichment. Creators would have enough of a head start to recoup their investment, and then their work would return to the public domain from whence it came. This framework of term-limited exclusivity supported innovation precisely because it was never intended to last forever. It was authored by people who had just rejected the divine right of kingship, saw learning as a collective enterprise, and understood communally-determined currency flows as an instrument of democratic governance. Even the patent laws that preceded the US system – the Venetian Patent Statute of 1474, the British Statute of Monopolies in 1624, and The Statute of Anne in 1710 – all set time limits based on how long it would take to train two generations of apprentices and re-seed ideas back into the community.

If capital is the lifeblood of society, then ask yourself: what kind of being draws as much of it out of circulation as possible?

Again, our stories matter here. While modern media frequently depicts the vampire as a separate, monstrous species, many of the world’s oldest vampire myths viewed it as the spirit in possession of a human body. Not a malicious individual but a faceless hunger that inhabits someone. A pattern living on the substrate of a person.

So the question is not whether you have ever collected rent. In this economy, at any scale, you have – usually in total innocence, believing you were simply earning profit. The question is what you do when you see it.

The temptation is to escape individual scarcity through the very mechanism that causes it for everyone else: every tenant seeks to become the rentier. In business, you find cheaper suppliers, cut costs on labor, negotiate harder, refinance, extract a little more margin to compensate for what’s being extracted from you. This keeps you in the game, but meanwhile the structural rent load on the whole system only grows, and more and more of your ingenuity goes into how to squeeze depleted systems harder than the competition. This is the “original sin” of rent: the positioning of capital to claim on innovation and flourishing itself. And all of us have been paying rent to this story for the last two hundred years, working ever harder to serve unproductive claimants, whilst the idea itself lives in our heads rent-free.

We were taught that capital reduces risk through passive income, but in a world approaching Total Rent, systemic risk keeps growing exponentially until it’s existential. Some things can’t be bought: recent estimates put the value of ecosystem services at $150 trillion annually, roughly twice the size of global GDP. According to research from 2014, modern economies deplete that core capital asset to the tune of between $4-20 trillion every year, steadily eroding the very basis of life itself. When even the wealthiest among us have to buy clean air and water, “passive income” is no longer a secure financial position. (Even vampires don’t want everyone to be a vampire. You’d run out of blood!)

Decoupling rent from profit gives us the clarity to play another game entirely. The same compounding logic that has degraded the social contract, impeded canonical innovation, and undermined planetary life support systems works in the other direction when we point into the flows that sustain us. The smartest move for capital now is in the regeneration of our most basic commons: trust, nature, and the vast networks of shared infrastructure that make modern life possible.

Commons infrastructure reduces the cost base for everyone who draws on it, which means purpose-aligned organisations spend less servicing rent and more pursuing their mission. Stewardship structures deliver value to the people, processes, patterns, and protocols that actually create it. Financial gain becomes one signal among many – including thriving communities, healthy ecosystems, sovereign intelligence, durable relationships, and resilient infrastructure.

The good news: being able to trade one thing for a more valuable thing in the future is a developmental marker observed in human four-year-olds.

The first step out of enclosure is to pay rent where it’s actually due: back into the bigger world the story of capital hid from us, the world from which we borrow everything. No claim is truly permanent, no wealth is fully private, and by far the greater profit lies in making plays that grow the game.

Total Rent gives us a future optimized for maximal overhead and existential threat. Reviving the commons secures a future with an ROI on care too great to measure. Which one we get depends on the quality of our maps and the clarity of our vision.

“No amount of private wealth can purchase what a healthy society provides freely: the ability to walk safely in public spaces, trust in everyday transactions, a thriving cultural commons, and the innovative dynamism that comes from broad-based prosperity. History shows that the most successful capitalists have been those who recognized when the rules needed to change, who understood that their long-term interests aligned with systemic evolution rather than defending an unsustainable status quo. Investing in systemic well-being [is] actually the most sophisticated form of wealth preservation available. When you fund regenerative systems, you’re not giving money away; you’re purchasing social stability, environmental resilience, and economic dynamism that will benefit your family for generations. It’s taking responsibility for the commons that wealth depends upon rather than hoping someone else will maintain them.”
— Benjamin Life, “Compost Capital or Die”

If the history of enclosure tells us anything, it’s far more challenging to rebuild a commons than to maintain one. And of course, cooperation doesn’t work if everybody else .

In Part Two, we’ll explore what a thriving multiscale, multidimensional commons might look like in the future we’re building at Atlas – including:

• How ecologically-informed financial systems and sovereign collective intelligence infrastructures support the decision to engage in voluntary stewardship.

• How to navigate the paradox that a successful commons requires clearly defined boundaries.

• How a planet-scale digital commons could address the massive coordination and enforcement challenges that historical, localized communities never had to face.

• How coherent sociotechnical processes can offset the risk of capital-intensive development for critical innovation.