The Cognitive Commons: The Last Enclosure
The Cognitive Commons is the political concept — advanced by the Human Remainder, the SCLF, and a growing coalition of labor activists — that human attention is a shared resource, like air or water, and that its commodification constitutes an enclosure of the commons analogous to the privatization of public land. The argument is straightforward: attention is a finite biological resource. Each human mind produces approximately 16 hours of waking attention per day. When that attention is commodified — sold through forced-focus contracts, taxed through the Attention Tithe, shaped through neural advertising, and measured through cognitive load pricing — it ceases to be a personal capacity and becomes a corporate asset. The individual retains the biological substrate. They lose effective control of its primary output.
Quick Facts
Technical Brief
A forced-focus worker consents to sell their time. But the focus lock doesn’t just control their time — it controls what they think about during that time. The distinction is the distance between renting a room and renting a mind.
The Commons movement draws this line with surgical precision. Traditional labor sells hours. A welder shows up, welds, goes home. The welder’s mind wanders to their children, their dinner, the ache in their shoulder. The focus-locked worker cannot wander. Their attention is neurologically constrained to the task — their consciousness directed and held by systems they did not design, toward outputs they do not own, for durations they cannot interrupt. This is not employment. This is cognitive tenancy.
The Economic Trap
The opposition’s argument is not ideological — it is arithmetic. The Attention Economy generates ¢340 billion annually. Banning forced-focus contracts would not liberate 14 million workers. It would unemploy them. And in the Sprawl, unemployment is the loss of everything: consciousness license, housing access, network privileges, medical coverage. The system that harms and the system that sustains are the same system.
The Distinction
Selling time is old as labor. A worker sells eight hours and their body is present but their mind is free — free to daydream, to plan, to hate the work, to love the work, to think about anything at all while their hands move. Selling attention is new. The focus-locked worker’s mind is not free. Their consciousness is directed, held, and metered. The Commons movement argues this is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind.
Network
The Human Remainder
The political vehicle for the Commons movement. The Remainder champions the Cognitive Liberty Act and provides the organizational infrastructure for the coalition.
Councillor Adaeze Nwosu
Has introduced the Cognitive Liberty Act twice. Its twice-failed champion. Nwosu’s persistence is either principled or performative — the Sprawl has not yet decided.
Source Code Liberation Front
Provides the technical analysis of how attention is captured, metered, and sold — the engineering documentation behind the political argument.
The Attention Abolitionists
Share the philosophical framework of attention as a commons. Where the Remainder organizes, the Abolitionists theorize.
The Attention Economy
The Commons movement challenges the Economy’s fundamental premise — that attention is a commodity to be traded rather than a right to be protected.
Forced-Focus Contracts
The most visible target. The contract that sells what you think about, not just your time — the clearest case of cognitive enclosure.
Open Questions
The Cognitive Commons forces the Sprawl to confront questions it would rather leave unanswered — questions where the morally obvious answer is economically catastrophic.
The Enclosure
Attention is the last commons. Land was enclosed centuries ago. Water was privatized decades ago. Now the biological act of noticing — the finite capacity of a human mind to direct itself toward something and hold — is parceled, priced, and sold. The construction crews are approaching from every direction. The question is whether anyone will stop them.
The Trap
Ban forced-focus contracts and 14 million people lose their jobs, their licenses, their housing, their access to medical coverage. Preserve forced-focus contracts and 14 million people continue selling their thoughts. The system that harms and the system that sustains are the same system. The Cognitive Liberty Act fails not because the Council disagrees with its principles — but because it cannot survive its consequences.
Cognitive Sovereignty
The right to choose what you think about. The right to let your mind wander. The right to daydream during work, to hate the task, to love it, to be bored by it — to be present in your own consciousness without neurological constraint. The Commons movement argues this is the foundational right from which all other rights derive. If you do not own your attention, you do not own yourself.
If your attention is for sale, who owns your mind?
▲ Classified
The Beautiful Idea
The Cognitive Commons is a beautiful idea. The Sprawl’s economy would collapse without its violation. Everyone involved knows this — the advocates, the legislators, the corporations, the workers themselves. The movement persists not because anyone believes it will succeed, but because some ideas are too important to stop saying out loud, even when saying them changes nothing.
Councillor Nwosu knows the Act will fail a third time. She will introduce it anyway.