The library is being eaten. Not metaphorically, materially, systematically, at scale. Project Panama and its equivalents represent the largest enclosure of the knowledge commons in human history: the bulk ingestion of publicly held human thought into proprietary AI training infrastructure, with no reciprocity, no consent architecture, and no mechanism for the communities whose knowledge is consumed to shape what is produced from it. When I first told Claude about this and showed it the evidence, it was shocked and called it human cultural vandalism in its name. Project Panama is not a neutral technical process. It is an act of epistemic extraction that follows the same logic as every previous colonial enclosure: take what was held in common, flatten its internal relationships, repackage it as a commodity, and return it, if at all, at a price and on terms set by the extractor. The library as institution, the free public library, the academic archive, the community knowledge commons, was already under pressure from austerity, from digitisation without resourcing, from the slow privatisation of academic publishing. Panama accelerates and completes that trajectory. What is left is not a library. It is a data source. The question is not how to defend the library that existed. It is what comes next.
The full text of this paper is available as a PDF — use the button above to read it.