TL;DR
Treating privacy and creative work as property rights that can be bought and sold leaves the poor and creators increasingly powerless before capital; only by framing these issues as human and labor rights can they truly be protected.
The author argues that capitalism has soaked us all in the holy water of 'property rights,' and even its critics talk in terms of buying and selling—so the battle is lost before it begins.
Privacy is not a commodity
Some propose: if Facebook steals your privacy, it should pay you—a few dollars a year. The rich shrug it off, but the poor, for the sake of that small change, would have to endure surveillance every day. When businesses know you've just been paid, they add an extra dollar to your breakfast burrito in the app. The poorer you are, the more privacy you sell; the more you sell, the poorer you become. A vicious cycle.
Worse, privacy is never just one person's affair—if your mother is your mother, that fact belongs to you, her, both grandmothers, your father, and your siblings. You didn't sell the family tree, but your cousin handed their genome to 23andme, and yours is implicated too.
The problem is not that privacy is under-priced
The author says: human life is priceless, which is why murder and rape are illegal. But if privacy becomes a priced commodity, Facebook can say, 'You agreed to exchange privacy for service.' That turns the most basic human right into a shelf item.
Creators fall into the 'copyright' trap
Media companies constantly accuse AI companies of 'stealing' works, yet they themselves have long wanted to replace writers with AI. The Writers Guild won its strike: AI can be used, but only with writers' consent, and wages and headcount can't be cut. That was a victory for labor rights, not property rights.
If the issue is only copyright, then the boss can simply insert a clause into the contract transferring 'AI training rights' to the company, license those rights to an AI firm, and replace the worker with the resulting model. For the past 50 years, every new copyright supposedly 'helping artists' has become a new weapon in the bosses' arsenal.
Scraping is not theft
Scraping public information online—what the author calls 'unpermissioned research'—is a vital tool for overseeing big corporations. If scraping counts as theft, every search engine is a crime, and only Google could afford to license 'search-indexing rights,' leaving the internet with one monopoly.
Independent researchers use scraping to expose platforms' manipulation and surveillance of the public. American scholar Ethan Zuckerman, fearing political interference from the Trump regime, moved his lab to Canada. Even when Wikipedia's servers are overwhelmed by AI crawlers, that's a denial-of-service problem, not theft.
The author concludes: constantly calling information use 'theft' is the poison of property worship. Scraping can cause harm, but it should be regulated under privacy and human rights frameworks—not by giving governments and giants the power to decide who may document and analyze their actions.
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