Still, it’s not entirely fair to blame the founders of free software for having their movement hijacked. They were facing difficult odds: the neoliberal consensus of the last few decades has meant that the benefits of technological development have largely flowed to corporations, under the aegis of a strong intellectual property regime. As the free software movement came up against these prevailing economic forces, its more contentious aspects were watered down or discarded. The result was “open source”: a more collaborative method of writing software that bore few traces of its subversive origins.

Which is a shame, because the movement had the potential to be so much more. Free software arose out of the desire to decommodify data, to contest the idea of treating information as property. Of course, the movement’s ability to fulfill this desire was hampered by a lack of political analysis and historical context. Crucially, free software advocates neglected to recognize information as simply the latest battlefield in a centuries-old story of capital accumulation, as capital discovers new engines of profit-making and new areas of our common life to enclose. [...]