The Dead and the Commons

Leaf-Eater: Human says that when your brothers die, you bury them in the dirt, and then make your houses out of that dirt. (Laughs.)

Miro: No. We never dig where people are buried.

Leaf-Eater: (Becomes rigid with agitation): Then your dead don’t do you any good at all!

—Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead

The idea that the dead don’t perform work is new. The stripping of agency from the dead that defines much of the narrative of industrial modernity required enormous historical pressure, not only in the organization of labor, but in the configuration of the mind. Because the relations between labor and the mind are undergoing such fundamental change in the present moment (whether by automation or new regimes of accumulation), it is no surprise that the dead should reappear so forcefully in new and old guises right in the center of culture. They return as epigenetic inheritance and in the recovery of ancestral rituals, enunciating their presence through chatbots and séances.

Where the dead are located and what they are thought capable of has everything to do with the ways we organize place, by which I mean relations: between land and labor, between humans and nonhumans, between the resources necessary for life and privatization. The scale of current systems of enclosure is staggering, their scope verging on the incomprehensible. If previous regimes of enclosure came for land, natural resources, energy, and infrastructure, today’s frontiers extend the drive to steal, privatize, and commodify the innermost recesses of our minds and the intricate relational structures that connect us to self, other, world. At this highly unstable moment, we find the dead haunting our spaces and our machines, our infrastructures and our cells. 

Archeological records show that humans marked graves long before they had purpose-built homes. When they did begin to build homes to live in, they built the dead into the walls and under the floors. Robert Pogue Harrison writes that “humans bury not simply to achieve closure and effect a separation from the dead but also and above all to humanize the ground on which they build their worlds and found their histories.”1 The burial ground marks the physical continuum between persons and place. And yet, burial grounds simultaneously insist, in a distinctly human way, on distinguishing the human body at the very moment it returns to the earth. The grave marks a place to differentiate the human from the surrounding, making of the human something distinctly sacred, exceeding the body’s organic decomposition.

Burial sites are the origins of the human-built environment but also of signification itself. The Ancient Greek word sema means “grave,” “sign,” and “omen.” Signs signify: meaning, they mark the presence of absence. Signs are messengers across the boundary of life and death. They are the means by which the dead communicate to the living. A bird lands on the windowsill of a grieving child, and the child knows with certainty that their parent is speaking to them through the bird. I doubt this kind of interpretive practice will ever cease, because signs are by their very nature agents of the ever-present oscillation between life and death. It is their job to communicate the presence of absence, to resurrect what has disappeared.

The dead form the connective tissue between the body and place, between signs and signification, between the built environment and the nonhuman world. Their absent presence in the material and immaterial relations that structure life means that when those relations are reconfigured, the dead take on new forms. Perhaps different historical regimes of enclosure continuously displace the dead, and in the process, reconfigure the scope of possibilities for their appearance or disappearance among the living.

1.

The dead are our guardians. We give them a future so that they may give us a past. We help them live on so that they may help us go forward.

—Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of the Dead

Until recently, an undated text fragment by the German romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin titled “Communism of Spirits” (Communismus der Geister) had received almost no scholarly attention because it was omitted from Hölderlin’s collected works.2 In rediscovering the text, scholar Joseph Albernaz located its origins in the early 1790s. The implications of this discovery are striking because, as Albernaz articulates, it marks the very first time the word “communism” appeared in any modern language.3

“Communism of Spirits” is the poet’s response to witnessing the historical disappearance of the commons and the systematic enclosure of land at the turn of the eighteenth century. The short text recounts a conversation between two men, Eugen and Lothar, discussing the changing world as they walk through the countryside. They are at an historical crossroads, where science is overriding religion, and the spirits are in retreat. In earlier times spirits moved freely between nature and the built environment but now they seem to have left. The new modern age is one of atomization, in which communal life has all but disappeared. Expressing their crisis in faith, the two figures ask, “Where will you find community?”4

Communism’s best-known entrance into the world is as a “specter” in the opening line of the Communist Manifesto. Hölderlin’s text fragment, written half a century earlier, uses the then-unknown term to name a haunting presence of absence. Albernaz puts it succinctly:

This fragment harbors a force of questioning and a pang of longing that it places under the unheard of heading of communism. “Communism” thus appears here, quite possibly for the first time ever, not as a developed system of politics or economics, nor as a foundation for collective being or action, nor even as a goal of historical unfolding, but as an ungrounding abandonment.5

In other words, “communism” first names an experience of the ground being pulled out from under one’s feet, of the invisible but vital relations that previously structured life suddenly going missing. 

What was once common became enclosed. Places were stripped of limitless variability to become only resource: an amount of arable land, a standing reserve of timber, a quantity of potable water. According to the great historian of the commons Peter Linebaugh, it was never simply about natural resources. The commons was first and foremost a relational framework, structuring modes of living between humans and how these relate to the nonhuman life that coproduces their environment. The commons arranged the way labor connects the body to the land. As such, the commons organized time as well as space, shaping the way the past flows through the present and into the future.

Enclosures dispossess people of the sources of common wealth, but they also annihilate these more complex and difficult-to-capture relational systems. Linebaugh writes: “The commons is invisible until it is lost. Water, air, earth, fire—these were the historic substances of subsistence. They were the archaic physics upon which metaphysics was built.”6 When the relational framework of the commons is intact, it is taken for granted as the basic substrate of life. The commons only become visible as a present absence once they’ve been eradicated by enclosure. Property, in turn, becomes naturalized, transmuting an ecology of relations into bounded objects understood only through their economic function. To lose what is common is to lose something that was previously invisible, and therefore something whose stake in the real, however vital, is fragile and difficult to defend.

Anonymous, The Dance of Death, sixteenth century. Metropolitan Museum of Art. License: Public domain.

The fact that the first use of the word “communism” appeared in relation to the word “spirits” (Geister) is striking for the multiple interpretive openings it affords. Hölderlin’s spirits appear to him at the moment of their disappearance. Like Linebaugh’s definition of the commons, these spirits name a field of relations between things. They move between the human and nonhuman environment, inhabiting both the open fields and the human-built cathedral discussed by the two characters. They are necessary for life, a kind of unquantifiable excess that emanates from the world and its inhabitants. But crucially, spirits are also ghosts, meaning that they move between the boundaries of life and death.

The commons—and thereby inversely, processes of enclosure—are not only about ways of organizing life, but also fundamentally shape how we relate to the dead, determining how they appear and disappear, how they speak to us, and the tools we have for listening to what they say. What if we thought of enclosure, rather than cosmology, as the driving force behind our understanding of the place of the dead among the living? In such a reading, we might chart each successive regime of enclosure as a dispossession not only of the living commons but of the invisible connective tissue between the living and the dead.

Elsewhere, Linebaugh quotes William Blake’s equation: “Enclosure = Death.”7 This assertion is true. But I would prefer the formulation “enclosures kill.” Their violence annihilates the invisible structure of the relations conducive to life as such. But what about the living presence of the dead, whose actions, words, dwellings, and infrastructures project into the future, determining everything about the contours of our lives? Death is never the end of the story, but a transmutation of energy from one state into another. And because the dead remain woven into the fabric of life, they too can become subject to enclosure.

2.

They told me that I had five senses to inclose me up.
And they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle

—William Blake, “Visions of the Daughters of Albion”

The commons are often referred to in the past tense to name forms of land stewardship that gradually disappeared through colonization and successive enclosure acts. But the commons are not tied to plots of land. Rather than view the commons as a bounded object or territory, we might consider commons as the activity of cultivating relations conducive to collective flourishing. The polymath, priest, and thinker of the commons Ivan Illich illustrated the adaptability of power to enclose the ephemeral relations through which life unfolds in his memory of the first loudspeaker arriving on the small island off the Dalmatian coast where his grandfather lived:

In 1926, the first loudspeaker was landed on the island. Few people there had ever heard of such a thing. Up to that day, all men and women had spoken with more or less equally powerful voices. Henceforth this would change. Henceforth the access to the microphone would determine whose voice shall be magnified. Silence now ceased to be in the commons; it became the resource for which loudspeakers compete. Language itself was transformed thereby from a local commons into a national resource for communication.8

Illich shared this observation in a speech he gave in 1983 in Japan, where he was asked to speak of the impact computers would have on society. He opened the talk with a truly prophetic insight: “Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures.”9 From a historical perspective computers were simply a new means to continue the appropriation and commodification of the field of common relations.

Nowhere are the forces of enclosure more apparent today than in the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure. In its current manifestation, driven by the companies and states competing for AI sovereignty, the AI turn represents a historically unprecedented system of theft, extraction, and privatization—not only of land, energy, minerals, water, and intellectual property, but of cognition itself. In a vivid literalization of the aim to enclose cognition, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman stated in an interview in March 2026 that the most important question was not when they would reach so-called “Artificial General Intelligence,” but rather when “more of the world’s cognitive capacity would be inside of data centers than outside of them.”10 In a sense, the future terrain of class struggle will not only be over the means of production, but over the means of cognition.

Alongside the rise of AI, the last decade has seen the proliferation of AI services designed to connect the living to the dead, referred to under the umbrella term “GriefTech” or “DeathTech.” In contrast to the many diverse and longstanding practices of communicating with the dead—prayer, mediumship, dreams, literature, legal systems, archives, architecture, burial sites, archaeology—GriefTech’s appeal seems to be the promise of technological accuracy and personalized control over the dead’s ability to speak. With AI, there is no longer a need to rely on the subjectivities of interpretation; the dead can now communicate as digital clones precisely generated from the ever-growing troves of data most of us now leave behind.

Discussion around the rise of GriefTech has mostly focused on whether or not the technology is conducive to “healthy” grief responses in people experiencing bereavement. Much of this revolves around a sizeable field of grief literature, largely rooted in the Freudian psychoanalytic framework which dictates how the grieving process should aim towards the withdrawal of emotional investment in the symbol of the lost object. The Freudian framework, whose reinforcement of the boundedness of the modern subject in the early twentieth century has long become accepted as common sense, is reconceptualized through countless models for programs that the bereaved should aim to progress through as they accept their loss and let go of their deceased.11 Are these GriefTech companies threatening to distort their customers’ relationship to reality by prolonging their emotional attachment to their deceased loved ones? Will they prevent people from going through the necessary steps of acceptance and detachment?

With discussions on GriefTech limited to the individualized grieving subject, I have yet to encounter a discursive confrontation with the GriefTech industry that incorporates a broader perspective on AI as the imperial system of enclosure that it is. Even if GriefTech is only a small piece of a larger system, it is of course part of this violent extractive frontier. The fact that AI appears to offer new possibilities for mediating consciousness across the boundary between life and death opens a new set of questions about the historically evolving place of the dead and how this place changes in relation to different enclosure regimes.

The first time I can remember encountering an example of GriefTech was in a 2013 episode of Black Mirror. At that point there were only a small handful of fledgling companies offering services using what now seem like quaint proto-LLMs. The episode introduced a broader public to the very premise of digitally cloning the dead, while the show’s dystopian spin on the theme was in line with its broader perspective at that juncture of rapid digital transformation: These tools might look a lot like life, but their likeness is a sinister shadow of life. Accept their premise and suffer the dark consequences. The story depicts those consequences as personal—as a failure to progress through the stages of grief—rather than structural: the corporate dispossession of the dead. Today, GriefTech has very different ramifications in a world where AI threatens to overturn global labor systems, military operations, education, and health care.

The premise of communicating with the dead may appear novel because the dead are thought to have disappeared with the advent of industrial modernity, scientific materialism, electric lighting, psychoanalysis, and coordinated universal time. Yet seen through its intrinsic relationship to the AI’s extractive modus, GriefTech is merely another system for enclosing and privatizing the many diverse practices of communicating with the dead, which, despite being relegated to history, never actually disappeared.

Seen as a system of enclosure, GriefTech signals the becoming-visible of the dead at the moment of their reduction to a trick of word prediction machines. The dead, like the commons, become known through their loss as the presence of absence. What is lost in our relational framework to the past and future when the dead are captured and reappear in the commodity form? Where will we find a communism of spirits? 

3.

Really and truly, it’s such a strange commodity, I’ve never heard the like!

—Nikolay Gogol, Dead Souls

Nikolay Gogol’s novel Dead Souls (1842) begins with an unknown man who arrives in a small provincial town. It is early nineteenth-century Russia and landowners’ wealth is calculated by how many serfs they own. Every seven to ten years, a census registers the number of serfs (“souls”) belonging to each landowner and calculates the amount of tax owed accordingly. But because of how infrequently the census is carried out, many landowners face a problem. Their registered serfs often die long before the new census is conducted, which means they must continue to pay taxes on those dead souls.

The reader encounters this somewhat absurd slippage between the early bureaucratic state and the older feudal system of landed wealth through Gogol’s antihero, Chichikov, a completely unexceptional middle-aged, middle-class gentleman. Upon arrival in the town, Chichikov sets out to methodically charm the officials and landowners before making the purpose of his business clear: He is offering to relieve the landowners of unfair tax burdens by purchasing their dead serfs. Unbeknownst to them, he plans to turn his symbolic ownership of souls into the assets required to eventually purchase his own land.

Gogol’s story is exceptional for how well it shows the ways in which enclosure reconfigures the shared contract around what is and isn’t real. To Chichikov’s first request, the landowner Manilov responds, “How do you wish to purchase the peasants, with land or simply to take them away?”12 Chichikov doesn’t want land or living bodies. He simply wants to acquire the names of the dead. For Manilov, this request is completely outside the realm of the real. It breaks the whole relational structure Manilov and everyone he’s ever known live by. Money is exchanged for resources, for labor. The dead, immaterial, cannot be exchanged for money. Dumbfounded, Manilov responds, “But I cannot grasp … pardon me … of course I didn’t receive an education as brilliant as yours, of the kind, so to speak, that is evident in your every movement; I do not possess the high art of expressing myself.” Chichikov assures Manilov that there is nothing complicated about his offer. They can simply draw up a deed of purchase. “You mean a deed of purchase for the dead souls?”13 Manilov is still at a loss. No, Chichikov responds. They will list them as living, just as they are in the census, only from then on, Manilov will no longer have to pay taxes for them.

Marc Chagall, Gogol and Chagall from Dead Souls, 1923–27. License: Public domain.

Perhaps Chichikov is suggesting some kind of illegal business deal? No—Chichikov insists on his total adherence to the law: “An obligation for me is a sacred matter, and the law—I stand mute before the law.”14 Indeed, such a use of the law is essential to enclosure. By redrawing the boundaries of the real, enclosure uses the laws governing the real to reconfigure what can be turned into value; it opens up a new extractive horizon beyond reality’s boundary. Enclosure displaces and dispossesses the heretofore unreal, and therefore changes something that cannot be perceived as value into something that will be repurposed elsewhere.

Gogol’s story is ripe for reinvention, with Chichikov turned into the CEO of a GriefTech start-up. Chichikov has identified an excess that emanates from the material world, but which is imperceptible, unthinkable even, to others. He can harvest the excess emanating from the dead’s place among the living, an excess whose very existence most people cannot fathom. Like the generation of tech oligarchs who created the digital infrastructure required to harvest user data, he sees an abundant yet invisible substance, there for enclosure, extraction, and privatization. “Really and truly, it’s such a strange commodity, I’ve never heard the like!” exclaims the old widow Nastasya Petrovna when she is approached by Chichikov.15 Much like the tech oligarchs of today, Chichikov repackages his covert extraction of the invisible as a golden opportunity for others.

I read Dead Souls as a story about the place of the dead and how that place is historically contingent, shaped by the relational structures that govern our orientation to the commons. How do the dead appear in the guise of private property, as enclosed units to be traded as commodities? How are they resurrected when property changes hands? How does the immateriality of the dead press against the real, like a mold shapes a cast? How do the dead live on as signification and continue to participate in the living present and future? There are no ghosts in Gogol’s story, only signs, stripped of any social or spiritual meaning beyond their potential to generate profit. It is a story of society stripped of a communism of spirits, the dark tragicomic epic to Hölderlin’s brief lament.

By the time Gogol wrote Dead Souls, ghosts were on the wane throughout European mainstream culture (the Ukrainian Gogol lived in Rome for much of the period in which he wrote Dead Souls and was deeply influenced by German, French, and English literature). In his monumental study of the place of the dead from antiquity to the present, Thomas Laqueur traces the disappearance of ghosts in European culture over the eighteenth century as nascent scientific materialism stripped away prevalent notions about how the dead haunt the living: “First, ghosts became the province of scientific skepticism. Not theology, but experiment and natural philosophy would determine the status of the revenant dead. In the most notorious cases, ghosts seemed of very little consequence beyond exciting controversies in the public sphere about whether they existed.”16

But in addition to the prevalence of scientific skepticism, the eighteenth century also saw the systematic enclosure of the commons throughout Europe. It was the century that scientifically severed being from function, the means of production from the laboring body. The eighteenth century catalyzed the First Industrial Revolution, with its systems for regulating production and stripping laborers of the profits of their own work. The scientific skepticism that eradicated ghosts by reducing the dead to inert matter came from the same industrially driven scientific determinism that transformed the infinite multiplicities of forests and rivers into standing reserves of potential value. Both ghosts and the commons, whose invisibility evaded science’s systems of measurement and classification, were rendered nonexistent by force. At the end of the eighteenth century, Hölderlin would ask, “Where will you find community?”

Half a century later, the 1840s began with Gogol’s indictment of a society stripped of a communism of spirits. By the end of that decade Marx and Engels introduced the specter of communism haunting Europe.

4.

Of course, we can think of a tit-for-tat kind of answer: if you need a milieu that is favorable for the belief in ghosts, you also need one that is favorable to believe that the dead are dead.

—Vinciane Despret, Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left Behind

When Freud turned his attention to the dead a century after Hölderlin sought a communism of spirits, he wrote that “so-called educated people have officially ceased to believe that the dead can become visible as spirits.”17 Freud was trying to understand how people could still be haunted by ghosts. His response to this seemingly irrational tension was to place ghosts inside the individual psyche, in the unconscious—another type of enclosure. Freud wasn’t the first to suggest that ghosts emanated from the individual—this idea had been around since early modernity—but he was in a unique position to hitch this notion to the drive to build a scientific model of the psyche. Avery Gordon argues that Freud essentially interred ghosts inside the unconscious, “the self-contained closed system, inaccessible to worldly consciousness, accessible only to a certain kind of analysis competent in treating symptoms.”18 Confined within the bounded individual psyche, the excess of the commons in which ghosts dwell became the pathologized excess of the troubled patient who will not or cannot accept industrial modernity’s frameworks of social regulation.

According to Gordon, Freud’s understanding of the unconscious shifted as he sought to turn psychoanalysis into a science, seeking to rid the former of the vestiges of animism that had informed his early writing. Freud was himself haunted by animism, with its unmeasurable excesses and distributed agencies. In asserting psychoanalysis’s place within science, Freud attempted, in Gordon’s words, to “demystify our holdover beliefs in the power of the world at large, hoping to convince us that everything that seems to be coming at us from the outside is really from this now shrunken inside, tormented by its own mortality.”19 And yet this reconfiguration of the place of the dead, which insisted on pathologizing the excessive psyche of an enclosed individual, occurred just as modern European society was becoming “increasingly taken with the animation of the commodity world.”20 In other words, animism (much like the dead) never actually disappeared; it was reconfigured as a regulated system of commodity production.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, A Matter of Life and Death, still, 1946.

Mark Fisher is perhaps best remembered as the hauntological critic of capitalist realism. Returning to his Ghosts of My Life, it seems to me that there is an ambivalence in his writing about ghosts and where they might be located. His still-powerful contribution to the discourse around depression insists that there are always structural reasons behind depression, that the individualized isolation that the depressive feels is not a personal failing. Yet his notion of haunting remains largely indebted to Freud, which we recognize when Fisher writes, “Haunting, then, can be construed as a failed mourning.” But then Fisher adds a twist that seems to quietly undermine Freud’s attempt to strip the dead of agency by placing them in the unconscious: “It is about refusing to give up the ghost or—and this can sometimes amount to the same thing—the refusal of the ghost to give up on us. The specter will not allow us to settle into/for the mediocre satisfactions one can glean in a world governed by capitalist realism.”21 Now there is something outside the grieving subject that also exerts agency. The ghosts may still have unfinished business that the living must respond to.

Fisher’s oscillation between the words “ghost” and “specter” in this passage is interesting and adds to the sense of ambivalence that I encounter in his approach to haunting. Among spirit mediums and other paranormal traditions there is a clear distinction between ghosts and specters. Where ghosts are fully autonomous entities possessing their own agency, specters are considered residual hauntings, more like sense impressions that remain imprinted to particular sites but that lack the agency of fully formed entities. Ghosts influence the living and are in turn influenced by events in the world. Hamlet’s father is a ghost because he influences Hamlet’s actions with the aim of changing the course of events. Specters appear as knockings and footsteps, shutting doors and flickering lights. They signal the presence of an absence—announcing we’re here!—but cannot engage in reciprocal exchange.

And spirits? The Latin spiritus is the animating movement of breath that breaches the body’s boundaries, that necessitates the oscillating interplay between inside and outside. “Ghost,” from the old English gast, also referred to the breath, but shaped the way it brought the outside in as a form of possession. The word itself never stipulated whether the possessing ghost was good or bad, human or nonhuman, angel or demon. In Old and Middle English, “spirit” and “ghost” were used interchangeably. But by the eighteenth century, they grew to frame very different discourses. For Enlightenment philosophers and scientists, “spirit” became a disembodied essence, a unifying life force. “Ghost,” on the other hand, turned towards the uncanny—that thing that should not be there. The dead should be dead. What is invisible should not have agency. 

Fisher is keen to avoid suggestions of the supernatural or spiritual in his hauntology, preferring “to think of hauntology as the agency of the virtual, with the specter understood not as anything supernatural, but as that which acts without (physically) existing.”22 Fisher’s commitment to materialism allows for the past to become virtual and for that virtual space to exert agency upon the living, but he stops short of making the present absence of the dead tangible, something in the concrete space of shared collectivity. Gordon goes further, insisting on threading the dead through matter and making them part of the commons:

It is precisely the experience of being haunted in the “world of common reality,” the unexpected arrival of ghosts or wolves or eerie photographs, that troubles or even ruins our ability to distinguish reality and fiction, magic and science, savage and civilized, self and other, and in those ways gives to reality a different coloring. The “reality-testing” that we might want to perform in the face of hauntings must first of all admit those hauntings as real.23

Gordon stresses the philosophical and political importance of placing the dead in the space of the commons, on making them part of the shared reality that we all must negotiate.

5.

If words are successful in naming the ghost, there is no ghost … A human body ghosts a text, and the ghost is encrypted there as a condensation of incorporation.
—Alice Raynor, Ghosts: Death’s Double and the Phenomena of Theatre

This new time of yours may, in fact, be the time of the dead themselves.
—Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow

Maybe the real issue with industrial modernity is not that ghosts have disappeared but that they have so oversaturated the very center of culture that they have stopped being noticed. Photography, both in moving and still images, was from the very beginning a technology of capturing and restaging the dead, a reconfiguration of sema’s task of mediating across the boundary of the living and the dead. Photography is largely responsible for the systematic transformation of ghosts into specters. Photographs insist on keeping the dead present, but only insofar as they are stripped of agency, captured safely in a past that leaves an imprint but does not actively trouble the present and future.

Frederick Hudson, Album of Spirit Photographs, 1872. Metropolitan Museum of Art. License: Public domain.

Griefbots fascinate and frighten through a new kind of disorientation about where the dead are located and what they can and can’t do. Scientific materialist cultures have conditioned us to believe that the dead cannot speak back. They can overpopulate our physical environments as so many specters, but they cannot have agency of their own. What is sold by reconfiguring the dead through LLMs appears to negate that understanding, by seeming to supply the dead with tools to speak back. The widespread accessibility and power of the leading free AI platforms have led GriefTech companies to shift their focus. Now services such as Afterlife AI emphasize security and consent. Those wishing to leave behind a digital clone for their loved ones are promised full control over exactly who can access their digitally reconfigured self: “We are built for a harder, narrower thing: a consent-first AI Persona you create while living, governed by Executor Lock, and released to your family only after you are gone. Build Once. Live Twice.™”24 One assumes that it is now much more difficult to compete with the large freemium platforms and their global industrial data-mining complex, so that a smaller company like Afterlife AI™ is forced to create a narrower product that tightens the noose around the bounded individual and their commoditized persona.

Sam Altman is clear on his aim to enclose the means of cognition in data centers. In the midst of this perpetually disorienting shift in power, economy, and consciousness, we see the historical boundaries of the real shifting. Previous generations could have never imagined that the movements of their bodies and eyeballs could be mineable, let alone that the people who created the infrastructure to extract this attention would become the most powerful people on the planet. In this transfer of wealth that, much like Chichikov’s scheme, has expanded the boundaries of the real, we see the restless dead appearing through the cracks, reasserting their presence in the commons as the systems of enclosure once again reconfigure their place and function among the living.