The Great Flattening: Enclosure, Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power argues that we are living through the largest expansion of enclosure since the commons were fenced off centuries ago.

Journeying from the Teifi Valley in Wales to the streets of India and the Netherlands, the book traces the common logic linking industrial farming, tourism, smart cities, platform culture, disappearing regional traditions and the erosion of biological diversity. Its central argument is simple. What began with the enclosure of land has steadily expanded into the enclosure of culture, biology, knowledge, communities and even human attention. Across every sphere of life, complexity is reduced, diversity gives way to standardisation, and local autonomy is absorbed into systems that are easier to measure, manage and commodify.

Rather than treating farming, cities, technology, culture and ecology as separate subjects, The Great Flattening develops a distinctive framework that reveals them as interconnected expressions of a single historical process: the expansion of enclosure into the cultural, ecological and biological flattening of contemporary life. Drawing on examples ranging from artisan cheese, modern architecture and the human microbiome to smart cities, industrial farming, tourism and digital surveillance, the essays demonstrate how this process is reshaping both landscapes and everyday life.