What if ownership required ongoing contribution to the community—and actual, lived use—rather than passive legal title? In Māori jurisprudence, the principle of "ahi kā" (“keeping the fires burning”) ties rights in land to continuous presence, stewardship, and reciprocal obligation. Property is not an abstract entitlement; it is a relationship sustained in time.
By contrast, modern regimes of private property—crystallised in the aftermath of the Enclosure Movement (see David Bollier's work)—redefined land (and later capital, financial assets, and intellectual property) as alienable, exclusionary, and increasingly detached from use. This transformation underwrote what we now take for granted: ownership without presence, control without contribution, and extraction without accountability.
The result is a peculiar asymmetry. A landlord may hold dozens of empty homes as appreciating assets. A media proprietor—say Rupert Murdoch via News Corp—can shape public discourse without any reciprocal obligation to the communities affected. A platform like Meta captures and monetises social interaction at planetary scale, while bearing minimal responsibility for the civic infrastructures it displaces. In each case, ownership persists absent meaningful contribution.
What would it mean to invert this logic?
To condition property rights on demonstrable contribution: housing kept habitable and occupied; land actively stewarded; media ownership tied to measurable public-interest obligations; digital platforms required to reinvest in the informational commons they extract from. Not symbolic CSR, but enforce use-it-or-lose-it regimes—an ahi kā for late capitalism.
Such a shift would not abolish property, but re-embed it within social time and collective life. Ownership would become less a static right and more a dynamic practice—earned, maintained, and, if neglected, relinquished.
The provocation is simple: if value is socially produced, why is ownership so rarely socially conditioned?
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