Digital platform enclosure is continuous with historical land enclosure, transforming relational life into extraction

Evidence

This is what happens when we allow so many of our previously private actions to be enclosed by corporate tech platforms whose founders said they were about connecting us but were always about extracting from us. The process of enclosure, of carrying out our activities within these private platforms, changes us, including how we relate to one another and the underlying purpose of those relations. This goes back to early forms of enclosure, beginning in the Middle Ages. When common lands in England were transformed into privately held commodities surrounded by hedges and fences, the land became something else: its role was no longer to benefit the community—with shared access to communal grazing, food, and firewood—but to increase crop yields and therefore profits for individual landowners. Once physically and legally enclosed, the soil began to be treated as a machine, whose role was to be as productive as possible. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 126

Categorization

• DEFINE: Klein’s definitional move here — transposing the historical concept of enclosure of common lands onto the tech platform enclosure of private actions — is the conceptual framework the Mirror World thesis will build on.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to ‘Grafting & Growth’ — both read infrastructure/enclosure as transformative of human relations rather than merely instrumental.
• XREF: connects to: Commodification of land, not utopian design, universalized abstract space — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1614; Platform data extraction operates as a continuous cache-gathering of social life. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 411; Digital tools enable new decentralized forms of commons peer production. — Laura Albareda and Alejo Jose G. Sison, Commons Organizing: Embedding Common…, 193 (+3 more)