Platform power required the prior privatization of the Internet commons

Evidence

Capitalism surfaced when owners of capital goods (steam engines, machine tools, spinning jennies, telegraph poles, etc.) acquired the power to command people and nations – powers that far exceeded, for the first time, those of landowners. It was a Great Transformation made possible by the prior privatisation of common lands. Same with cloud capital. To acquire its even greater powers to command, it too required the prior privatisation of another crucial commons: Internet One. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 357

Categorization

• XREF: Links to Polanyi’s Great Transformation and the enclosure-of-commons history; resonates with the ADDENDUM essay on trees as infrastructure (commons privatization themes) only loosely. — connects to: Platform power required political commons-plunder before any invention — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 281; Cloud capital required the prior privatisation of the internet commons; Neoliberal privatization decisions shaped the corporate-controlled internet — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 288 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Frames cloud capital as structurally parallel to industrial capital via a prior enclosure.

Broader Connections

• Cloud capital required the prior privatisation of the internet commons #corroborates (1.00)
• Neoliberal privatization decisions shaped the corporate-controlled internet #corroborates (0.85) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 288
• The internet commons was ransacked by politicians before cloud capital’s inventions #qualifies (0.85)
• Algorithm-driven finance prepared the ground for enclosing the early commons-like internet #expands (0.78) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 296