a771a6d9_defining_internet_enclosure
Defining enclosure
The attempt by capital interests to encircle, control and contain networked digital communication with the object of extracting financial value from the exchanges and the community from which they arise.
This constitutes the commodification of a human-constituted resource, like labour rather than a natural resource, like oil.
Main characteristics
Strategic denial of alternative communication media
Where there is a multiplicity of media and within media, a multiplicity of channels, capital steers communication toward a single entity.
In a “democratic free-market society”, capital cannot simply ban alternative media, it can however work to diminish the influence of alternatives through the strategic denial of interoperability and the aquisition and subsumption of rivals into its system.
Tyrannical control of the rules of communication
Where the standards of communication are elective and established organically and collaboratively between peers (possibly even democratically), capital enforces rules derived externally and applied in an authoritarian manner. These rules are mutable but changes are enacted unilaterally and arbitrarily by the owners of the medium, not its users. Hence, tyranny in its technical political sense.
Total control of information and content
Where individuals share information freely in collaborative enterprise with diminished concern for ownership (typically favouring citation and iteration as models), capital takes full possession of the information generated such that it can be removed and destroyed at will without consultation.
Surveillance
Where communication is anonymised (loosly or strictly (i.e. through cryptographic means)), capital surveils all exchanges and the behaviour of community members.
Typically this is not personal in the sense of being interested in the specific user’s identity, rather it is abstracted into a composite of the person’s preferences which may or may not disclose their legal identity (i.e metadata).
This characteristic is both an attribute of internet enclosure and its ultimate reason for existence. It is critical to the mechanism of extraction since it provides both data that can be sold to other capital interests and content that can be used to sell to community members as consumers.
Artificial promotion of commercial content and prolongation of engagement
Where engagement with media is idiosyncratic and organic, capital circumscribes the field. This is done to prolong engagement.
At one pole this is achieved through the excitation of visceral responses by artificially favouring content that titillates, disgusts or angers the user. At the other, it is achieved through mollification and the coddling of the user. The user encounters only like-minded fellows who affirm and repeat his existing beliefs and values, creating community and a sense of safety through the othering of contrary viewpoints. Both techniques are demagogic in nature familiar from the control mechanisms of cults and extreme political ideologies.
