Big Tech is Like the Enclosure Movement

Email, RSS, the open hyperlink, and the early web were commons: shared infrastructure anyone could build on. Social platforms converted that commons into walled gardens, moving the audience inside and charging rent for access to it. In doing this, big tech companies were following a centuries-old playbook.

The idea that an individual can own a piece of the earth’s surface is younger than most people realize, specific to certain legal traditions, and was imposed on much of the world by force. In most places throughout most of history, land was managed collectively via overlapping use rights rather than exclusive ownership. Understanding how private property in land was created, and what was destroyed in the process, lets us ask clearer questions about property rights generally: not “is this property?” but “who decided it was property, when, why, and who was dispossessed in the process?”

The best-known example of communal land being privatized (to English speakers, anyway) is the enclosure movement, which peaked in the second half of the 18th century. Before enclosure, common land was governed by overlapping, community-enforced use rights: the right to graze a specific number of animals, to cut timber for fuel, or to fish particular stretches of a river. Elinor Ostrom’s research on commons governance documented how these systems were managed sustainably for centuries without either private ownership or state control through locally developed rules, monitoring, and graduated sanctions. The commons worked; the argument that they were inherently prone to overuse was made by enclosure’s beneficiaries and repeated long after it had been empirically refuted.

Parliament passed hundreds of private Enclosure Acts between 1750 and 1850, each one extinguishing common rights over a specific area and converting that land into private property. The process was not neutral arbitration between competing claims: the landowners who stood to benefit were the same class that controlled Parliament. The commoners whose rights were extinguished had no equivalent political representation; when they received any compensation at all, it was consistently inadequate. The result was a large-scale transformation of semi-independent smallholders into wage laborers.

The English enclosure model was not confined to England. It was carried outward through colonialism as one of the primary instruments of dispossession. In Ireland, India, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas, colonial law systematically refused to recognize collective or customary land tenure. Land that was not individually titled under a system legible to European courts was declared waste, Crown land, or legally available for settlement. This did to colonized peoples what the Enclosure Acts had done to English commoners: extinguish practices that had sustained communities for generations, convert resource into commodities that could be extracted or sold, and make the people dependent on their new overlords.

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Linebaugh2014

Peter Linebaugh: Stop, Thief!: The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance. PM Press, 2014, 978-1604867473.

Linklater2015

Andro Linklater: Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership. Bloomsbury, 2015, 978-1620402917.

Ostrom2015

Elinor Ostrom: Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 2015, 978-1107569782.