One of the many reasons I’m a fan of reading history is its ability to offer frameworks for understanding the present. I recently finished Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History, a 1,300-page monument to scholarship that The New York Times praised as “generational” in its importance. I tend to agree. Its pages contain foundational truths which enliven today’s debate around the role of technology in society.
Beckert argues that over the past millennium, capitalism’s amoral ideology of “accumulation above all else” has become so deeply embedded in the global political economy that we no longer question its core assumptions.
We are the fish, capitalism is the water.
But as Beckert demonstrates, capitalism’s march to omnipresence was a jagged one, filled with reprehensible and often horrifying demonstrations of state, corporate, and personal opportunism at a global scale. If, for example, you had any doubts about the central role slavery played in the creation of the modern industrial economy, Capitalism should dispel them*.
But this post is not a review of the book – I highly recommend it, should you be so inclined. Instead, I want to think out loud about a concept central to its argument: enclosure.
The formal definition of “enclosure” is “the removal of common rights that people held over farm lands and parish commons.” The term is usually associated with the evolution of English society from the late 1500s through the early 1800s, a time when the country transitioned from subsistence-based farming to a market- and export-driven economy. In the name of productivity and profit, and with the enthusiastic support of the monarchy, capitalists enclosed lands formerly held as public commons, forcing a new class of tenant farmers and wage laborers to produce agricultural products for markets opened by the rise of global trade.
While the English may have invented enclosure, they certainly did not have a monopoly on the practice. If we redefine enclosure as leveraging law, violence, or economic pressure to acquire commodity and/or free inputs to drive capitalist outcomes, the list grows well beyond agriculture. Throughout his work, Beckert delivers example after example of capital enclosing nearly all natural resources, including minerals, water, timber and fossil fuels.
Crucially, the practice of enclosure was not limited to commodities. By the mid 1800s, human labor had also been violently enclosed, either through slavery, indenture, indebtedness, or the relatively new practice of wage labor. Beckert demonstrates that the industrial revolution – and our heritage as a capitalist economy – is a byproduct of this enclosure. The modern state, with its ability to wage war and coerce compliance through lawfare, was central to enclosure’s success.
Reading Beckert helps us understand powerful and largely invisible forces driving assumptions behind today’s technology- and information-driven political economy. We learn that capitalism loves nothing more than inexpensive (and if possible, free) inputs which it can turn into profitable market goods. For centuries capitalism built a global economy based on these inputs: labor, cotton, saltpeter, indigo, coal, iron, and oil, among countless others.
These resources all share one critical characteristic: they are rivalrous. A ton of coal or the labor of a worker may power my factory or it may power yours, but it cannot power both. Once it’s used, it’s gone. The same can be said for an acre of land, a bushel of corn, or a roll of steel. Capitalism was built on the concept of rivalry – an endless competition for the non-renewable resources upon which wealth is built.
Beckert’s examination of capitalism necessarily ends just as the information age is gathering strength. But his work leaves me certain that regardless of the changes that digital technology has wrought, one thing remains constant: Capitalism covets and encloses valuable inputs – and once enclosed, capitalists fights like hell to maintain that enclosure.
WHAT ABOUT DATA?
In data, capitalism has found a novel, elastic, and invaluable new input. In an astonishingly short amount of time and just as it did with physical commodities, capitalism has enclosed this new asset and claimed it as its own**.
Whether you are nodding your head or rolling your eyes at that sentiment, it’s hard to argue that the aggregate value of the world’s data is anything but central to our information economy. That we’ve ceded this power to corporations without fully investigating alternative architectures of control will be seen as one of the greatest mistakes of the post-digital era, and the apotheosis of regulatory capture via mechanisms that capital has long used to dominate the state.
Why label our current approach to managing data as a societal asset a historic mistake? It’d likely take at least 1,300 pages to definitively argue that point, but in this post I’ll focus on this one fact:
Data is non-rivalrous.
The Corporate Finance Institute defines non-rivalrous goods as “public goods that are consumed by people but whose supply is not affected by people’s consumption. In other words, when an individual or a group of individuals use a particular good, the supply left for other people to use remains unchanged. Therefore, non-rivalrous goods can be consumed over and over again without the fear of depletion of supply.”
Data are like ideas – if I give you a copy of mine, you gain, but I do not necessarily lose. Centuries before the concept of “data” took root, Thomas Jefferson wrote of ideas:
“That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”
Only 20 years after the British passed the Inclosure Act of 1773, which enabled enclosure of land and the removal of the right of commoners’ access to that land, Jefferson laid the groundwork for an enlightened approach to data.
Shame on us if we decide to ignore him.
*And if you want to go deeper, read Beckert’s widely praised history of the cotton trade, Empire of Cotton.
**I’ve written about this practice continuously over the past 20 years, but I’ve not definitively linked it to the concept of enclosure. In future writings, I’ll detail how the technology industry, with the full throated support of most western governments, has used Terms of Service and Privacy Policies to enclose data for its own enrichment, and to the detriment of a more flourishing society.
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The single most essential ingredient of good journalism is trust. By that measure, journalism is in a very bad way: According to The Reuters Institute’s annual survey, only 37 percent of the global public trusts the news industry, down nearly 20 points from ten years ago. In the US, that figure stands at 25 percent.
