New enclosures
[Note to Dutch readers: this article is a translation of an original Dutch text that is of more interest as it relates the word ‘commons’ to the word ‘meenten’]
Selling air is understood as the ultimate foolishness. Or as a scam, especially if said air is hot, too! This goes to show just how much we take air for granted. It is ubiquitous and belongs to everyone.
In order to sell something, one must own it. It’s easy to appropriate air: just fill a bag with it, no one will stop you! But we shrug it off: what’s the point? There will be no takers.
Until not so long ago, forests, meadows, heaths and other natural resources were more or less regarded as think of the air we breathe. Land belonged to everyone and each of us could gather wood, graze his sheep or pick herbs. Land was free for all to use.
‘co’ or ‘com’ is a prefix with a long history and means ‘with, together’. Linguistic historians see an even older root in ‘mon’. Many Eurasian languages are considered to have evolved from a proto-Indo-European (PIE) language (both Latin and Sanskrit are believed to have evolved from it). PIE has a word ‘*mei’, which means ‘move, change’. We can therefore understand ‘common’ as ‘to change together’ and this fits this idea of land that is used, cultivated and maintained by all.
In contemporary England there are virtually no commons anymore. In the late Middle Ages, monarchs and aristocracy appropriated large parts of the commons in a relatively short time. They were sometimes literally enclosed, which is why this process is known as the ‘enclosure of the commons’. Bad news for the people who lived on them as they were deprived of their means of existence. They were driven out, moved to cities, or became tributary tenants.
Obviously this robbery meant that the ruling elite got richer. In his book “Wat we gemeen hebben” (“What we have in common”) Dutch author Thijs Lijster explains how this kind of appropriation is an important raison d’être of a capitalist society. He consequently sees enclosure not just as a historical event, but as a pattern that repeats itself over and over again. Through this lens we see the conquest of the Americas in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries in the same light as the colonialization of large parts of Asia and Africa.
There is no ‘empty’ land anymore and as Mark Twain famously said, they don’t make any more of it (except, of course, in the Netherlands). But, closer to home and in our own time, the sale of public utilities that provide energy and water also fits the pattern. As does the commercialization of healthcare services. In Lijster’s view, any common domain can fall prey to enclosure and there is a powerful force at work that makes it happen.
English has the words ‘commodity’ and ‘commodification’. Again it is instructive to look at their etymology. A Latin root is ‘commoditas’ which means ‘suitable, adaptation, convenience, advantage’. In ‘commodification’ we recognize, in addition to ‘commoditas’, also ‘fication’, which derives from Latin ‘facere’ or ‘to make’. From this emerges a meaning of ‘to make suitable’. Commodification is the process by which something is taken from its natural context and made suitable for trading.
‘Enclosure’ can be ‘fencing in’. Fenced, appropriated land becomes a commodity. It is set apart from the rest and can be exchanged for money. That is exactly what happened in the late Middle Ages.
The verb ‘inform’ comes directly from the Latin word ‘informare’, which means ‘to shape, to demarcate’. I have described in previous articles in this series how ‘information’ can be understood as ‘a thought given a shape’. Whether that form is a clay tablet, or a sheet of paper written on, or whether it is the sound waves by which we speak to each other; one person produces a form and another interprets it. This is because a writer or speaker has the intention to share his thoughts with someone else. To that end the thought must be somehow conveyed. And so one must express oneself in a form that the other can ‘get a grip on’. We recognize in the word ‘communicate’ of course once again the root ‘common’; and so communication is nothing more than making common, or sharing.
Information is therefore archetypically the domain of what we have in common. The world of thoughts we share is a common, if anything; we might perhaps call it the mother of all commons!
It is precisely these commons that, on our watch, have fallen prey to the process of robbery described by Thijs Lijster. We cannot but produce information if we want to communicate. As long as we communicated primarily by talking, information was literally elusive. One cannot grab words out of thin air! But as we increasingly communicate using electronics, our thoughts take the form of patterns on a magnetic tape, or on a magnetic metal disk, or in static random-access memory (SRAM). These forms are ideal for fast transport, for storage and for effortless copying. Those three properties facilitate capturing communication as if it were tapping sap from a rubber tree. And that is exactly what happens. It’s what the information economy is built on. In short, it is extremely easy to turn thoughts into a commodity when people communicate through an electronic medium.
Data is commodification of communication.
This is the sixteenth column in a series. The previous one was: Emergence. Here is the series introduction.