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Citizen Infrastructure

Enclosure

If commoning is the practice of stewarding shared wealth together, enclosure is its opposite: the fencing-off of that shared wealth for private accumulation. Understanding enclosure is how you see the commons clearly — because the commons is almost always under pressure from it.

An old move, repeated

Section titled “An old move, repeated”

The classic example is the English enclosures, when common fields were walled off into private property — including the king disbanding monasteries in the Renaissance and seizing their lands for private gain. Marshall McLuhan’s quip was that the printing press and industrialisation destroyed the medieval commons. Enclosure isn’t a one-time historical event, though; it’s a move that gets repeated on each new commons:

  • Public institutions get privatised — water systems, highways, libraries handed to corporations (often after being deliberately starved first).
  • The early internet was a commons that people built and tended in a distributed way — “until the market figured out how to monetise it,” and the commoners hadn’t built any defences.
  • Personal data is enclosed wholesale. The twist: your data alone is nearly worthless — it’s only valuable in aggregate. So a genuinely collective wealth is quietly fenced off and sold, while we’re told to think of it as an individual asset.

Why it keeps happening — and how commons defend themselves

Section titled “Why it keeps happening — and how commons defend themselves”

A commons is, by its nature, competition with the proprietary world — so capital and the state have every incentive to discredit, privatise, or absorb it. Bollier’s sharp warning: commons are often treated as “free R&D for capitalism” — built by idealists, then enclosed once they prove valuable. (Couchsurfing began as a gift-economy hospitality network, took venture money to scale, and became just another travel service.)

The defence isn’t a property wall. Bollier borrows from biology: a commons needs a semi-permeable membrane — like the blood-brain barrier — that lets nutrients and good energy in while keeping poisons and vandals out. And it needs to build those defences (legal, technical, social) before it’s enclosed, not after. See relational property and capture risk.

Sources

Section titled “Sources”