Modern Digital Enclosures

Context

< " The architectural form of that refusal is a protocol substrate. Hold the commons as commons, in open protocols, so the enclosure is impossible in the first place. Build the substrate so the fence cannot be built. " >

- Kaliya Young [1]

Discussion

How to remedy digital enclosures: why Cory Doctorow's proposals fall short

Kaliya Young:

"Doctorow’s prescription stops short

Doctorow names a structural answer almost as explicitly as he names the structural problem. His prescription has three parts: the end-to-end principle, freedom of exit, and interoperability. He particularly champions adversarial interoperability (or competitive compatibility, “comcom”): the right of third parties to build interoperable tools — scrapers, clients, alternative front-ends — that pry captured platforms open from outside, without asking permission.

This prescription is a retrofit. Doctorow’s argument mostly assumes the captured platforms are the starting condition, and asks: how do we force them to interoperate? How do we mandate that they let users leave with what they came with? His regulatory recommendations follow the same shape — lower exit costs, force open APIs, legalize reverse engineering.

But notice what this prescription accepts. It accepts the enclosure. It accepts that LinkedIn owns the professional social graph, and asks for the right to scrape it. It accepts that Facebook owns your friend list, and asks for the right to take a copy. It accepts that Slack owns your community’s workspace, and asks for an export button. It accepts the fence and asks for a gate.

The deeper move is to refuse the property right at the root. The social graph was never LinkedIn’s to own. Identity was never Google’s to issue. A community’s roster was never Slack’s to keep. These are not facts that belong to vendors. They are facts that belong to the people, the relationships, and the groups they describe.

The architectural form of that refusal is a protocol substrate. Hold the commons as commons, in open protocols, so the enclosure is impossible in the first place. Build the substrate so the fence cannot be built."

Typology

Kaliya Young:

"Each of these was once properly nobody’s property. Each of them is now somebody’s asset. This is enclosure.

Identity

You used to be a person. Now you are a Google account, an Apple ID, a Facebook login. The platforms that issued the credentials you log in with own the canonical record of who you are online. If they cancel you, your relationships disappear with you.

The social graph

Microsoft owns LinkedIn, so Microsoft owns the LinkedIn social graph. Every professional relationship you have asserted there — every colleague, every collaborator, every introduction, every weak tie that turned into a job or a partnership or a friendship — is Microsoft’s asset. Not in some loose sense. In the literal, accounting sense: it shows up as goodwill on Microsoft’s balance sheet and as defensive moat in their competitive strategy. Meta owns Facebook, so Meta owns the Facebook social graph. X owns the Twitter follow graph. Discord owns its server membership graphs. Each enclosed by a different platform; none of them held in common; none of them yours.

Groups themselves

This is the one that gets least talked about, and it may be the deepest enclosure of all. A group — a congregation, a soccer league, a watershed council, a neighborhood association, a community garden, a union local, an affinity group, a movement chapter — is a thing in the world. It has its own identity. It has its own roster. It has its own history. It has its own collective will. None of these are facts that belong to a vendor.

But in the platform era, the group does not own itself. The Slack workspace belongs to Slack. The Discord server belongs to Discord. The Facebook Group belongs to Meta. The community has no protocol-level standing. It exists inside a product. If the product changes its terms, the group is at the product’s mercy. If the product shuts down, the group disappears with it. If the host of the workspace leaves the community, the workspace can go with them. Groups, in the current architecture, are not first-class entities. They are features inside someone else’s tool.

This is not how groups have ever worked before the internet. A congregation that has been meeting for two centuries owned itself. A union local owned its membership list. A guild owned its traditions, its standards, its right to admit and expel. The community held itself. No outside vendor held a claim to its identity or its roster or its collective memory.

Digital enclosure changed that. And the result is that every community that has moved its life online has been quietly turned into a tenant in someone else’s building.

Collective memory

Every document, every decision, every conversation, every photo, every record of what your group has been and done — all of it lives on someone else’s servers, under someone else’s terms.

Trust relationships

Reputation, references, vouching, recommendations — all platform-mediated. LinkedIn endorsements. Yelp reviews. Uber ratings. Whatever trust you have built with people you have met online is held in the proprietary databases of whoever mediated the connection."

(https://identitywoman.net/enshittification-arises-from-enclosure-open-protocols-refuse-both/)