Enclosure is more than just a simple barrier or boundary: it is a severing of the ties that connect us to other people and living creatures, while uprooting us from the land and, more generally, our sense of place.
Both knowledge and land must be given back to the whole at some point
Technology and open source software became deeply politicized for me in 2012 in a way that food and farming had never been.
Link the ejidos Of Mexico to the concept of usufruct.
Incorporate R. Turner into "Forgotten Enclosures" between "Information, after all, wants to be free" and "Yet the cost of disregarding information's earthly trappings."
Richard Stallman observed in the early 1980's that software is enclosed by denying users access to freely read, modify and share the source code. Two decades later, Lawrence Lessig brought attention to the way codes of law can restrict or enable the codes of software, but that the later can also be used to supplant, obscure or evade the former. As he more succinctly put it: "Code is law."
To say nothing of the truly abhorrent sovereign citizen movement, a loose group of white supremacists fronting as tax protestors. While I don't know of any direct connections to either food or tech movements, the regrettably similar name has prompted some food sovereignty activists to question whether "autonomy" might be a better option.1
The European Commission's Joint Research Center defines data sovereignty as:
Data sovereignty involves enhancing control by organisations and individuals over data that they contribute to generating. It implies participation in data governance and allows individuals and organisations to self-determine how, when and at what price others may use their data across the value chain. It means that data holders can safeguard user data, and ensure that it is used only in accordance with strictly defined rules.2
The Global Indigenous Data Alliance stewards the CARE Principles3 and has a ton of resources that covers most of the early literature on the subject of Indigenous Data Sovereignty. They provide their own definition:
While the term Indigenous Data Sovereignty is relatively new, Indigenous Peoples have always been data collectors and knowledge holders. The rise of national Indigenous Data Sovereignty networks reflects a growing global concern about the need to protect against the misuse of Indigenous data and to ensure Indigenous Peoples are the primary beneficiaries of their data. GIDA connects these national communities to advocate for shared rights and interests in data.
They then cite the following paper from Lovett, et al.:
Indigenous groups across the world have increasingly become engaged in the data space in response to historical practice and to guide good practice going forward. This has included the establishment of country specific networks including the US Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network (USIDSN) to support IDS through data-driven research, policy advocacy, and education. The Aotearoa New Zealand-based Te Mana Raraunga - Maori Data Sovereignty Network, was formed in 2015, and argues that data that are collected about Indigenous people should be subjected to the laws of the nation from which it is collected, including tribal nations. The First Nations Information Governance Centre advocates for and coordinates Indigenous data governance efforts for First Nations in Canada; the Maiam nayri Wingara Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective in Australia was formed in early 2017 to develop Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data sovereignty principles andto identify Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategic data assets (Lovett et al. 2019).4
Stephanie Russo Carroll (a.k.a. Stephanie Carroll Rainie, a.k.a. Ahtna Athabascan) is a key figure in the development of the CARE principles (hence she's the principal researcher cited in the paper) and was also instrumental in bringing the concept of data sovereignty into wider usage in North America. Carroll et al.5 gives a brief appraisal of the origins of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and its relationship to national sovereignty:
In mainstream usage, “data sovereignty is the concept that information which has been converted and stored in binary digital form is subject to the laws of the country in which it is located” (Rouse 2013)6. This definition focuses on geographic jurisdiction over digitized data. A nation-state’s laws control the digital data that is housed within its geographic boundaries. Indigenous data sovereignty extends beyond this mainstream definition. It is not limited by geographic jurisdiction or digital form.
“Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples and tribes to govern the collection, ownership, and application of their own data” (Rainie et al. 2017b). Further, it refers to all data gathered by the Native nation themselves or by other external data agents. “Indigenous data sovereignty (IDS) derives from the inherent right of Native nations to govern their peoples, lands, and resources” (NCAI 2018, p. 1).
Carroll also played a key role in founding the US Data Sovereignty Network. The
archived /about page defines data sovereignty:
Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of a nation to govern the collection, ownership, and application of its own data. It derives from tribes’ inherent right to govern their peoples, lands, and resources. This conception of data sovereignty positions Indigenous nations’ activities to govern data within an Indigenous rights framework. In other words, Indigenous data sovereignty accords with international declarations and covenants to which the US has become a signatory, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
Notably, this conception of data sovereignty contrasts with the mainstream understanding of data sovereignty, which is that data are subject to the laws of the nation in which it is stored. USIDSN posits that when data are collected from the people and communities of an Indigenous nation, the data come under the control of that Indigenous nation.
The footnote on that page refers to an earlier 2017 paper, "Data as a Strategic Resource: Self-determination, Governance, and the Data Challenge for Indigenous Nations in the United States", which is also highly cited, while also stating that:
Some of this language is adapted and informed by the charter7 of Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori Data Sovereignty Network in Aotearoa/New Zealand founded in July 2015.
This is a reference to the work of Tahu Kukutai, who with John Taylor, authored the 2015 document "Data Sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples: Current Practice and Future Needs", which was later included as the first chapter in the book they also edited together, Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Toward an Agenda. That book features contributions from Ray Lovett and Desi Rodriguez-Lonebear, two more authors who show up a lot in the literature, as well as Ceal Tournier, then chairperson of he First Nations Information Governance Centre (FNIGC).
The FNIGIC is in turn closely affiliated with The British Columbia First Nations’ Data Governance Initiative (BCFNDGI), founded by Gwen Phillips of the Ktunaxa Nation. Eventually, the BCFNDGI would become the BC First Nations Regional Information Governance Centre (RIGC), as a part of the FNIGIC, and Phillips would join their board of directors.8 BCFNDGI defines IDS:
Indigenous Data Sovereignty is the assertion of identity ownership by a distinct group of Indigenous Peoples; it includes the ownership of historic and current identity including intellectual property (language, stories, songs, worldview, cultural signs, symbols and properties …), data, records and information.9
The FNIGC published the "Ownership, Control, Access and Possession (OCAP™): The Path to First Nations Information Governance" in 2014. Though it does not explicitly use the term "data sovereignty," the concepts are all there in that document. They've put out more recent publications on the subject, like this 2022 discussion paper, "Exploration of the Impact of Canada’s Information Management Regime on First Nations Data Sovereignty", and have included the language in many of their documents and brochures. They offer a course on The Fundamentals of OCAP® and have an excellent timeline of their history on their website.
Significant space is given to the discussion of First Nations Data Sovereignty in this discussion paper, "Exploration of the Impact of Canada’s Information Management Regime on First Nations Data Sovereignty", from 2022:
The term ‘data’ is defined here as more than just numbers and statistics that can be charted on a graph. It also includes stories, traditional knowledge, intellectual property, surveys, and research. ‘First Nations Data’ therefore is defined here to mean any information:
- About First Nations people like health, jobs, and housing;
- From First Nations like languages, patterns, songs, dances; and
- About First Nations reserve and traditional lands, waters, resources, and the environment.
First Nations data sovereignty means all this data and information are subject to the laws of the First Nation. First Nations rights to data sovereignty extend to their citizens as individuals as well as their collective rights as nations and governments.
[T]he data governance rights of Indigenous nations apply regardless of where the data is held or by whom. This includes the right to the generation of the data that Indigenous peoples require to support nation rebuilding and governance… IDS (Indigenous data sovereignty) also comprises the entitlement to determine how Indigenous data is governed and stewarded (Raine, 2019).
Data sovereignty is an element of self‑determination and self‑government. (Kukutai, 2016). Access to data and information about a nation’s citizens, lands, waters, economies, natural resources, etc., is critical to good governance and sustainable development (United Nations, n.d., Office of the Privacy Commissioner, 2016). Without data and information, governments are unable to determine what policies and programs may be needed or the impact they might be having. Good governance requires reliable data and information. This is as true for First Nations as it is for the Government of Canada (Joint Advisory Committee on Fiscal Relations, 2019).
First Nations exercise data sovereignty through the application of their own laws, policies, and processes (FNIGC, 2020). How First Nations choose to exercise their data sovereignty is up to them. First Nations traditional laws and protocols, the modern application of these laws, and the need to develop new laws, codes, protocols, policies, and programs will influence First Nations individual data governance regimes. That said, First Nations have adopted a common approach to what constitutes data sovereignty. The OCAP® principles of ownership, control, access, and possession are individually and collectively the pillars of First Nations data sovereignty
The same document also contains a section titled "Individual versus collective rights":
While being cautious to respect diversity, there are some generalizations that can be made about common differences between First Nations perspectives and those of Canada. For example, many First Nations philosophies of interconnectedness explain their relationship to their lands, cultures, and each other, a relationship of belonging and responsibility that are different from the philosophy expressed by the Crown (Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1996; Wilson, 2009). The concept of what is considered private is an additional example.
While ‘private’ information in mainstream discussions is commonly understood to include financial and health information, for Indigenous communities, ‘private’ information might include other types of information such as information associated with participation in ceremonies, hunting and gathering practices, or support for community development projects. Retaining privacy over certain traditional cultural practices is a long‑established convention based on an understanding of collective privacy. There is a strong interest in preserving and reviving Indigenous languages, cultural practices, and value systems among Indigenous peoples and a resultant drive to have control over cultural heritage in a way that conforms with Indigenous laws and conventions (Gee, 2019).
There also is a stark difference in perspectives held by First Nations and the Crown about the value of individual versus collective rights, including information management rights (Williams, 2011; Vis‑Dunbar, 2011). On behalf of the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, the Informational Privacy Interdisciplinary Research Group (IPIRG) at the University of Victoria, BC explored the issue of collective rights to privacy. They concluded that the Crown’s preference for individualism is evident in the information management regime. “Community interests are not mentioned explicitly, leading one to infer that a community’s privacy interest is seen under Canadian (statutory) law as being reducible to the privacy interests of its members” (Vis‑Dunbar, 2011). In other words, groups are treated as a collection of individuals. Any group rights to privacy are only those enjoyed by them as individuals, whether they be humans or corporations. Therefore, under the Canadian regime, First Nations citizens have individual rights to privacy of their personal information. These are the same rights enjoyed by all Canadians. First Nations do not however hold a collective right to privacy. While it is important that Canada respect First Nation individual’s privacy in their information management regime, it is equally important that Canada recognize First Nations collective rights to privacy and data sovereignty.
It is settled law that First Nations have collective rights (Behn v. Moulton Contracting Ltd., 2013). It is argued here that First Nations are owed a collective right to privacy beyond the rights of First Nations citizens to their individual privacy. First Nations are first and foremost Nations and are owed that respect in keeping with the Royal Proclamation, 1763 (Calder et al. v. Attorney‑General of British Columbia) and subsequent legal developments in Canada (Borrows, 2019). UNDRIP recognizes and affirms ‘that [I]ndigenous peoples possess collective rights which are indispensable for their existence, well‑being, and integral development as peoples” (UNDRIP, Preamble). It identifies several collective rights, including rights to self‑government. First Nations are fully empowered governments with authority to manage their own affairs (UNDRIP, Art. 4). The Prime Minister has committed to a Nation‑to‑Nation relationship (Trudeau, 2015; 2020).
There is growing recognition that individual rights are not adequate for the purpose of protecting First Nations collective rights to privacy (Vis‑Dunbar, 2011). This has been acknowledged by the federal government, “[s]ince individual and communal Indigenous privacy interests can be deeply intertwined, this raises the question of whether the Privacy Act could reflect the unique concept of communal privacy interests” (DOJ, 2020). One possible approach to address this problem is to develop a groups’ rights model of ownership of data and information (Vis‑Dunbar, 2011). This may entail developing a new common law concept of group rights. This route relies on the Courts, it is expensive, time consuming, and its outcome entirely uncertain. There is a far simpler and faster solution, which is to recognize the collective rights of First Nations as nations. Amendments to the information management regime would embed a Nation‑to‑Nation relationship simply through the Crown’s recognition of all First Nations as governments to be treated in like manner to other international, provincial, and municipal governments.
Tim Davies, co-founder of Open Data Services Co-operative and Datasphere Initiative Fellow, compiled this incredibly thorough review on topics related to data sovereignty.10 He is also one of the editors of the book "The State of Open Data", which the GIDA features among their resources. Datasphere Initiative also published a comprehensive report on the topic11 and a handy listicle on "Initiatives to follow on Indigenous Data Sovereignty".12
The Dataspheres report cites a meta-analysis paper from Hummel, et al., which concludes:
We have reviewed how the notion of data sovereignty is used in academic writing. The notion turned out to exhibit a variety of different candidate meanings, and we have presented a conceptual grid to systematize them. The candidate meanings tend to relate in some way to meaningful control, ownership, and other claims in data. Data sovereignty can apply to a range of agents across the spectrum from individual consumers to entire societies and countries, sometimes yielding conflicting claims to data sovereignty across these levels. It primarily occurs in the context of debates around the design of IT architecture and/or laws applicable to data processing, but a number of other contexts as well. It tends to address a nuanced mixture of values: typically, it concerns control and power over data, yet the kind of power in question is not brute an arbitrary power, but often ties in with considerations related to inclusive deliberation and fundamental rights of data subjects. Finally, distinguishing more sharply and explicitly between descriptions of data sovereignty, challenges to data sovereignty, and management strategies to overcome them could ameliorate discourses and negotiation processes surrounding the governance of the digital.13
Open DEI (Digitising European Industry, not diversity, equity & inclusion), as part of a taskforce for the EU's Horizon 2020 Project, released a position paper titled "Design Principles for Data Spaces", which provides the following definitions in its glossary:
Data Sovereignty: The capability of an individual or organization to be entirely self-determining with regard to their data (see also: Data Self-determination).
Data Self-determination: The capacity of an individual or organization to control who has access to their (personal) data and under what conditions (see also: Data Sovereignty).
The International Data Spaces Association provides an explainer page and publishes a rulebook that also covers data sovereignty. They seem to be closely affiliated with the European Commission's dataspaces initiatives. In a position paper on dataspaces, they draw on the Open DEI definitions and list data sovereignty as one of the 3 main building blocks:
[...] data sovereignty, i.e., the ability for each stakeholder to control their data by making decisions as to how digital processes, infrastructures, and flows of data are structured, built, and managed, based on an appropriate governance scheme enabling specification of terms and conditions.14
Another reference that popped up a few times, probably because its cited in the Wikipedia article on Indigenous Data Sovereignty is Rob Kitchin's The Data Revolution, but data sovereignty is only included in the 2021 second edition. The first edition, from 2014, only includes two instances of the word 'sovereign': "Across all state institutions data generation, management, storage and analysis are fundamental tasks, used to assess the liabilities and entitlements of sovereign and non-sovereign subjects."
All the while, proponents of neoliberal globalization, typically opponents of data sovereignty, still rely on the restrictive interpretation of data sovereignty of a decade ago. Typically, the contemporary proponents of neoliberal globalization rely on the outdated, statist interpretation of data sovereignty, as Susan Ariel Aaronson of the Hinrich Foundation does in a paper titled, "Data is disruptive: How data sovereignty is challenging data governance"15:
For China and India, the right to control the collection, ownership, and application of citizens’ data – heretofore referred to as data sovereignty – should rest with national policymakers.
See Dr. Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan, via "Native American Food Sovereignty, Explained" from PBS Origins. She is the principal author of "Food Sovereignty Indicators for Indigenous Community Capacity Building and Health".
A house in certain parts of Paris may be valued at thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds’ worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day — a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.
Who, then, can appropriate to himself the tiniest plot of ground, or the meanest building, without committing a flagrant injustice? Who, then, has the right to sell to any bidder the smallest portion of the common heritage?
From Monty Neill's "Encounters in Chiapas" in Midnight Notes #13, Auroras of the Zapatistas (2001):
Encircled by the armed women and men of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), people from over 40 countries meet in an Intercontinental Encuentro in the rain and mud season of Chiapas in southeastern Mexico. The EZLN hoped people would come, though Subcommandante Marcos said they had vacillated on this idea, initially thinking only a few would come. But we are here in the thousands. Mexico, Spain, France, Italy, and Germany provide the largest groups. The U.S. delegation is unfortunately small, and smaller delegations have arrived from other European countries, Japan, and the rest of the Americas with a few from Oceania, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean.
Our diversity is not just our continents and nations, or our gender (perhaps 40% women) or age (mostly young rather than veterans of the sixties), but our experiences and ideas. These we are to share and reshape through the experience of the encounter in the forest, striving toward a new possibility.
It is not quite the whole world, with too few from the South of our planet, and it is not likely that the kind of work, paid or unpaid, that the participants do accurately reflects the work done across the planet. But has there ever been such a gathering? We are not a party, nor party representatives to a Comintern. Indeed, we are not representatives but simply ourselves, though we are labeled "delegations." Many are activists from various forms of community and workplace struggles, such as the Argentinean mothers of the disappeared.
We certainly are not the owning class, who meet in fancy hotels with fine wines and fancy foods. Rather, we sleep on the ground or in hammocks under plastic roofs, or in tents, and eat tamales, enchiladas, beans, and soups. Alcohol and drugs are prohibited in the rules we each signed as a condition of attending. This gathering is, after all, in a war zone.
Thus, security concerns are real. At the start, in Oventic, not far from San Cristobal, everyone is thoroughly searched. Divided in two lines, women and men, standing behind their packs, a Zapatista empties each pack, feeling for weapons. Even Swiss army knives are taken, a receipt given to pick them up when leaving. A quick pat-down, then the Zapatistas carefully re-fill each bag. It is all done with care and respect for our belongings and our persons.
In the beginning and at the end, in La Realidad, southeast toward the Guatemalan border, the Encuentro meets as a whole. In between, it separates into five mesas (tables) to discuss politics, economics, society, culture, and identity. Each table divides further into sub-mesas.
The additional three village sites, all in or near the Lacandon forest, are Roberto Barrios (near the great Mayan ruins of Palenque), Morelia, and La Garrucha. To arrive at the villages requires traveling past the Mexican army, which has set up a base next to each community that has declared itself a Zapatista community, and past the immigration checkpoints set up to harass us all, both Mexicans and non-Mexicans. Getting to Roberto Barrios required walking through the army base then fording a stream.
At each locale, the mesa is within a circle, within the protection of the EZLN. At Roberto Barrios, the site of the economics table, some 3500 local people, among the materially poorest on the planet, have spent four months constructing a space for the encounter: a hall to hold 400 (with rented chairs and an excellent sound system), a kitchen and a dining hall, sleeping areas, a space for the press and to house the omnipresent computers and to recharge batteries, showers and toilets. It is a huge, overwhelming and humbling gift.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, "The Institutional Aspects of Peasant Communities: An Analytical View" (1965):
Another institution sets in even stronger light the idea that land is to be used, not to be owned by exclusion. It is the custom called "open field pasture" in England, vaine pâture in France and Gemenglad der Felder in Germany. According to it, after harvest all fields are opened for pasture to everyone's cattle and remain so until the next tilling. Once the practice was common to all European countries; it survived in many parts of Western Europe well into our own time.
Open field agriculture was prevalent in Ireland, too, where it was called rundale, until those farmers were dispossessed by English settlers and the plantation system, starting in the 1580's. This was an important proving ground for Britain's colonial methods, which they would later perfect in the expropriation of the Americas' common landholdings, from Virginia to Belize. In the Scottish Highlands, the similarly named run-rig system continued through the late 18th century, coinciding with the Scottish Enlightenment that produced The Wealth of Nations and a wave of land privatization consistent with that book's core tenets. Today, the village of Laxton, Nottinghamshire, retains the last open field system in England. Three fields are still held in common ownership, little changed from detailed maps of the area from 1635. A fourth field was lost only in 1903, during the final era of Parliamentary enclosure. The farmers of Laxton — in a sophisticated practice combining regular crop rotation and fallow periods, intermittent grazing and permanent pasture lanes — are apportioned strips of land from each of the fields, a tradition that has likely endured for over half a millennium.
Elsewhere, the Russian obshchina or mir16 persisted in its medieval form as late as 1861, when Tsar Alexander II emancipated the serfs. It has even been argued that a kernel of communal land practice held out until the Soviet Union undertook collectivization in the 1920's. In Mexico, the revolutionary Constitution of 1917 and subsequent land reforms of Lázaro Cárdenas established the system of ejidos. These remained largely in tact until the relevant articles of the constitution, which blocked the sale of communal lands to foreign investors, were repealed at the behest of neoliberal policy makers in the interest of ratifying NAFTA. The Zapatista uprising was launched the day NAFTA took effect on January 1, 1994, and to this day the EZLN defends the communal lands of Chiapas from further enclosures. This is all to say nothing of the indigenous land practices which have successfully resisted colonial encroachment and land enclosures for centuries across the globe, but I feel ill-equipped to speak to that vast history of struggle.
The Free Culture Movement, or the principles it advocated for, were at least on my radar throughout the aughts. This was out of naked self-interest if nothing else. I was a broke 20-something, trying to make rent on my Loisaida apartment while struggling first to get through college and then through a global recession. I also had a taste for obscure music and films, and in that primordial age before Spotify and Netflix, torrenting was my best if not only option. Somewhere between late 2011 and early 2012, however, I gained a whole new appreciation for the meaning of information freedom.
In the early hours of November 15, 2011, I woke up to the sound of many, many helicopters flying low and fast over Manhattan, their powerful spotlights strobing across my bedroom window. The occasional late night NYPD chopper was nothing out of the ordinary in Bloomberg's cleaner, friendlier, post-9/11 New York City, but this was another level of intensity. It took a few unsuccessful attempts to fall back asleep before I realized where they were likely heading. The commotion had woken my roommate, too, so we went to the roof for a better look. There wasn't much to see, just the lights from a dozen or more helicopters scanning the rooftops and empty city streets, mostly concentrated about a mile and a half south of us. Still, we knew what it meant: they were raiding the encampment in Zuccotti Park. The cops, the bankers and their good pal the mayor had all had enough, and they were finally putting an end to Occupy Wall Street.
Like a lot of New Yorkers, I had been quietly supportive of the movement, joined a couple rallies when it seemed convenient, but didn't guess it posed much of a threat to the halls of power — and that was too bad. This crackdown seemed entirely out of proportion though. In the weeks that followed, I learned plenty that made me think maybe powerful people did have some reason to worry: there was the vast sum of money anonymously donated to police union in the weeks prior to the raid; the restraining order issued by State Supreme Court Justice Lucy Billings and the cavalier way it was ignored by Bloomberg and the cops; the brazen assaults against members of the press; just the sheer expenditure of resources and the political gamble they were willing to take to stamp it out once and for all. Something clearly made them rate Occupy more of a threat than I had.
While those impressions were still fresh, SOPA/PIPA...
via James Boyle's 2003 "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain":
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose.The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back.
Boyle's essay, as published by Duke Law in 2003, provides the most thorough commentary on the poem's provenance, at least that I have found to-date:
Apart from being anonymous, the poem is extremely hard to date. It probably comes from the enclosure controversies of the eighteenth century. However, the earliest reference to it that I have been able to discover is from 1821. Edward Birch was moved to compose some (fairly poor) verses in response when he reported “seeing the following jeu d’esprit in a Handbill posted up in Plaistow, as a ‘CAUTION’ to prevent persons from supporting the intended inclosure of Hainault or Waltham Forest.” He then quotes a version of the poem. Edward Birch, TICKLER MAG., Feb. 1821, at 45. In 1860, a staff writer for the journal Notes and Queries declares that “the animosity excited against the Inclosure Acts and their authors . . . was almost without precedent: though fifty years and more have passed, the subject is still a sore one in many parishes. . . . I remember some years ago, in hunting over an old library discovering a box full of printed squibs, satires and ballads of the time against the acts and those who were supposed to favour them,—the library having belonged to a gentleman who played an active part on the opposition side.” The author then quotes the first verse as a “naive epigram . . . which forcibly impressed itself on my memory.” “Exon” Ballads Against Inclosures, 9 NOTES AND QUERIES, at 130-131 (2nd ser., Feb. 1860). The context makes it appear that the poem itself must date from the late 18th century. In other sources, the poem is sometimes dated at 1764 and said to be in response to Sir Charles Pratt’s fencing of common land. See, e.g., Dana A. Freiburger, John Thompson, English Philomath—A Question of Land Surveying and Astronomy, poster paper submitted to the History of Astronomy Workshop University of Notre Dame, (July 1-4, 1999), note 15, available at http://www.nd.edu/~histast4/exhibits/papers/Freiburger/index.html (last visited Dec. 19, 2002). This attribution is widespread and may well be true, but I have been able to discover no contemporary source material that sustains it. By the end of the nineteenth century, the poem was being quoted, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with agreement, on both sides of the Atlantic. See Ezra S. Carr, Aids and Obstacles to Agriculture on the Pacific-Coast, in THE PATRONS OF HUSBANDRY ON THE PACIFIC COAST 290, 291 (San Francisco, A.L. Bancroft and Co. 1875); EDWARD P. CHEYNEY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE INDUSTRIAL AND SOCIAL HISTORY OF ENGLAND 219 (1901).
The paper from self-ascribed "independent scholar" Dana A. Frieburger, "John Thompson, English Philomath — A Question of Land Surveying and Astronomy", is available on the Internet Archive. Contemporaneously with Boyle, or even preceding him by a narrow margin, David Bollier uses a slightly different version of the poem as an epigraph to his 2002 book, Silent Theft: the Private Plunder of our Common Wealth and a portion of the same for an article in the Boston Review, "Reclaiming the Commons", published June 1, 2002. It's unclear if this usage predates Boyle's usage, as Boyle's first footnote points to an earlier iteration of his paper, titled "Fencing off ideas: enclosure and the disappearance of the public domain", published in the Spring 2002 edition of Daedalus.
Peter Linebaugh's attribution, where he cites the same poem in Stop, Thief!, cites relevant scholarship on the commons from the 20th Century Marxist and tradition and critical theory, but I have not found specific reference to that poem in any of these works that I've so far been able to access:
E.J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W.W. Norton, 1959); and from the Warwick School of Social History, our collective’s Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1975) and E.P. Thompson’s Whigs and Hunters (London: Allen Lane, 1975). Verso published a second edition of Albion’s Fatal Tree in 2011, and Breviary Stuff published a new edition of Whigs and Hunters in 2013. See also the “Frankfurt School” study by Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), and the influential work by Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977).
In "The Second Enclosure Movement", Boyle lays out his main thesis plainly:
We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. It sounds grandiloquent to call it “the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind,” but in a very real sense that is just what it is. (p. 37)
The footnote to the above reads:
The analogy to the enclosure movement has been too succulent to resist. To my knowledge, Ben Kaplan, Pamela Samuelson, Yochai Benkler, David Lange, Chrisopher May, David Bollier and Keith Aoki have all employed the trope, as I myself have on previous occasions. For a particularly thoughtful and careful development of the parallel between the two enclosure movements, see generally Travis, supra note 7. (p. 37, n. 12)
Acknowledging Lange, once again:
Thus, there are a number of possible places where one could say, “the defense of the public domain begins here.” But, like most people, I attribute central importance to the writing of my friend and colleague David Lange, whose article Recognizing the Public Domain really initiated contemporary study of the subject. (p. 59)
In a telling footnote (p. 176, n. 131), Lange admits:
I should perhaps say clearly at this point that of course I do not mean to be taken literally when I suggest an analogy to public lands. Proposals of that sort too quickly lead to analysis rooted in reductive nonsense.
The footnote addresses a rather callous comparison of the public domain to "the public grazing lands on the Western plains of a century ago," and the environmental impact statements required for its private use. Yet he qualifies even that analogy, because "so insubstantial is the stuff of intellelctual property." He suggests that the Alaskan tundra, "singularly unsuited for colonization," might make a fairer analogy, before dismissing both as nonsense.
Here's the full context:
In this final portion of my own essay, I will suggest some other ways courts might respond when unwarranted claims of intellectual property are advanced.
Then, after providing the first two methods:
Third, as an additional part of the plaintiff's prima facie case, it would seem fair to require the submission of proof concerning the likely impact that recognition of the plaintiff's claim might have on subsequent claims. [...] The analogy that comes to mind is the environmental impact statement that must be prepared when, for example, government agencies propose to make some doubtful use of lands. The purpose of these statements is generally to require that, as against the uncontrolled ravages wrought in earlier times, would-be users today assure us that their proposals will not heedlessly affect the interests of individuals in generations to come.'129 The analogy here seems apt; in certain useful respects the public domain in the field of intellectual property today can be compared to the public grazing lands on the Western plains of a century ago.130 Indeed, so insubstantial is the stuff of intellectual property that the more insistent image is not the sturdier lands of the American West but the more fragile tundra of the Alaskan North: wild, vast, inaccessible, beautiful, but singularly unsuited to colonization.131 If it is fair, as we seem to have decided in this century it is, to require the users of public lands to prepare impact statements as a condition of their use, then perhaps it is also fair to require similar assurances before we permit the outright appropriation of the territory of the creative subconscious.132
- See generally F. Anderson, NEPA in the Courts (1973).
A California practitioner, writing some years ago in response to then-recent litigation involving Nancy Sinatra and the Fifth Dimension, captured the essence of the concerns expressed in the text at this point: [...]- Or to public lands of other sorts. See Krasilovsky, supra note 20, at 205, 225-26.
- But cf. id. at 225-26 (suggesting the development of the Alaskan crab and shrimp industries as examples of how a federal bureau might be established to manage, conserve and develop the public domain). If this alarming suggestion were followed, impact statements would be even more relevant.
I should perhaps say clearly at this point that of course I do not mean to be taken literally when I suggest an analogy to public lands. Proposals of that sort too quickly lead to analysis rooted in reductive nonsense. Cf. Comment, Premature Burial, supra note 20, at 996-97.- One author has used the term "public commons" to describe "the raw materials from which creative imaginations must work" and which therefore cannot be "fenced in" in any circumstances. Carman, supra note 20, at 58, 59. Cf. Nimmer, supra note 20, at 266.
- Cf. Stone, Should Trees Have Standing?— Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, 45 S. CAL. L. REV. 450 (1972).
Pay special attention to note 133, where he cites Christopher Stone's paper, today considered a cornerstone of the legal arguments for Rights of Nature.
So dismissing Lange, we come back to Benkler for the earliest comparison of intellectual property, particularly copyright expansion, to early modern land enclosures:
- Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 N.Y.U. Law Review 354 (1999)
- The Commons As A Neglected Factor of Information Policy (TPRC September 98)
Make sure to also acknowledge his Wealth of Nations, particularly "Table 11.1: Overview of the Institutional Ecology," with its 2 contrasting columns for "Enclosure" and "Openness" across 3 layers (adapted from the OSI model, it seems): physical, logical and content. See his footnote 157.
Alongside Benkler, Travis is also an important early source on enclosure, as Boyle suggests. His paper, "Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment," was " a winner of the 1999 Berkeley Technology Law Journal Comment Competition," which would explain how it came to be so widely cited when Travis was only in his last year at Harvard Law School. Travis also cites E.P. Thompson and other writers from the Marxist tradition without provisos, something later scholars were reluctant to do, with the possible exception of Boyle. In particular, he cites Chapter III from Thompson's 1991 Customs in Common, which is an extension of his earlier Whigs and Hunters but provides much more context on the history of enclosure.
Hess and Ostrom provide a good overview of the use of the term "commons" with regard to intellectual property, in the "Ideas, Artifacts and Facilities" § "What Is a Commons?". They also edited a book length collection in 2007 called Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice.
I don't believe Boyle's Shamans, Software & Spleens contains any references, even though I haven't been able to access the full text, because I have been able to search it via Google Books but that turned up zero results. It's also not present in an older publication from 1992, "A Theory of Law and Information: Copyright, Spleens, Blackmail and Insider Trading", which contains early versions of a few of the same articles later expanded upon in the book. It is, however, present in the 2000 work, "Cruel, Mean, or Lavish? Economic Analysis, Price Discrimination and Digital Intellectual Property".
So I think that leaves Benkler and Travis with the earliest use of the metaphor, at least with regard to IP law specifically, which Boyle and Bollier would expand upon very soon after.
I regret I overlooked Christopher May, one of the names cited by Boyle in "The Second Enclosure Movement." His analysis of information enclosures is as it includes of survey of Marxian and anarchist (Proudhon, Robert Cox, Nozick, etc) interpretations of enclosure, as applied to IP. He also shares some important citations with Bollier in The Global Political Economy of Intellectual Property Rights, such as Radin, Boyle, Reichman, particularly in chapter 6.
Also, Vandana Shiva was years ahead of everyone else in the Duke/Harvard Law circles on all the most critical issues of enclosure, linking agricultural and intellectual commons, the central role women played in both, and the ways that European enclosures were expanded through colonization. Her 1997 Biopiracy and its first and fourth chapters are particularly relevant. She is cited by both Bollier and May.
Both May and Shiva give considerable attention to the TRIPS agreements, which were still being actively developed in the late nineties by the WTO, as well as its predecessor, GATT.
In From Counterculture to Cyberculture (pp. 258-260), Fred Turner cites Ellen Ullman's 1997, Close to the Machine, a testament to the alienating work/life culture of the late nineties tech boom. Turner then comments on the overlooked material elements of what techno-utopians back in the 1980's and 90's lauded as the coming information society:
To stay employed, Ullman and workers like her must move from node to node within the network of sites where computers and software are manufactured and used, and in order to pick up leads for new work, they must stay in touch with one another. As a result, programmers and others often find themselves living in a social and physical landscape populated principally by people like themselves. To succeed within that landscape, they must often turn their attention away from another, parallel landscape: the landscape of local, material things, of town boards and PTA meetings, of embodied participation in civic life. They must declare and maintain an allegiance to their own professional network, to its sites and technologies. And they must carry with them a handful of rules that Ullman trumpets with more than a little sarcasm: “Just live by your wits and expect everyone else to do the same. Carry no dead wood. Live free or die. Yeah, surely, you can only rely on yourself.”17
For those like Ullman who have the education, the professional skills, and the lack of geographically binding social ties that allow a person to remain mobile and flexible, such libertarian nostrums can transform a series of personal losses — of time with family and neighbors, of connection to one’s body and one’s community — into a soothing narrative with which they can rationalize the limits of their own choices. As Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have argued, the antinomian and antistatist impulses of the American counterculture do in fact allow workers like Ullman to acknowledge the power of market forces in their lives and, paradoxically, to preserve a sense of their own autonomy.18 However, to the degree that the libertarian rhetoric of self-reliance embraces a New Communalist vision of a consciousness- centered, information-oriented elite, it can also permit a deep denial of the moral and material costs of the long-term shift toward network modes of production and ubiquitous computing.
For Stewart Brand and, later, for the writers and editors of Wired, the mirror logic of cybernetics provided substantial support for this denial. For Norbert Wiener and those who followed his lead, the world consisted of a series of informational patterns, and each of those patterns in turn was also in some sense an emblem of every other. As taken up by the New Communalists, this vision produced two contradictory claims, one egalitarian and the other elitist. On the one hand, the fact that material phenomena could be imagined as part of a single, invisible whole suggested that an egalitarian order might obtain in the world. Human beings, nature, machines — all were one and each should coevolve with every other. On the other hand, though, in keeping with the vision’s history as a universal rhetorical tool with which cold war researchers claimed authority for their projects, the fact that the social and the natural, the individual and the institutional, the human and the machine could all be seen as reflections of one another suggested that those who could most successfully depict themselves as aligned with the forces of information could also claim to be models of those forces. They could in fact claim to have a “natural” right to power, even as they disguised their leadership with a rhetoric of systems, communities, and information flow.
It was this claim that Stewart Brand and his colleagues modeled for their clients at the Global Business Network, and it is was this claim that the writers of Wired bolstered by depicting subjects such as Esther Dyson and George Gilder as people who spoke or acted like computers. As the communards of the back-to-the-land movement had once argued that they were forerunners of a new, more egalitarian society on the basis of their being in touch with a shared consciousness, the information consultants of the 1990s asserted that the Internet modeled not only an egalitarian future, but their own, existing lives. In touch with the flow of information, they could safely represent themselves as a “digital generation” — or, in a term much used at the time, as “digerati.”19
The rhetoric of peer-to-peer informationalism, however, much like the rhetoric of consciousness out of which it grew, actively obscures the material and technical infrastructures on which both the Internet and the lives of the digital generation depend. Behind the fantasy of unimpeded information flow lies the reality of millions of plastic keyboards, silicon wafers, glass-faced monitors, and endless miles of cable. All of these technologies depend on manual laborers, first to build them and later to tear them apart. This work remains extraordinarily dangerous, first to those who handle the toxic chemicals required in manufacture and later to those who live on the land, drink the water, and breathe the air into which those chemicals eventually leak.
The relevant section from Richard Barbrook's and Andy Cameron's "The Californian Ideology", as published in Mute, 1995:
Although companies in these sectors can mechanise and sub-contract much of their labour needs, they remain dependent on key people who can research and create original products, from software programs and computer chips to books and tv programmes. These skilled workers and entrepreneurs form the so-called 'virtual class': '...the techno-intelligentsia of cognitive scientists, engineers, computer scientists, video-game developers, and all the other communications specialists...' (Kroker and Weinstein). Unable to subject them to the discipline of the assembly-line or replace them by machines, managers have organised such intellectual workers through fixed-term contracts. Like the 'labour aristocracy' of the last century, core personnel in the media, computing and telecoms industries experience the rewards and insecurities of the marketplace. On the one hand, these hi-tech artisans not only tend to be well-paid, but also have considerable autonomy over their pace of work and place of employment. As a result, the cultural divide between the hippie and the organisation man has now become rather fuzzy. Yet, on the other hand, these workers are tied by the terms of have no guarantee continued employment. Lacking the free time of the hippies, work itself ho become the main route to self-fulfilment for much of the 'virtual class'.
Because these core workers are both a privileged part of the labour force and heirs of the radical ideas of the community media activists, the Californian Ideology simultaneously reflects the disciplines of market economics and the freedoms of hippie artisanship. This bizarre hybrid is only made possible through a nearly universal belief in technological determinism. Ever since the '60s, liberals -in the social sense of the word - have hoped that the new information technologies would realise their ideals. Responding to the challenge of the New Left, the New Right has resurrected an older form of liberalism: economic liberalism. In place of the collective freedom sought by the hippie radicals, they have championed the liberty of individuals within the marketplace. From the `70s onwards, Muffler, de Sola Pool and other gurus attempted to prove that the advent of hypermedia would paradoxically involve a return to the economic liberalism of the past. This 'retro-utopia echoed the predictions of Asimov, Heinlein and other macho sci-fi novelists whose future worlds were always filled with space traders, superslick salesmen, genius scientists, pirate captains and other rugged individualists. The path of technological progress leads back to the America of the Founding Fathers.
These three sections are also significant for calling out the hypocrisy of the communalists-turned-technocrats:
Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken place with the aid of large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies of the computer and the Net were invented with the aid of massive state subsidies. For example, the first Difference Engine project received a British Government grant of £517,470 - a small fortune in 1834. From Colossus to EDVAC, from flight simulators to virtual reality, the development of- computing has depended at key moments on public research handouts or fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM corporation built the first programmable digital computer only after it was requested to do so by the US Defense Department during the Korean War. The result of a lack of state intervention meant that Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the first electronic computer in the late '30s when the Wehrmacht refused to fund Konrad Zuze, who had pioneered the use of binary code, stored programs and electronic logic gates.
One of the weirdest things about the Californian Ideology is that the West Coast itself is a product of massive state intervention. Government dollars were used to build the irrigation systems, high-ways, schools, universities and other infrastructural projects which make the good life possible. On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast hi-tech industrial complex has been feasting off the fattest pork barrel in history for decades. The US government has poured billions of tax dollars into buying planes, missiles, electronics and nuclear bombs from Californian companies. Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defence budget.
All of this public funding has had an enormously beneficial - albeit unacknowledged and uncosted - effect on the subsequent development of Silicon Valley and other hi-tech industries. Entrepreneurs often have an inflated sense of their own 'creative act of will' in developing new ideas and give little recognition to the contributions made by either the state or their own labour force. However, all technological progress is cumulative - it depends on the results of a collective historical process and must be counted, at least in part, as a collective achievement. Hence, as in every other industrialised country, American entrepreneurs have in fact relied on public money and state intervention to nurture and develop their industries. When Japanese companies threatened to take over the American microchip market, the libertarian computer capitalists of California had no ideological qualms about joining a state-sponsored cartel organised by the state to fight off the invaders from the East!
Despite the central role played by public intervention in developing hypermedia, the Californian Ideology is a profoundly anti-statist dogma. The ascendancy of this dogma is a result of the failure of renewal in the USA during the late '60s and early '70s. Although the ideologues of California celebrate the libertarian individualism of the hippies, they never discuss the political or social demands of the counter-culture. Individual freedom is no longer to be achieved by rebelling against the system, but through submission to the natural laws of technological progress and the free market. In many cyberpunk novels and films, this asocial libertarianism is expressed by the central character of the lone individual fighting for survival within a virtual world of information.
In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals - the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. Yet this primary myth of the American republic ignores the contradiction at the heart of the American dream: that some individuals can prosper only through the suffering of others. The life of Thomas Jefferson - the man behind the ideal of `Jeffersonian democracy' - clearly demonstrates the double nature of liberal individualism. The man who wrote the inspiring call for democracy and liberty in the American declaration of independence was at the same time one of the largest slave-owners in the country.
Despite emancipation and the civil rights movement, racial segregation still lies at the centre of American politics - especially in California. Behind the rhetoric of individual freedom lies the master's fear of the rebellious slave. In the recent elections for governor in California, the Republican candidate won through a vicious anti-immigrant campaign. Nationally, the triumph of Gingrich's neoliberals in the legislative elections was based on the mobilizations of "angry white males" against the supposed threat from black welfare scroungers, immigrants from Mexico and other uppity minorities.
The hi-tech industries are an integral part of this racist Republican coalition. However, the exclusively private and corporate construction of cyberspace can only promote the fragmentation of American society into antagonistic, racially-determined classes. Already 'redlined' by profit-hungry telcos, the inhabitants of poor inner city areas can be shut out of the new on-line services through lack of money. In contrast, yuppies and their children can play at being cyberpunks in a virtual world without having to meet any of their impoverished neighbours. Working for hi-tech and new media corporations, many members of the 'virtual class' would like to believe that new technology will somehow solve America's social, racial and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part. Alongside the ever-widening social divisions, another apartheid between the 'information-rich' and the 'information-poor' is being created. Yet calls for the telcos to be forced to provide universal access to the information superstructure for all citizens are denounced in Wired magazine as being inimical to progress. Whose progress?
As Hegel pointed out, the tragedy of the masters is that they cannot escape from dependence on their slaves. Rich white Californians need their darker-skinned fellow humans to work in their factories, pick their crops, look after their children and tend their gardens. Unable to surrender wealth and power, the white people of California can instead find spiritual solace in their worship of technology. If human slaves are ultimately unreliable, then mechanical ones will have to be invented. The search for the holy grail of Artificial Intelligence reveals this desire for the Golem - a strong and loyal slave whose skin is the colour of the earth and whose innards are made of sand. Techno-utopians imagine that it is possible to obtain slave-like labour from inanimate machines. Yet, although technology can store or amplify labour, it can never remove the necessity for humans to invent, build and maintain the machines in the first place. Slave labour cannot be obtained without somebody being enslaved. At his estate at Monticello, Jefferson invented many ingenious gadgets - including a 'dumb waiter' to mediate contact with his slaves. In the late twentieth century, it is not surprising that this liberal slave-owner is the hero of those who proclaim freedom while denying their brown-skinned fellow citizens those democratic rights said to be inalienable.
In 2013, Turner gave a keynote lecture for The Anthropocene Project in Berlin, based on his book. He traces the thread from the early cybernetics movements of the 40's and 50's, to the counter culture and communes of the 60's, then to silicon valley culture of the 70's and 80's, and finally to the emergence of neo-libaral capitalism in the 90's and 00's. The whole talk is fantastic, but when he explicitly links these themes to farming toward the end, at 38m30s, it practically gave me chills:
You know, I think in many ways the New Communalist dreams of "communities of consciousness" provided a guiding ethos for networked computing. And the irony is that that ethos helped underwrite the emergence of a highly individualized kind of economy that's very rough to live in. Contract labor is a very hard way to live and it's a way that increasing numbers of Americans are living. Blending your community and your labor sounds fun, until you've worked on a farm. When you get up in the middle of the night to milk a cow, boy, I bet you wish for the 40-hr week, and some separation between home and work. And I think that's true for a lot of people I know who code.
In The Wealth of Networks, as the titular reference might suggest, Benkler fits squarely into the two Post-Cold War camps of neoclassical economics and liberal political theory, extrapolating neatly from a line of thought that passes through both Adam Smith and John Rawls. He acknowledges this position, though it is by no means without nuance or qualifications:
There are four methodological choices represented by the thesis that I have outlined up to this point, and therefore in this book as a whole, which require explication and defense. The first is that I assign a very significant role to technology. The second is that I offer an explanation centered on social relations, but operating in the domain of economics, rather than sociology. The third and fourth are more internal to liberal political theory. The third is that I am offering a liberal political theory, but taking a path that has usually been resisted in that literature—considering economic structure and the limits of the market and its supporting institutions from the perspective of freedom, rather than accepting the market as it is, and defending or criticizing adjustments through the lens of distributive justice. Fourth, my approach heavily emphasizes individual action in nonmarket relations. Much of the discussion revolves around the choice between markets and nonmarket social behavior. In much of it, the state plays no role, or is perceived as playing a primarily negative role, in a way that is alien to the progressive branches of liberal political thought. In this, it seems more of a libertarian or an anarchistic thesis than a liberal one. I do not completely discount the state, as I will explain. But I do suggest that what is special about our moment is the rising efficacy of individuals and loose, nonmarket affiliations as agents of political economy. Just like the market, the state will have to adjust to this new emerging modality of human action. Liberal political theory must first recognize and understand it before it can begin to renegotiate its agenda for the liberal state, progressive or otherwise.
See also Heller, "The Liberal Commons" and Deirdre McCloskey
Contrast George Monbiot's 1995 article, originally in The Guardian, "A Land Reform Manifesto"
James Muldoon on "data commodity fetishism" in Platform Socialism (p. 18):
Data has an allusive quality in the digital economy, sometimes appearing to be a raw material, at other points a commodity, or even a new form of capital.26 Some commentators have understood data in this sense as ‘the new oil’ of the digital economy.20 On the surface, it appears to be a valuable asset akin to a natural resource. But unlike oil – and other raw materials – data is always data of something. Far from a multi-purpose good that can be plugged into a range of machines, data is information about specific phenomena. Data collected by Amazon on the processes of its warehouse operations will not necessarily be valuable to another company. Nor is there a single way to convert data into a profitable commodity. The science needed to leverage data into a profitable good is complicated and messy. The pay-offs on particular bundles of data depend on a range of contextual factors and do not follow the simple pattern of oil extraction and refinement.21 Finally, oil’s value comes from the fact that it is a finite resource that is difficult to extract, while data will exist so long as there is human activity to be recorded and analysed.
Others have made similar points to this before,22 but there is another negative consequence of this view of data which has received less attention. This danger is what I call data commodity fetishism: the perception of certain digital relationships between people (especially for communication and exchange) as having their value based not on the social relationships themselves but on the data they produce.23 When we understand data as a natural resource we mystify the true source of its value in the human activity required to produce it. Inside the data centres lies the reified activity of human beings. A whole range of interactions from everyday life is captured as profitable material: food deliveries, ride-shares, online orders of household goods, messages with friends and relatives, job applications, overseas travel and online learning. Many internet users now spend more than four hours online every day.24 The more our lives are spent online, the more they can be appropriated through data relations.
Data is often thought of as an unclaimed good ‘out there’ in a digital terra nullius – an empty space in which tech entrepreneurs can assert their rights over this seemingly free resource. As users of platforms, we tend not to see data through the same proprietary lens as other tangible goods, which has enabled tech companies to establish unfavourable norms over who should own and control data flows in digital spaces. The fact that we sign our rights away in terms of service agreements is not surprising because as individuals there is little value in our personal data trove. It’s in the collection and analysis of large quantities of data where value can be generated. As Salome Viljoen has argued, companies’ data collection practices are ‘primarily aimed at deriving population-level insights from data subjects’ that can then be used to develop advertising products.25
Katherina Pistor on property 'absolutism' and rights held erga omnes or "against the world" (p. 15):
The third attribute is universality, which not only ensures that priority and durability will affect the parties who agreed to be bound by them, but that these attributes will be upheld against anybody, or erga omnes in Latin legalese. Universality sheds a crucial light on the nature of capital and its relation to state power. A simple agreement between two parties can exert influence only between the two contracting parties, but it cannot bind others. It takes a powerful third party to extend priority and durability rights against the world such that others will yield.
How capital is coded into law:
Capital is coded in law, and, more specifically, in institutions of private law, including property, collateral, trust, corporate, bankruptcy law, and contract law. These are the legal modules that bestow critical legal attributes on the select assets that give them a comparative advantage over others in creating new and protecting old wealth. Once properly coded, capital assets enjoy priority and durability, are convertible into cash, or legal tender, and, critically, these attributes will be enforced against the world, thereby attaining universality. This works because states back and, if necessary, coercively enforce the legal code of capital, whether or not they had a direct hand in choosing the coding strategy for the asset in question. Recognizing that capital is made, and not simply the product of superior skills, shifts attention to the processes by which different as- sets are slated for legal coding and to the states that endorse relevant legal modules and offer their coercive powers to enforce them. As I will show, this process is both decentralized and, in only seeming contradiction, increasingly global. Private attorneys perform most of the work on behalf of their clients, and states, for their part, offer their own legal systems as a menu from which private parties get to pick and choose. As a result, many polities have lost the ability to control the creation and distribution of wealth.
Katherina Pistor on the changes from Romano-Briton Law to Norman Law to English Common Law (p. 30):
Early English treaties compiled prior to the Norman conquest followed the Roman legal tradition, which treated land just like other objects of property rights.26 In Roman law a property right was considered an absolute right that included the right to use, possess, and alienate an asset. However, following the Norman conquest, legal practice in England increasingly ignored these treaties. For two centuries, from 1290 to 1490, the terms “property” and “ownership” dropped out of the vocabulary in court cases concerning land, even as these terms continued to be used for “chattel,” that is, goods and animals. Rights to land were neither unified nor absolute; there were only “greater” or “higher” rights, and only the king could claim an absolute right to the land. Yet, already by the end of the 1600s, a remarkable change had taken place. “A grand rule was emerging: whoever had the ‘general’ or ‘absolute’ property in a thing could assert the interest against everyone in the world, and whoever had the ‘special’ property (like a specific use right or collateral), could assert it against everyone but the ‘general’ or ‘absolute’ owner.”27
Ultimately, enclosure created not just a pasture for their sheep, but a market for their pasture (p. 32):
The successful enclosure of the land created the conditions for an emerging land market—a radical change in societies that had revolved around stable relations to land, which provided sustenance and also served as the foundation of political and economic power. Land sales rose steadily since the late 1500s and by 1610 were 250 percent higher than 50 years earlier.
In 1997, half a decade after the governments and news media of Europe and North America had celebrated the quincentenary of his "discovery," largely without question, Vandana Shiva pronounced the "Second Coming of Columbus" as the advent of new intellectual property regimes and free trade agreements (pp. 2-3):
Five hundred years after Columbus, a more secular version of the same project of colonization continues through patents and intellectual property rights (IPRs). The Papal Bull has been replaced by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) treaty. The principle of effective occupation by christian princes has been replaced by effective occupation by the transnational corporations supported by modern-day rulers. The vacancy of targeted lands has been replaced by the vacancy of targeted life forms and species manipulated by the new biotechnologies. The duty to incorporate savages into Christianity has been replaced by the duty to incorporate local and national economies into the global marketplace, and to incorporate non-Western systems of knowledge into the reductionism of commercialized Western science and technology.
The creation of property through piracy of others wealth remains the same as 500 years ago.
The freedom that transnational corporations are claiming through intellectual property rights protection in the GATT agreement on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) is the freedom that European colonizers have claimed since 1492. Columbus set a precedent when he treated the license to conquer non-European peoples as a natural right of European men. The land titles issued by the pope through European kings and queens were the first patents. The colonizer's freedom was built on the slavery and subjugation of the people with original rights to the land. This violent takeover was rendered "natural" by defining the colonized people as nature, thus denying them their humanity and freedom.
She then situates this process explicitly within the history of enclosure, and derives a definition of capital based upon that history (p. 3, emphasis added):
John Locke's treatise on property effectually legitimized this same process of theft and robbery during the enclosure movement in Europe. Locke clearly articulated capitalism's freedom to build as the freedom to steal; property is created by removing resources from nature and mixing them with labor. this "labor" is not physical, but labor in its "spiritual" form, as manifested in the control of capital. According to Locke, only those who own capital have the natural right to own natural resources, a right that supersedes the common rights of others with prior claims. Capital is thus defined as a source of freedom that, at the same time, denies freedom to the land, forests, rivers, and biodiversity that capital claims as its own and to others whose rights are based on their labor. Returning private property to the commons is perceived as depriving the owner of capital of freedom. Therefore, peasants and tribespeople who demand the return of their rights and access to resources are regarded as thieves.
Indeed, some of those charters granted in that first fit of colonization would be called "patents," though the more revealing term for them was "royal monopolies." Expropriation by royal or papal decree was invested with republican legitimacy in 1823, when U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall cited Pope Alexander VI as he set down his own so-called "doctrine of discovery." That ruling not only led to a violent escalation in the theft of native lands on the North American continent, but also had a profound effect on international law that reverberates to this day.
More from Biopiracy, pp. 4-5:
The assumption of empty lands, terra nullius, is now being expanded to "empty life," seeds and medicinal plants. The takeover of native resources during colonization was justified on the ground that indigenous people did not "improve" their land. As John Winthrop wrote in 1869:
Natives in New England, they enclose no land, neither have they any settled habitation, nor any tame cattle to improve the land by soe have nor other but a Natural Right to those countries. Soe as if we leane them sufficient for their use, we may lawfully take the rest.
The same logic is now used to appropriate biodiversity from the original owners and innovators by defining their seeds, medicinal plants, and medical knowledge as nature, as nonscience, and treating the tools of genetic engineering as the yardstick of "improvement." Defining Christianity as the only religion, and all other beliefs and cosmologies as primitive, finds its parallel in defining commercialized Western science as the only science, and all other knowledge as primitive.
Five hundred years ago it was enough to be a non-christian culture to lose all claims and rights. The humanity of others was blanked out then and their intellect is being blanked out now. Conquered territories were treated as peopleless in the patents of the 15th and 16th centuries. People were naturalized into "our subjects." In continuity with conquest by naturalization, biodiversity is being defined as nature — the cultural and intellectual contributions of non-Western knowledge systems are being systematically erased.
Today's patents have continuity with those issued to Columbus, Sir John Cabot, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, and Sir Walter Raleigh. The conflicts that have been unleashed by the GATT treaty, by patents on life-forms, by the patenting of indigenous knowledge, and by genetic engineering are grounded in the processes that can be summarized and symbolized as the second coming of Columbus.
At the heart of Columbus's "discovery" was the treatment of piracy as a natural right of the colonizer, necessary for the deliverance of the colonized. At the heart of the GATT treaty and its patent laws is the treatment of biopiracy as a natural right of Western corporations, necessary for the "development" of Third World communities.
p. 7:
What is creativity? This is at the heart of the current debates about patents on life. Patents on life enclose the creativity inherent to living systems that reproduce and multiply in self-organized freedom. They enclose the interior spaces of the bodies of women, plants, and animals. They also enclose the free spaces of intellectual creativity by transforming publicly generated knowledge into private property. Intellectual property rights on life-forms are supposed to reward and stimulate creativity. Their impact is actually the opposite — to stifle the creativity intrinsic to life-forms and the social production of knowledge.
pp. 9-10:
As currently discussed in global platforms, such as GATT and the Biodiversity Convention, or as unilaterally imposed through the Special 301 clause of the U.S. Trade Act, IPRs are a prescription for a monoculture of knowledge. These instruments are being used to universalize the U.S. patent regime worldwide, which would inevitably lead to an intellectual and cultural impoverishment by displacing other ways of knowing, other objectives for knowledge creation, and other modes of knowledge sharing.
p. 10:
By denying the creativity of nature and other cultures, even when that creativity is exploited for commercial gain, intellectual property rights becomes another name for intellectual theft and biopiracy. Simultaneously, people's assertion of their customary, collective rights to knowledge and resources is turned into "piracy" and "theft."
p. 22:
One of the characteristics of reductionist biology is to declare organisms and their functions useless on the basis of ignorance of their structure and function. Thus, crops and trees are declared "weeds." Forests and cattle breeds are declared "scrub." And DNA whose role is not understood is called "junk DNA." To write off the major part of the molecule as junk because of our ignorance is to fail to understand biological processes. "Junk DNA" plays an essential role. The fact that Tracy's protein production increased with the introduction of "junk DNA" is an illustration of the PPL scientists' ignorance, not their knowledge and creativity.
While genetic engineering is modeled on determinism and predictability, indeterminism and unpredictability are characteristic of the human manipulation of living organisms. In addition to the gap between the projection and practice of the engineering paradigm, there is the gap between owning benefits and rewards and owning hazards and risks.
When property rights to life-forms are claimed, it is on the basis of their being new, novel, not occurring in nature. But when it comes time for the "owners" to take responsibility for the consequences of releasing genetically modified organisms (GMOs), suddenly the life-forms are not new. They are natural, and hence safe. The issue of biosafety is treated as unnecessary. Thus, when biological organisms have to be owned, they are treated as not natural; when the ecological impact of releasing GMOs is called to account by environmentalists, these same organisms are now natural. These shifting constructions of "natural" show that science, which claims the highest levels of objectivity, is actually very subjective and opportunistic in its approach to nature.
The problem of "naturalization" that Shiva identifies (Biopiracy, p.4-5) likely derives from feminist theory, particularly Monique Wittig's 1981 essay, "One Is Not Born a Woman":
A materialist feminist28 approach to women’s oppression destroys the idea that women are a ‘natural group’: ‘a racial group of a special kind, a group perceived as natural, a group of men considered as materially specific in their bodies29.’ What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a ‘natural group.’ A lesbian society30 pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one and shows how we have been ideologically rebuilt into a ‘natural group.’ In the case of women, ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our minds are the product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us. Distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call ‘natural,’ what is supposed to exist as such before oppression. Distorted to such an extent that in the end oppression seems to be a consequence of this ‘nature’ within ourselves (a nature which is only an idea). What a materialist analysis does by reasoning, a lesbian society accomplishes practically: not only is there no natural group ‘women’ (we lesbians are living proof of it), but as individuals as well we question ‘woman,’ which for us, as for Simone de Beauvoir thirty years ago, is only a myth. She said: ‘One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine31.’
However, most of the feminists and lesbianfeminists in America and elsewhere still believe that the basis of women’s oppression is biological as well as historical. Some of them even claim to find their sources in Simone de Beauvoir32. The belief in mother right and in a ‘prehistory’ when women created civilization (because of a biological predisposition) while the coarse and brutal men hunted (because of a biological predisposition), is symmetrical with the biologizing interpretation of history produced up to now by the class of men. It is still the same method of finding in women and men a biological explanation of their division, outside of social facts. For me this could never constitute a lesbian approach to women’s oppression, since it assumes that the basis of society or the beginning of society lies in heterosexuality. Matriarchy is no less heterosexual than patriarchy: it is only the sex of the oppressor that changes. Furthermore, not only is this conception still imprisoned in the categories of sex (woman and man), but it holds onto the idea that the capacity to give birth (biology) is what defines a woman. Although practical facts and ways of living contradict this theory in lesbian society, there are lesbians who affirm that ‘women and men are different species or races (the words are used interchangeably): men are biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological inevitability...33.’ By doing this, by admitting that there is a ‘natural’ division between women and men, we naturalize history, we assume that men and women have always existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible. For example, instead of seeing birth as a forced production, we see it as a ‘natural,’ ‘biological’ process, forgetting that in our societies births are planned (demography), forgetting that we ourselves are programmed to produce children, while this is the only social activity ‘short of war’34 that presents such a great danger of death. Thus, as long as we will be ‘unable to abandon by will or impulse a lifelong and centuries-old commitment to childbearing as the female creative act,’35 gaining control of the production of children will mean much more than the mere control of the material means of this production: women will have to abstract themselves from the definition ‘woman’ which is imposed upon them. (19-21)
A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark36 imposed by the oppressor: the ‘myth of woman,37’ plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women. Thus, this mark does not preexist oppression: Colette Guillaumin has shown that before the socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept of race did not exist, at least not in its modern meaning, since it was applied to the lineage of families. However, now, race, exactly like sex, is taken as an ‘immediate given,’ a ‘sensible given,’ ‘physical features,’ belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an ‘imaginary formation38,’ which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. (They are seen black, therefore they are black; they are seen as women, therefore, they are women. But before being seen that way, they first had to be made that way.) A lesbian consciousness should always remember and acknowledge how ‘unnatural,’ compelling, totally oppressive, and destructive being ‘woman’ was for us in the old days before the women’s liberation movement. It was a political constraint and those who resisted it were accused of not being ‘real’ women. But then we were proud of it, since in the accusation there was already something like a shadow of victory: the avowal by the oppressor that ‘woman’ is not something that goes without saying, since to be one, one has to be a ‘real’ one. We were at the same time accused of wanting to be men. Today this double accusation has been taken up again with enthusiasm in the context of the women’s liberation movement by some feminists and also, alas, by some lesbians whose political goal seems somehow to be becoming more and more ‘feminine.’ To refuse to be a woman, however, does not mean that one has to become a man. Besides, if we take as an example the perfect ‘butch,’ the classic example which provokes the most horror, whom Proust would have called a woman/man, how is her alienation different from that of someone who wants to become a woman? Tweedledum and Tweedledee. At least for a woman, wanting to become a man proves that she escapes her initial programming. But even if she would like to, with all her strength, she cannot become a man. For becoming a man would demand from a woman not only the external appearance of a man but his consciousness as well, that is, the consciousness of one who disposes by right of at least two ‘natural’ slaves during his life span. This is impossible and one feature of lesbian oppression consists precisely of making women out of reach for us, since women belong to men. Thus a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society.
The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role ‘woman.’ It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man. This, we lesbians, and nonlesbians as well, knew before the beginning of the lesbian and feminist movement. However, as Andrea Dworkin emphasizes, many lesbians recently ‘have increasingly tried to transform the very ideology that has enslaved us into a dynamic, religious, psychologically compelling celebration of female biological potential39.’ Thus, some avenues of the feminist and lesbian movement lead us back to the myth of woman which was created by men especially for us, and with it we sink back into a natural group. Thirty years ago we stood up to fight for a sexless society40. Now we find ourselves entrapped in the familiar deadlock of ‘woman is wonderful.’ Thirty years ago Simone de Beauvoir underlined particularly the false consciousness which consists of selecting among the features of the myth (that women are different from men) those which look good and using them as a definition for women. What the concept of ‘woman is wonderful’ accomplishes is that it retains for defining women the best features (best according to whom?) which oppression has granted us, and it does not radically question the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman,’ which are political categories and not natural givens. It puts us in a position of fighting within the class ‘women’ not as the other classes do, for the disappearance of our class, but for the defense of ‘woman’ and its reenforcement. It leads us to develop with complacency ‘new’ theories about our specificity: thus, we call our passivity ‘nonviolence,’ when the main and emergent point for us is to fight our passivity (our fear, rather, a justified one). The ambiguity of the term ‘feminist’ sums up the whole situation. What does ‘feminist’ mean? Feminist is formed with the word ‘femme,’ ‘woman,’ and means: someone who fights for women. For many of us it means someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class. For many others it means someone who fights for woman and her defense–for the myth, then, and its reenforcement. But why was the word ‘feminist’ chosen if it retains the least ambiguity? We chose to call ourselves ‘feminists’ ten years ago, not in order to support or reenforce the myth of woman nor to identify ourselves with the oppressor’s definition of us, but rather to affirm that our movement had a history and to emphasize the political link with the old feminist movement.
It is then this movement that we can put in question for the meaning that it gave to feminism. It so happens that feminism in the last century could never resolve its contradictions on the subject of nature/culture, woman/society. Women started to fight for themselves as a group and rightly considered that they shared common features of oppression. But for them these features were natural and biological rather than social. They went so far as to adopt the Darwinist theory of evolution. They did not believe like Darwin, however, ‘that women were less evolved than men, but they did believe that male and female natures had diverged in the course of evolutionary development and that society at large reflected this polarization41.’ ‘The failure of early feminism was that it only attacked the Darwinist charge of female inferiority, while accepting the foundations of this charge - namely, the view of woman as “unique42.”’ And finally it was women scholars–and not feminists–who scientifically destroyed this theory. But the early feminists had failed to regard history as a dynamic process which develops from conflicts of interests. Furthermore, they still believed as men do that the cause (origin) of their oppression lay within themselves. And therefore the feminists of this first front after some astonishing victories found themselves at an impasse out of a lack of reasons for fighting. They upheld the illogical principle of ‘equality of difference,’ an idea now being born again. They fell back into the trap which threatens us once again: the myth of woman. (23-4)
I found Wittig's essay after watching PhilosophyTube's video essay on Judith Butler. I've excerpted a large portion of the beginning of Wittig's essay, b/c the PDF I found was a folio of a zine published by Pink and Black Attack, appearing alongside her 1980 essay, "The Straight Mind."
David Bollier on the difference between "open-access" and the commons (Silent Theft, p. 20)43:
This pessimism persists, in part, because the commons is frequently confused with an open-access regime, in which a resource is essentially open to everyone without restriction. In an open-access regime, there is no identifiable authority. No one has recognized property rights, and the output of the commons is intended for sale on external markets, not for personal use by members of the commons. For all these reasons, no one worries about long-term sustainability. Without the "social infrastructure" that defines a commons—the cultural institutions, norms, and traditions—the only real social value in open-access regimes is private profit for the most aggressive appropriators.44 Hardin's essay might more appropriately have been titled, "the tragedy of open access."
Many commons are regarded by economists as "public goods." These are resources from which it is difficult or costly to exclude people ("nonrival" and "nonexcludable" resources, as economists put it). A public good is typically an open-access regime, such as a lighthouse, city park, or the global atmosphere—resources whose benefits are accessible to everyone without any given individual having to pay for them. This is why government often steps in to pay for public goods, provided there is sufficient political pressure from influential constituencies. While a public goods analysis is certainly useful, it may not necessarily grapple with social management methods for governing the commons.45
The importance of discussing enclosure (p. 49):
It is important to speak of market enclosure because it reframes the economic narrative of the market. What the market considers incidental externalities (toxic waste, species extinction, safety hazards), the narrative of the commons regards as an assault on the community. Marketeers presume an entitlement to privatize clean air and water, public spaces, and even shared images and words. Cultural traditions that belong to the commons are drained of meaning.
Enclosure of the organic foods movement by the industrial agriculture and the USDA (pp. 50-51):
Enclosure is not just a shift in ownership and control. It is a conversion in the management and character of the resource. An excellent case study is the enclosure of organic agriculture by the "organic-industrial complex." As described by journalist Michael Pollan, organic farmers have traditionally grown "natural foods" as part of a larger commitment to pesticide-free nutrition, a more local, energy-efficient food-distribution chain, humane animal husbandry, and preservation of family farms and the local landscape. Historically, the values inherent in organic food production, distribution, consumption, and lifestyle were ... organic, so to speak. Over the past generation these values have been embodied in a diverse network of farms, cooperatives, and community based organizations dedicated to healthy, chemical-free foods.46
As the popularity of organic food grew, especially after the Alar pesticide scare in 1990, large food corporations saw the great profits to be had from enclosing this commons. By acquiring and consolidating small farms serving local customers, and integrating them into national markets bolstered by "branding" and advertising, food conglomerates have begun to remake the character and meaning of "organic food."
Pollan writes:
In the eyes of General Mills, an organically grown fruit or vegetable is not part of a revolution, but part of a marketing niche, and health is a matter of consumer perception. You did not have to buy into the organic "belief system" to sell it. ... The broccoli is trucked to Alberta, Canada, there to meet up with pieces of organic chicken that have already made a stop at a processing plant in Salem, Oregon, where they were defrosted, injected with marinade, cubed, cooked, and refrozen.
For the food company executive, lunch is "just lunch"—a commodity that you buy. his commitment to organic food is not personal or moral, but legalistic: it extends no further than the USDA's organic standards. But to Pollan, organic food is tightly related to a stable local community, ecological sustainability, and a personal connection to the food production system. "Farms produce more than food," he writes. "They also produce a kind of landscape, and if I buy my organic milk from halfway across the country, the farms I like to drive by every day will eventually grow nothing but raised ranch houses." Through enclosure, certain inalienable personal values are overrun by the impersonal, amoral norms of the market system.
Footnotes
-
I was going to include this as a footnote to the introduction, where I distinguish food and data sovereignty from more libertarian trends in agriculture and technology, but I think it would be better to address somewhere else. ↩
-
European Commision, Joint Research Center, "European Data Spaces - Scientific Insights into Data Sharing and Utilisation at Scale", 25. ↩
-
Carroll, S, Garba, I, Figueroa-Rodríguez, O, Holbrook, J, Lovett, R, Materechera, S, Parsons, M, Raseroka, K, Rodriguez-Lonebear, D, Rowe, R, Sara, R, Walker, J, Anderson, J and Hudson, M. 2020. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal, 19: XX, pp. 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-043 ↩
-
Lovett, R., Lee, V., Kukutai, T,. Cormack, D., Carroll-Rainie, S,. & Walker, J. (2019). Good Data Practices for Indigenous Data Sovereignty and Governance. In Good Data, Daly, A., Devitt, SK,. & Mann, M (eds), Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. ↩
-
Carroll SR, Rodriguez-Lonebear D, Martinez A. "Indigenous Data Governance: Strategies from United States Native Nations". Data Sci J. 2019;18:31. doi: 10.5334/dsj-2019-031. PMID: 34764990; PMCID: PMC8580324. ↩
-
Margaret Rouse, "data sovereignty", whatis.com, 2013 (archived 2017 May 07). ↩
-
"Te Mana Raraunga - Māori Data Sovereignty Network Charter" ↩
-
Government of Canada, GC Data Conference 2023, "Speaker: Gwen Phillips". First Nations Information Governance Centre, "Gwen Phillips (bio as Sec. of the BoD)". ↩
-
Tim Davies, "Data Governance and the Datasphere Literature Review", Datasphere Initiative (2022). ↩
-
Dataspheres Initative, "We Need to Talk about Data: Framing the Debate Around the Free Flow of Data and Data Sovereignty" ↩
-
Dataspheres Initative, "Initiatives to follow on Indigenous Data Sovereignty". ↩
-
Hummel, P., Braun, M., Tretter, M., & Dabrock, P. (2021). "Data Sovereignty: A review". Big Data & Society, 8(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720982012 ↩
-
"Governance for Data Space Instances Aspects and Roles for the IDS Stakeholders" ↩
-
Susan Ariel Aaronson, "Data is disruptive: How data sovereignty is challenging data governance" (PDF), The Hinrich Foundation, 03 August 2021, 3. ↩
-
This is indeed the same name given to the Russian space station Мир in 1986, although the term has a broader meaning that carries with it the sense of "world," "planet" and "peace". See Afterburner, "Space Station ´Mir´ – the symbol of Soviet supremacy in space, that reconciliated nations". Also, Robert Ellickson backs up that miri were still in practice as late as Stalin's collectivization ("Property in Land" p. 1393) ↩
-
Ullman, Close to the Machine, 127. ↩
-
Barbrook and Cameron, “Californian Ideology.” ↩
-
The term digerati was almost certainly coined by John Brockman, a member of the downtown New York art scene of the early 1960s and an acquaintance of the USCO troupe; he went on to become a literary agent for many scientists and technologists. In 1996 he authored brief biographies of many of his friends and clients, including Brand, Dyson, Barlow, Kelly, Rheingold, and others, in a volume entitled Digerati and published by the fledgling book division of Wired magazine. ↩
-
The Economist, ‘The World’s Most Valuable Resource Is No Longer Oil, But Data’, 6 May 2017. www.economist.com/leaders/2017/05/06/the-worlds-most-valuable-resource-is-no-longer-oil-but-data; Kiran Bhageshpur, ‘Data Is the New Oil – And That’s a Good Thing’, Forbes, 15 November 2019. www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2019/11/15/data-is-the-new-oil-and-thats-a-good-thing/. ↩
-
Lisa Gitelman, ed., ‘Raw Data’ Is an Oxymoron (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). ↩
-
Antonio Garcia Martinez, ‘No, Data Is Not the New Oil’, Wired, 26 February 2019. www.wired.com/story/no-data-is-not-the-new-oil/. ↩
-
Karl Marx coined the term ‘commodity fetishism’ to refer to how we obscure the social relations through which goods and services are produced as if commodities themselves had a completely independent existence. See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1990), ch. 1. ↩
-
Ofcom, ‘UK’s Internet Use Surges to Record Levels’, 20 June 2020. www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/media/media-releases/2020/uk-internet-use-surges. ↩
-
Salome Viljoen, ‘Democratic Data: A Relational Theory for Data Governance’, 23 November 2020. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3727562. ↩
-
David J. Seipp, “The Concept of Property in Early Common Law,” Law and History Review 12, no. 1 (1994):29–60, p. 36. ↩
-
Ibid., p. 84 (emphasis added). ↩
-
Christine Delphy, ‘For a Feminist Materialism,’ in Feminist Issues 1, 2 (Winter, 1981). ↩
-
Colette Guillaumin, ‘Race et nature: Systeme des marques, idee de groupe naturel et rapport sociaux,’ Pluriel 11 (1977). ↩
-
I use the word society with an extended anthropological meaning, since strictly speaking it does not refer to societies in the sense that lesbian societies do not exist completely autonomously from heterosexual social systems. Nevertheless, they are more than simply communities. ↩
-
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Bantam, 1952), p.249. ↩
-
Redstockings, Feminist Revolution (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 18. ↩
-
Andrea Dworkin, ‘Biological superiority, the world’s most dangerous and deadly idea,’ Heresies 6:46. ↩
-
Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links Books, 1974), p. 15. ↩
-
Andrea Dworkin, op. cit., p. 55. ↩
-
Colette Guillaumin, op. cit. ↩
-
Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit. ↩
-
Colette Guillaumin, op. cit. ↩
-
Andrea Dworkin, op. cit. ↩
-
Ti-Grace Atkinson, op. cit., p. 6: ‘If feminism has any logic at all, it must be working for a sexless society.’ ↩
-
Rosalind Rosenberg, ‘In Search of Woman’s Nature,’ Feminist Studies 3, 1/2 (1975): 144. ↩
-
Ibid., p. 146. 16. In an article published by L’Idiot International (mai 1970) whose original title was ‘Pour un mouvement de liberation des femmes.’ ↩
-
Some of this material can also be found in his 2002 article for the Boston Review, "Reclaiming the Commons" and a podcast episode, "Week 5: The Dynamics of Modern Enclosure / Governing the Commons", which isn't timestamped but seems to predate Frontiers of Commoning. ↩
-
The Ecologist, _Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1993) p. 13 ↩
-
Glenn Stevenson sketches the distinctions between public goods and common property in Common Property Economics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 54-56. ↩
-
Michael Pollan, "The Organic-Industrial Complex," New York Times Magazine, May 13, 2001. ↩