Really thought provoking essay. Thanks for sharing this! Given that it’s the day before Thanksgiving, which in my family is always a “reunion of the commons” of sorts, I’d like to focus on one of your takeaways near the end:
“ The logic of enclosure seeks to lock us into a private virtual world of “bespoke realities,” thus excluding us from the common world of things that yields as well a public consciousness.”
The distinction between private and public here is key. But I also find an interrelation between the two in daily life. A person can take certain steps to keep their own psyche from being enclosed by measures such as withdrawing from all social media (check), leaving the phone on Focus for large swaths of each day and only checking in during times set aside for dealing with such things (check), insisting on ad-free media experiences by paying extra for the privilege (check), self imposing daily periods of silence for centering the self (check), etc.
But a single person cannot control the degree to which others in their sphere allow the enclosure of their psyche. The result can be that even if a single person does what they can to avoid distraction and enclosure, they lose common ground and shared experience with others who do not make those same sorts of choices. Which makes it more difficult to relate these people on common ground and shared experience.
Which is kind of a long way around to say that more and more often it can feel as though we are caught in the spaces between the enclosures of others when it comes to relationships; as if we are outside of the collective Venn circle overlap.
The only solution I see is to seek and foster the healthiest relationships we can find where there are shared values, and let that suffice as our new definition of our “commons”. They will of necessity be smaller than we might like, but they are better than getting swept away by the tides of white noise that seeks - intentionally or not - to deprive us of the intimacy required to actually experience anything that we consider to have real and lasting value.
Great analogy, and one that really sparks new perspectives. I've always recoiled against the tendency of Youtube to filter video suggestions and landing pages to my prior viewing habits. The same happens with Reddit. It's as though every prior decision I've made to view or read something is used to force me into a pathway of more and more detailed (and often increasingly neurotic or frenetic) takes on those prior decisions. And no wonder so many people become radicalized in some way or another along that primrose path.
What a freedom it must have been (I was alive then but took it for granted of course) to read a newspaper and to know that the act of reading that object did not meaningfully impact the next newspaper or magazine I picked up. That whatever reality was presented to me in those pages was someone's version of reality, but not one doubly filtered through an algorithm's estimation of my own atomized perspective.
On the topic of being listened to by our phones (or more generally being profiled by our interactions), we should also consider that we may not have thought of that offline topic unless previously 'branded', perhaps unconsciously.
Are our phones listening, or are they sowing thoughts too?
A short appreciation from an occasional reader who at this moment is reminding herself that she really ought to give more regular attention to your essays. They are such well-argued and well-sourced beacons of sanity!
I have spent years pondering and futilely resisting my addiction to the solitaire game on my phone. I once thought of it as an entirely shameful indication of my lack of ability to consistently cope with the real world and Get Stuff Done. More recently, I’ve noticed its role in soothing me and thus perhaps supporting such ability to cope as I have. I find myself saying things such as “The latest news from Gaza is so horrifying I ended up playing solitaire for half an hour before I could finish reading the rest of the news.”
I wonder if this simple game doesn’t provide me with the same relatively calm headspace that, say, fingering beads while saying the rosary would have a century ago. I’m pretty sure that the rosary would be a more healthy coping mechanism, except that I’m not Catholic and so I can’t quite go there. You are helping me unpack how a finger game on a screen may affect me differently than a more traditional soothing mechanism, which is probably important for me to understand.
This morning I have been savoring memories of yesterday evening following Thanksgiving dinner. We spend Thanksgiving not with family—my husband wisely refuses to travel during Thanksgiving week—but with our close friends: a couple, their now 11-year-old daughter, the wife’s mother, and, this year, their new kitten. Bellies full, minds slightly buzzed with good wine and liquor, we sat around in their living room watching the daughter instruct my husband on the best techniques for playing with the kitten. (She also demonstrated her new skill of turning wool roving into yarn using a simple drop spindle. I think this is becoming her mechanism for coping with anxiety.) I thought, THIS. This is the precious thing. What binds us together. What we strive for. What happens when grace visits us. What is real.
Yet another gem of an essay. As usual, I have some thoughts.
1. Mr. Sacasas, how did you develop this analogy of the enclosure of our minds related to the historical enclosure of common lands in England? I'm interested to learn what thinkers/ideas led you to develop this analogy.
2. Some random thoughts. In a world in which efficiency is optimized at every turn, I feel even in myself an urge to read through all the Substack essays that have arrived in my inbox in the past few days; as in, an urge to read them all, get it done, check the box. And I often have to remind myself, unfortunately, that the very reading of these essays is supposed to be a leisurely activity; that they aren't something to do and "mark as done" as I do with my work emails. This is particularly true about Mr. Sacasas' writing, which, I've recently decided, is my favorite writing on Substack.
3. Speaking of being able to luxuriate in a bucolic setting with no utilitarian end in mind, I think of Walt Whitman when he writes, "I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." How refreshing.
4. Mr. Sacasas, you speak about silence in this essay. Do you have any recommendations for people who want to read writers who write about the role of silence in our lives, particularly in the context of our obsessively doing-getting-consuming-spending contemporary lives?
5. When I think of all this doing-getting-consuming-spending, I think of "The World Is Too Much With Us", by William Wordsworth.
--
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
--
6. Lastly, I appreciate when Arendt says that we're deprived of a truly human life when we are deprived of being seeing and heard by others. This means that we actually have to have the attention span to be able to attend to others. With the relentless pace of technological developments, it seems that our attention spans are getting shorter, and we are prone to be distracted by the noises our devices make, etc. If the economic agenda that accompanies our technological development is predicated on "mining" our attention as much as possible, we can swiftly conclude that most of us will be (are currently?) deprived of Arendt's truly human life because other people are less able to attend to us; to hear us, to see us. This would make us more consistently superficial, 2-dimensional human beings. More like automatons, really, getting and spending in entirely predictable habit patterns. It will take a consistently conscious effort in different areas of our life to withstand this assault. Mr. Sacasas: any suggestions about how we might consider the totality or our lives and the kinds of steps we can take to ensure that we are effectively guarding our own mental commons? I think that starting with silence is key, and I admittedly don't spend enough time in silence. Sometimes engaging in some silent pursuit, like creative writing/journaling, while at other times, sitting in silence and doing absolutely nothing. From there, where do we go?
I am grateful for this Substack, and for this newsletter in particular, and for this virtual community where we can share our thoughts.
Thanks for this! The balance of including and excluding becomes overwhelming when surrounded by surveillance and projection from all sides. Will be digesting this one for a long time.
One interesting concept about social media in particular that has recently occurred to me is that, unlike Hannah Arendt, we are not all seeing the same things as a group of people might view a table in a tavern. When we are on social media we are seeing different stories or videos or memes all likely in a different order at a different time. We might think we're seeing the same things but the context is always different. We have no *shared* reality.
This essay (and the one cited which gives a primer for enclosure) have left me with much thinking. Principally, how can we get some of the commons back to explore different ways of living. One of your best essays to date. Cheers.
The problem with the British land enclosure movement is not about privatization. Privatization is ill-defined and non-binary. If we talk about levels of sharing resources instead, then our organelles share more with each other within each cell than with organelles outside their cell. Cells share more with each other within an organ than with cells outside their organ. Organs share more with each other within a body than outside the body. Neurons share more with each other within a brain module (sub-personality) than without. A brain module shares more with other sub-personalities within a brain than with other brains. And we may be able to extend this to the social realm: we share more within our families than without, not only material but emotional and intellectual resources. Families share more within a village/tribe than without, etc. The problem with the land enclosure movement is that it (and other aspects of capitalism) destroyed these intermediate human levels of organization, and now is destroying the integrated human individual level.
You may ask why we need these intermediate levels, why not just have a soup of organic molecules (or less drastic, why not a soup of individuals in a global "village")? I have an answer, but it is too long to expound on here.
As far as attention/consciousness not being solely a resource. Perhaps this is true. It might be an emergent quality from both embodied brains, and communities of these. Perhaps all the way down to organelles (which might have a rudimentary attention).
Silence: yes, it is nice to NOT always be part of the mindless gossip and virtue signals that occupy most humans, which existed before the internet as far back as paleolithic tribes and maybe even before our species. But this is an anti-commons sentiment (or at least an anti-certain-human-commons sentiment)... And it is also nice to be part of a community of thoughtful, respectful and emotionally expressive people, even if it's through a digital medium, though it is nicer through face to face interactions.
Other sources of co-incidence of meaning…? I follow your ongoing thought with great interest...
A few minutes ago I re-stacked your essay with the following note, and then followed the comment/link to WieseItier's essay: and am glad to have read it.
I read your essay last night when I went online for a brief time before bed...
My note this British morning:
"Illumination, intelligible, convivial, a touch uncanny for me as ½h before reading I had drafted a poem on similar grounds… i.e. previous Sacasas, Illich and in my case Jeremy Naydler’s books reviewed to start my substack a year ago.
Electrification… AI on top of…? I had listened in the afternoon to Hagens/Prof. Thompson struggle for intelligible light."
PS. Much common ground for me and my origins in agrarian Britain: EP Thompson, Cobbett, Blake (and the young 'Ancients'), poets all & various incl. Clare ... and history, Hill, The World Turned Upside Down', and my own ancestors' scraps of memory/literacy, and ... err... St Augustine I believe.
Really thought provoking essay. Thanks for sharing this! Given that it’s the day before Thanksgiving, which in my family is always a “reunion of the commons” of sorts, I’d like to focus on one of your takeaways near the end:
“ The logic of enclosure seeks to lock us into a private virtual world of “bespoke realities,” thus excluding us from the common world of things that yields as well a public consciousness.”
The distinction between private and public here is key. But I also find an interrelation between the two in daily life. A person can take certain steps to keep their own psyche from being enclosed by measures such as withdrawing from all social media (check), leaving the phone on Focus for large swaths of each day and only checking in during times set aside for dealing with such things (check), insisting on ad-free media experiences by paying extra for the privilege (check), self imposing daily periods of silence for centering the self (check), etc.
But a single person cannot control the degree to which others in their sphere allow the enclosure of their psyche. The result can be that even if a single person does what they can to avoid distraction and enclosure, they lose common ground and shared experience with others who do not make those same sorts of choices. Which makes it more difficult to relate these people on common ground and shared experience.
Which is kind of a long way around to say that more and more often it can feel as though we are caught in the spaces between the enclosures of others when it comes to relationships; as if we are outside of the collective Venn circle overlap.
The only solution I see is to seek and foster the healthiest relationships we can find where there are shared values, and let that suffice as our new definition of our “commons”. They will of necessity be smaller than we might like, but they are better than getting swept away by the tides of white noise that seeks - intentionally or not - to deprive us of the intimacy required to actually experience anything that we consider to have real and lasting value.
Great analogy, and one that really sparks new perspectives. I've always recoiled against the tendency of Youtube to filter video suggestions and landing pages to my prior viewing habits. The same happens with Reddit. It's as though every prior decision I've made to view or read something is used to force me into a pathway of more and more detailed (and often increasingly neurotic or frenetic) takes on those prior decisions. And no wonder so many people become radicalized in some way or another along that primrose path.
What a freedom it must have been (I was alive then but took it for granted of course) to read a newspaper and to know that the act of reading that object did not meaningfully impact the next newspaper or magazine I picked up. That whatever reality was presented to me in those pages was someone's version of reality, but not one doubly filtered through an algorithm's estimation of my own atomized perspective.
On the topic of being listened to by our phones (or more generally being profiled by our interactions), we should also consider that we may not have thought of that offline topic unless previously 'branded', perhaps unconsciously.
Are our phones listening, or are they sowing thoughts too?
A short appreciation from an occasional reader who at this moment is reminding herself that she really ought to give more regular attention to your essays. They are such well-argued and well-sourced beacons of sanity!
I have spent years pondering and futilely resisting my addiction to the solitaire game on my phone. I once thought of it as an entirely shameful indication of my lack of ability to consistently cope with the real world and Get Stuff Done. More recently, I’ve noticed its role in soothing me and thus perhaps supporting such ability to cope as I have. I find myself saying things such as “The latest news from Gaza is so horrifying I ended up playing solitaire for half an hour before I could finish reading the rest of the news.”
I wonder if this simple game doesn’t provide me with the same relatively calm headspace that, say, fingering beads while saying the rosary would have a century ago. I’m pretty sure that the rosary would be a more healthy coping mechanism, except that I’m not Catholic and so I can’t quite go there. You are helping me unpack how a finger game on a screen may affect me differently than a more traditional soothing mechanism, which is probably important for me to understand.
This morning I have been savoring memories of yesterday evening following Thanksgiving dinner. We spend Thanksgiving not with family—my husband wisely refuses to travel during Thanksgiving week—but with our close friends: a couple, their now 11-year-old daughter, the wife’s mother, and, this year, their new kitten. Bellies full, minds slightly buzzed with good wine and liquor, we sat around in their living room watching the daughter instruct my husband on the best techniques for playing with the kitten. (She also demonstrated her new skill of turning wool roving into yarn using a simple drop spindle. I think this is becoming her mechanism for coping with anxiety.) I thought, THIS. This is the precious thing. What binds us together. What we strive for. What happens when grace visits us. What is real.
Just wondering though whether it matters. Aren't our psyches anyway enclosed the moment we undergo formal schooling and then formal college?
Michael, coincidentally this (https://1drv.ms/b/c/D3271F70FC4BA27A/EXqiS_xwHycggNPRGgAAAAABobZk3zAWNBmDk83sstaU2g) from 2015 appeared on my screen yesterday. You will note the overlap between you and Wieseltier.
Yet another gem of an essay. As usual, I have some thoughts.
1. Mr. Sacasas, how did you develop this analogy of the enclosure of our minds related to the historical enclosure of common lands in England? I'm interested to learn what thinkers/ideas led you to develop this analogy.
2. Some random thoughts. In a world in which efficiency is optimized at every turn, I feel even in myself an urge to read through all the Substack essays that have arrived in my inbox in the past few days; as in, an urge to read them all, get it done, check the box. And I often have to remind myself, unfortunately, that the very reading of these essays is supposed to be a leisurely activity; that they aren't something to do and "mark as done" as I do with my work emails. This is particularly true about Mr. Sacasas' writing, which, I've recently decided, is my favorite writing on Substack.
3. Speaking of being able to luxuriate in a bucolic setting with no utilitarian end in mind, I think of Walt Whitman when he writes, "I loafe and invite my soul, I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." How refreshing.
4. Mr. Sacasas, you speak about silence in this essay. Do you have any recommendations for people who want to read writers who write about the role of silence in our lives, particularly in the context of our obsessively doing-getting-consuming-spending contemporary lives?
5. When I think of all this doing-getting-consuming-spending, I think of "The World Is Too Much With Us", by William Wordsworth.
--
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;—
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
--
6. Lastly, I appreciate when Arendt says that we're deprived of a truly human life when we are deprived of being seeing and heard by others. This means that we actually have to have the attention span to be able to attend to others. With the relentless pace of technological developments, it seems that our attention spans are getting shorter, and we are prone to be distracted by the noises our devices make, etc. If the economic agenda that accompanies our technological development is predicated on "mining" our attention as much as possible, we can swiftly conclude that most of us will be (are currently?) deprived of Arendt's truly human life because other people are less able to attend to us; to hear us, to see us. This would make us more consistently superficial, 2-dimensional human beings. More like automatons, really, getting and spending in entirely predictable habit patterns. It will take a consistently conscious effort in different areas of our life to withstand this assault. Mr. Sacasas: any suggestions about how we might consider the totality or our lives and the kinds of steps we can take to ensure that we are effectively guarding our own mental commons? I think that starting with silence is key, and I admittedly don't spend enough time in silence. Sometimes engaging in some silent pursuit, like creative writing/journaling, while at other times, sitting in silence and doing absolutely nothing. From there, where do we go?
I am grateful for this Substack, and for this newsletter in particular, and for this virtual community where we can share our thoughts.
Thanks for this! The balance of including and excluding becomes overwhelming when surrounded by surveillance and projection from all sides. Will be digesting this one for a long time.
One interesting concept about social media in particular that has recently occurred to me is that, unlike Hannah Arendt, we are not all seeing the same things as a group of people might view a table in a tavern. When we are on social media we are seeing different stories or videos or memes all likely in a different order at a different time. We might think we're seeing the same things but the context is always different. We have no *shared* reality.
This essay (and the one cited which gives a primer for enclosure) have left me with much thinking. Principally, how can we get some of the commons back to explore different ways of living. One of your best essays to date. Cheers.
The problem with the British land enclosure movement is not about privatization. Privatization is ill-defined and non-binary. If we talk about levels of sharing resources instead, then our organelles share more with each other within each cell than with organelles outside their cell. Cells share more with each other within an organ than with cells outside their organ. Organs share more with each other within a body than outside the body. Neurons share more with each other within a brain module (sub-personality) than without. A brain module shares more with other sub-personalities within a brain than with other brains. And we may be able to extend this to the social realm: we share more within our families than without, not only material but emotional and intellectual resources. Families share more within a village/tribe than without, etc. The problem with the land enclosure movement is that it (and other aspects of capitalism) destroyed these intermediate human levels of organization, and now is destroying the integrated human individual level.
You may ask why we need these intermediate levels, why not just have a soup of organic molecules (or less drastic, why not a soup of individuals in a global "village")? I have an answer, but it is too long to expound on here.
As far as attention/consciousness not being solely a resource. Perhaps this is true. It might be an emergent quality from both embodied brains, and communities of these. Perhaps all the way down to organelles (which might have a rudimentary attention).
Silence: yes, it is nice to NOT always be part of the mindless gossip and virtue signals that occupy most humans, which existed before the internet as far back as paleolithic tribes and maybe even before our species. But this is an anti-commons sentiment (or at least an anti-certain-human-commons sentiment)... And it is also nice to be part of a community of thoughtful, respectful and emotionally expressive people, even if it's through a digital medium, though it is nicer through face to face interactions.
Other sources of co-incidence of meaning…? I follow your ongoing thought with great interest...
A few minutes ago I re-stacked your essay with the following note, and then followed the comment/link to WieseItier's essay: and am glad to have read it.
I read your essay last night when I went online for a brief time before bed...
My note this British morning:
"Illumination, intelligible, convivial, a touch uncanny for me as ½h before reading I had drafted a poem on similar grounds… i.e. previous Sacasas, Illich and in my case Jeremy Naydler’s books reviewed to start my substack a year ago.
Electrification… AI on top of…? I had listened in the afternoon to Hagens/Prof. Thompson struggle for intelligible light."
PS. Much common ground for me and my origins in agrarian Britain: EP Thompson, Cobbett, Blake (and the young 'Ancients'), poets all & various incl. Clare ... and history, Hill, The World Turned Upside Down', and my own ancestors' scraps of memory/literacy, and ... err... St Augustine I believe.