The Enclosure of the Human Psyche
The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 13
Welcome to the Convivial Society, a newsletter about technology and culture. Before getting on to the usual business I wanted to note that a few days ago I was more than a little surprised to discover that I had been included in Vox’s Future Perfect 50, a list of “innovators, thinkers, and changemakers working to make the future a better place.” Being on the same list with Billie Eilish and Christopher Nolan was not something I ever anticipated, but the real honor was sharing the list with the likes of Shannon Vallor and Deb Chachra. I even got a flattering illustrated portrait with all the grey taken out of my beard. But I mention this chiefly to say thank you to you. This week in the U.S. we will be celebrating Thanksgiving. In that spirit, let me express my thanks to you for reading and supporting my work. I’m deeply grateful, and I’m quite certain any plaudits I earn flow from the generosity of my readers.
In this installment, I offer you a historical analogy that I hope will be of some use to you as you think about and try to make sense of the social and personal consequences of digitization.
Cheers,
Michael
If you were to ask me something like “What’s the most urgent task before us?” or “What counsel do you have to offer in this cultural moment?” I would say this:
Resist the enclosure of the human psyche.
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m sure there are other necessary and urgent tasks. But this would be my contribution to the conversation. I would be offering not only an imperative to pursue, but also, and perhaps more importantly, an analogy to clarify and interpret the techno-economic forces at play in a digitized society. Such analogies or concepts can be useful. They can crystalize a certain understanding of the world and catalyze action and resolve. They can be a rallying cry.
In any case, I’ll say it again: resist the enclosure of the human psyche.
Some of you may immediately intuit the force of the analogy, but I suspect it needs a little unpacking.
Here’s the short version: I’m drawing an analogy between a historical development known as the enclosure of the commons and the condition of the human psyche in the context of a digitized society. The enclosure of the commons is the name given to the centuries-long process by which lands available to the many were turned into a resource to be managed and extracted by the few. My claim is that structurally similar processes are unfolding with the aim of enclosing the human psyche and transforming it into a resource to be managed and extracted.
The long version starts now.
Your Phone Is Listening
In his 1964 classic, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, the late cultural historian Leo Marx remarked upon the frequency with which a certain anecdote appeared in the letters of early 19th-century American writers. The recurring anecdote was an account of when and where the writer first heard the distinctive whistle of a train.1 As Marx went on to demonstrate, this anecdote typically framed the distinctive whistle as the intrusion of an Industrial Age machine into an idyllic pastoral scene.
Perhaps every age has its own set of recurring anecdotes about its encounters with novel technologies—anecdotes which suggest some intrusion of a nefarious or complicated force into the world. In our time, anecdotes of this sort seem to gather around our smartphones. More specifically, I have in mind the stories we tell about how our phones must be listening to us. Usually, the form of the story involves, first, comments we made in conversation, usually about some entirely random thing that we’re sure we haven’t talked about in ages or much less searched for online, and, second, how this thing, whatever it was, now pops up in our feeds, typically as an ad that gets served to us on a website or social media feed. We can think of such stories as tales of digital uncanny. I, for example, have a story like this about Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
More recently, I was talking with two friends and the topic of personalized bookplates came up. I mentioned embossing seals in passing as another option. (I do not, for the record, own an embosser.) The next day, one of these friends texted me a screenshot of an ad that popped up on their feed for embossers from the very same online store where the other friend had purchased their book plates. As in all of these stories, there appears to be, on the surface of things, no more elegant explanation for the timing and specificity of the ad than that a device was listening to the conversation. It is a viscerally compelling theory. It may not be technically correct, depending on who you ask, but it feels true to our experience and that in itself tells us something of interest.2
In an essay published last year, “You Have a New Memory,” Merritt Tierce reflected on these uncanny moments and what she meant by the claim that the “internet is reading my mind.” She gives various anecdotes supporting her sense of the claim, the most elaborately detailed involved ads for opal earrings. I won’t relay the whole thing, you can read it for yourself, but here is her reflection on the incident:
“Maybe I did Google it at some point. I didn’t. But I’m thinking what you’re thinking, that I fed the data to the internet and I don’t remember. Maybe that’s true. (But it isn’t.) Assume for the sake of argument that it isn’t, that the internet just … read my mind. In point of fact, I don’t think the point of fact actually matters, because things like this have happened often enough that I now think there’s no real difference between my feeling that the internet is reading my mind and the yes/no true/false of it. If you feel like it’s happening, that is, itself, a happening.”
Elaborating somewhat on what she is describing, Tierce adds,
“So what I’m experiencing is only advertising, or coincidence, or it’s just frequency illusion, or synchrony. If there is order to the system, but the order is too complex for you to understand it, your experience will be mostly of disorder studded with coincidence and frequency illusion, and you will have no ability to say whether the system is disordered or too complex to understand. They become synonymous and meaningless.”
Whether our devices are, in fact, listening to us or not, it seems clear that the experience of our technological milieu is such that most people find the claim entirely plausible. Indeed, not only plausible, but altogether likely. And while I wouldn’t say that the question of fact is of no consequence, I do think it can be approached rather pedantically by those who want to brush off the fact that there are countless and concerted efforts made to capture our attention and thus our data for the express purpose of rendering us so predictable and pliable that it would be superfluous for a device to be actively listening to us.
However, I’m not sure how helpful it is to describe all of this as a case of “the internet reading our minds.” Instead, I’ll suggest another framing better anchored in historical and material processes, which also has the advantage of implicitly suggesting certain modes of resistance. That the internet is reading our minds conjures an amorphous, quasi-mystical phenomenon about which there would be little we could do. Consider instead that we are suffering through a process that has a concrete, historical precedent, one that we might describe as the enclosure of the human psyche.
Yes, the feeling that our phones are listening to us arises from a specific set of occurrences, but it is plausible and it persists in the face of corporate denials and expert skepticism because the whole technological environment is increasingly designed so as to enclose the human psyche not with hedgerows and fences, but with an array of data gathering tools and techniques so that the human psyche might be rendered more manageable and so that its value can be more readily extracted.
The Enclosure of the Commons
Before developing the analogy any further, though, it might be helpful to describe the enclosure of the commons in a bit more detail for the sake of those who may not be as familiar with the historical process. I’ll keep it brief, and I’ll emphasize the specific aspects that, in my view, give the analogy its explanatory power and punch.
As you might guess, there are numerous works examining the legal and economic processes by which the commons were enclosed, Marx (Karl not Leo this time) figures prominently in the literature as does the 20th-century historian, E. P. Thompson. England, from the late medieval period to the 19th century, supplies the classic case study.3 The process generally involved denying common people, by various means, the right to use the land for their subsistence needs as had been customarily the case.
For our purposes here, I’ll borrow a few observations from a recent essay by Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons,” which combines historical research and interviews with residents of Laxton, one of the very few villages in England that were never enclosed.
Biss eloquently described enclosure as “the centuries-long process by which land once collectively worked by the landless was claimed by the landed.” “That land already belonged to the landed, in the old sense of ownership,” Biss is quick to point out, “but it had always been used by the landless, who belonged to the land. The nature of ownership changed within the newly set hedges of an enclosed field, where the landowner now had the exclusive right to dictate how the land was used, and no one else belonged there.”
In a short lecture that I’ve cited before, “Silence as a Commons,” Ivan Illich described the commons this way: “People called commons that part of the environment which lay beyond their own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households.”
“In addition to common pasture,” Biss explains, “commoners were granted rights of pannage, of turbary, of estovers, and of piscary—rights to run their pigs in the woods, to cut peat for fuel, to gather wood from the forests, and to fish.” These specific rights essentially enshrined the more basic human right to share in what the land provided to all. But enclosure changed this situation. Biss continues:
“In the course of enclosure, as written law superseded customary law, commoners lost those rights. Parliament made property rights absolute, and the traditional practice of living off the land was redefined as theft. Gleaning became trespassing, and fishing became poaching.”
I won’t dwell on the commons or the history of enclosure any longer, but there were two specific ways of justifying the process of enclosure that I wanted to emphasize for the sake of the analogy I’m developing here.
First, enclosure was justified, in part, by the argument that the commoners were backwards and generally unruly. Biss puts it this way,
“Commoners were ‘rough and savage,’ according to eighteenth-century rhetoric. They were lazy. Their practice of sharing land was ‘barbarous,’ and their economy was ‘primitive.’ They had an inexplicable preference for using their free time for sport, rather than for paid labor.”
Enclosure was thus partially advanced as a measure to manage those deemed insufficiently enlightened … for their own good, of course.
But the dominant rationalization for enclosure, already implicit in the comments about the unruly commoners above, was increased efficiency and profit, for the landed few.
As Biss notes, “the landowners who promoted enclosure promised ‘improvement.’” “Improvement meant turning the land to profit,” she further explains. “Enclosure wasn’t robbery, according to this logic, because the commoners made no profit off the commons, and thus had nothing worth taking.”
From this point forward, I will develop the idea that we can make sense of many of the forces operating in a digitized society by analogy to the enclosure of the commons. Only now it is the human psyche that is being enclosed, a process often rationalized along similar lines: the human psyche, unruly and inefficient, is in need of better management, and it is a source of potential value that must be cultivated and extracted.
The Enclosure of the Human Psyche
Digitization and computation have made it so that we can be everywhere tracked, measured, monitored, and surveilled—often voluntarily and even gladly so.4 This is the message of the digital medium. And it is so because digitization, by its very nature, makes it possible to track and encode vast swaths of human experience, making multiple dimensions of that experience susceptible to mathematical manipulation and analysis. The urge to measure with a view to optimization was, of course, already manifest in the time studies of late-19th-century factory workers and the emergence of scientific management. Digitization dramatically increased the scope of what it is possible to measure and analyze, fueling the fantasy that we could bring not just observable bodily movements under administration, but also the human psyche.
Even this fantasy, it is worth noting, predates the advent of digitization. It is implicit in the modern drive to operationalize mathematics as a universal key to understanding and manipulating reality—first nature, then society. Dostoevsky’s Underground Man is already complaining of the “gentlemen” who believe “human action will automatically be computed according to these laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, reaching to 108,000 and compiled in a directory.” What was missing then was a sufficiently robust data gathering and computational infrastructure. This is what the digitization of society supplied.
But the enclosure of the psyche required one further development. In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan gives us an important clue to what this development might be in language that fits nicely with the enclosure analogy:
“Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.”
When we use any given technology, we tend to be most interested in what we will be able to do with that technology. We want to know how a tool will empower us. But we should be at least as concerned with how any tool we use shapes our perception and our experience.5 We should be especially interested in these dynamics given the degree to which our view of reality, both the reality that is before us moment by moment and the larger reality that exceeds our immediate purview, is mediated by digital media, a degree that I suspect McLuhan, far-sighted as he was, could hardly fathom in the early 1960s.
The senses are the gateway to the psyche. To enclose the psyche, it would be necessary to enclose the senses first. So, in this case, the fences and hedgerows become the devices that channel, direct, and colonize our perception of the world.
As a simple experiment, ask yourself a straightforwardly objective question: how much of your waking hours are spent looking at a digital screen?6 Set aside whatever qualitative judgements such a question might entail, don’t worry about justifying the nature of the activities, etc. All that we are interested in just now is the brute fact. To what degree is our attention, which is to say our perception of the world and the ground of our consciousness, mediated by a digital screen?
To this same degree, we are abetting the enclosure of our psyche. And it is not only that our gaze is captured, it is that in that very process our perception is mediated, our consciousness commandeered, and all of this in such a way that empowers political and economic structures of control and extraction.
One reading of AI is to see it precisely as a further development of the enclosure of the psyche, one that is made possible by an earlier stage of enclosure in which the collective human psyche was mined for raw material, the data which feeds the computational processes. In this new stage of enclosure, altogether novel and disturbing possibilities are opened up. Consider, as an example of the darker eventualities on the table, a recent paper by a group of scholars at MIT and the University of California titled “Conversational AI Powered by Large Language Models Amplifies False Memories in Witness Interviews.” Their research showed the heightened susceptibility to false memories induced by introducing a LLM into the interview process.
The Commons of Thought
Already in the early 1980s, Ivan Illich, in the essay linked above, was developing this line of analysis. Illich described the issue he was addressing in this way: “how to counter the encroachment of new, electronic devices and systems upon commons that are more subtle and more intimate to our being than either grassland or roads—commons that are at least as valuable as silence.”
So far, I’ve been mostly interested in analogizing certain developments in digitized society to the process (and motives) of enclosure. But it’s also worth considering whether the analogy to the commons can tell us something about the human psyche. Illich gives us a clue: silence.
The enclosure of the commons subjected the land to more efficient and persistent means of extraction, time was money. Improvement meant activity. So, too, with the psyche. The mind at rest, the psyche in a moment of silence, is like the land lying unused and unproductive. From this vantage point, what we might feel as the problem of distraction is just the logic of enclosure at work. The unceasing stream of notifications and pings, the persistent way even the built environment beyond the screen hails us—all of this is just the necessary operation of the engines of value extraction efficiently at work on the raw material that is the human psyche. When the enclosure of the psyche is complete, we lose the right to wander and roam and loaf about in thought, just as the enclosure of the commons restricted freedom of movement and disdained economically unproductive but life-affirming forms of leisure.
And we lose ourselves, too. For as Illich observed, “silence, according to western and eastern tradition alike, is necessary for the emergence of persons.” And in lines that seem as if they could have been written in the era of LLMs and AI chat bots, he adds: “It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.”
Several years ago, Matthew Crawford argued along similar lines. “Lately, our self-appointed disrupters have opened up a new frontier of capitalism,” Crawford wrote, “complete with its own frontier ethic: to boldly dig up and monetize every bit of private head space by appropriating our collective attention. In the process, we’ve sacrificed silence — the condition of not being addressed.” “And just as clean air makes it possible to breathe,” Crawford added, “silence makes it possible to think.”
In Crawford’s framing, the commons is an environment that makes thought possible. In my analogy, the mind itself is the commons to be protected against enclosure, the built environment is the means of enclosure. Close enough, of course. But Crawford does also say that “attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it.” On this point, I’ve written before at some length arguing that we should resist framing our attention as a resource.7
Those arguments against understanding our attention as a resource were inspired by Illich’s writing on the commons. Illich believed that even critics of enclosure were missing a critical element of the transformation enclosure wrought. In his view, they tended to focus on the economic injustice of denying the commoners a share in the wealth generated by working the land, but they ignored a more fundamental reality. “The appropriation of the grassland by the lords was challenged,” Illich noted, “but the more fundamental transformation of grassland (or of roads) from commons to resource has happened, until recently, without being subjected to criticism.”
Illich believed that the transformation of the commons into a resource, regardless of who profited, was itself a great loss. By accepting the logic of resources, extraction, and value, we had surrendered the ground on which an entirely different mode of life could be built.
This is why I began by saying that, in my view, the most important task before us is to resist the enclosure of the human psyche, because even our capacity to imagine an alternative way being in the world, to say nothing of enacting such a vision, depends on it.
There is one final dimension of enclosure that I’ll note briefly before wrapping up. Is there an even more literal form of the commons to which the analogy of enclosure points us? The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion. What if the psyche were a thing held in common? That is to say, what if our purchase on reality and the emergence of the self depended on human relationships and communities? From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging.
I’ve elsewhere developed this point at greater length, but here I’ll only note Hannah Arendt’s warning that we are deprived of a “truly human life” when we are “deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an ‘objective’ relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things.”
That last bit about a common world of things, a material, not only virtual world, is key. 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. As Arendt put it, “Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.”
So friends, resist the enclosure of the human psyche. How exactly we might best do that, I may take up in another post. But for now, I hope this analogy proves helpful.
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Nathaniel Hawthorne, for example: “But, hark! there is the whistle of the locomotive — the long shriek, harsh, above all other harshness, for the space of a mile cannot mollify it into harmony. It tells a story of busy men, citizens, from the hot street, who have come to spend a day in a country village, men of business; in short of all unquietness; and no wonder that it gives such a startling shriek, since it brings the noisy world into the midst of our slumbrous peace.”
A study published in late October of this year found that a significant majority of participants surveyed in the U.S., the Netherlands, and Poland reported having ads served to them based on offline conversations. A majority, although not as large, also believed that that happened because their phones were listening to their conversations.
See “Luxury Surveillance” by Chris Gilliard and the late David Golumbia.
Ivan Illich: “I would like to get ... people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them ... how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them.”
See also Nick Carr’s recent post: “Never in human history has there been an object so looked at as a smartphone. And yet, while we talk all the time about the content that flows through the phone, little research has been done on and little thought has been given to the psychological and ontological effects of the device’s unusual and unnatural form factor. Even as it dominates, and narrows, our field of vision, the phone as an object has become invisible to us. We need a phenomenology of the phone.”
“Your Attention Is Not a Resource,” The Convivial Society, April 1, 2021.
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.
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.