The Enclosure of the Imagination

It's time to break down the walls

It all started with the development of personal computers—Apple, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and Commodore were some of the first companies; next came the software to run the computers with the development of Microsoft Windows and other programs.

Thus begat the tech revolution. It was a heady time, one that ushered in an age in which anything was deemed possible and the imagination, ignited by personal computers, appeared limitless.

When the tech revolution began with the onset of personal computers, it kicked off an era of utopian fervor. It started out as a belief that “information wants to be free,” as Stewart Brand famously said at a Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand’s full comments were:

“On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.”

And Brand further clarified his remarks two years later in his book The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT when he wrote, “Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.”

Brand wasn’t saying everything digitally produced should be free, but it was provocative nonetheless, as it was questioning the entire realm of intellectual property laws and patent rights.

And in 1990, Richard Stallman, the American free software movement activist and programmer, added more fuel to the fire when he stated:

“I believe that all generally useful information should be free. By ‘free’ I am not referring to price, but rather to the freedom to copy the information and to adapt it to one’s own uses....When information is generally useful, redistributing it makes humanity wealthier no matter who is distributing and no matter who is receiving.”

On January 22, 1984, a commercial for Apple debuted at the Super Bowl, and it epitomized the hope, and hype, of this era.

The 60-second commercial was inspired by George Orwell’s novel 1984. It was intended to introduce the new Macintosh computer, and would become one of the most acclaimed commercials ever made.

In the commercial, a talking head on a screen, akin to Big Brother, the cryptic and authoritarian figure in Orwell’s novel, drones on, while an audience of people sitting on benches watch the screen in a trance-like state. A woman comes running up to the screen carrying a hammer, which she flings at the screen while letting out a primal scream. When the hammer hits the screen, the screen is destroyed, and with the destruction, the trance of the groupthink is broken.

Then the final voiceover: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce MacIntosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.”

From there, the next chapter of the tech revolution was the development of the internet, from its beginnings as ARPANET (an acronym for Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) in the 1960s to the development of the World Wide Web in 1990 by a team of computer scientists led by Tim Berners-Lee.

At first it enabled linking hypertext documents into an information system, accessible from any node on the network; within a few years it began its meteoric rise to the phenomenon it is today.

I wrote in my prior essay, This Land Was Made For Me and Me, about the invention of the internet by Tim Berners-Lee, and how when it was launched, Berners-Lee saw it as a public good and not something to be exploited for profit.

Sadly, it didn’t take long for the internet to be seen as a vehicle for making untold profits. It started almost right away with the rise of a bubble, as new and burgeoning internet companies went public, aided by venture capitalists caught up in gold rush fever and looking for the next big thing.

The tech bubble burst within a few years, after a flood of companies such as Pets.com, Infoseek, iVillage, MarchFirst, Kozmo.com, LookSmart, Webvan, WebChat, Boo.com, Divine, and hundreds more, many with dreams of big paydays even though they had minimal revenues, went belly up, leaving venture funders soured on giving money to anybody who had a pipedream with dot-com attached to it.

There were a few winners in this bunch—many of the winners became instant gazillionaires—but many more losers.

The next chapter was written from the ashes of the burst tech bubble: it was the genesis of the new generation of behemoths. Google. Amazon (although Amazon began as an online bookseller in 1995, it didn’t begin its ascent until after the dot-com crash). Facebook. YouTube (which quickly became a part of Google). And a few select others.

Even with this next generation, there was a certain tech-utopian feel to it. Remember Google’s original slogan, “Don’t be evil?” Sounds laughable now, but back then it was an earnest statement reflecting the feeling of how these new companies could be forces for good.

That euphoria was a short-lived dream. As was the utopian fervor of what the tech revolution could bring. The belief that we had entered an age where anything was possible and the imagination, ignited by personal computers, was limitless, rapidly turned rancid.

Instead, it initiated the enclosure of the imagination, and this enclosure has direct bearing on where we are today, amidst a time of turbulence, much upheaval, and the potential for democracy in the U.S. to go by the wayside.

When I use the term enclosure, I am using it in direct reference to the enclosure movement, which was the process of forcibly taking land that was previously owned in common and making it privately owned. It began in England in the 12th century and continued into the 19th century. 

For centuries in England, the peasantry had rights to land that were held in common, and they used it to graze their animals, grow food, hunt, and fish—basically they used the woods, rivers, and meadows to survive. But starting in the 12th century, the lands began to be privatized to make way for commerce—they were enclosed with fences, walls, and hedges, to be used by feudal lords to monetize the fields for their own benefit.

The people who had used the lands for centuries were removed, and with it, deprived of their livelihoods. It has been called “the greatest tyranny that was thought of in the world.” The displaced people began to migrate to cities, where eventually factory jobs awaited them; this is what triggered the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century.

A similar pattern has taken place in our modern era, with the result being the enclosure of our imaginations.

This new enclosure was ignited by the walling off of the internet by the next generation of tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others.

With these companies, a new type of oligarch has been created, one invested in what is called surveillance capitalism—the desire is to control your data and your mind.

As this has transpired, the revolutionary and utopian fervor of information wanting to be free has been overtaken by the dystopian and Orwellian fever of: we will control what information you see.

That’s where we stand today, and it ain’t pretty. It’s what happens when the enclosure of the imagination meets the final frontier—control of your mind.

Shoshana Zuboff, who wrote the landmark book Surveillance Capitalism, explains what this concept means with explicit clarity:

“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Although some of these data are applied to product or service improvement, the rest are declared as a proprietary behavioral surplus, fed into advanced manufacturing processes known as “machine intelligence,” and fabricated into prediction products that anticipate what you will do now, soon, and later. Finally, these prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets.”

Surveillance capitalists have grown immensely wealthy from these trading operations, for many companies are eager to lay bets on our future behavior.

Zuboff goes on to say that surveillance capitalism “revives Karl Marx’s old image of capitalism as a vampire that feeds on labor, but with an unexpected turn. Instead of labor, surveillance capitalism feeds on every aspect of every human’s experience.”

Facebook is the largest country on earth, with over three billion citizens, far dwarfing the 1.2 billion citizens of the next largest country, China. Of course, Facebook is not a country in the sense that China is, but then again, China is not a country in the sense that Facebook is. For that matter, Facebook is a world apart from any other nation and lives in its own universe (hence Facebook’s new name Meta, which is short for Metaverse), a universe in which truth and fiction can be difficult to distinguish from one another.

On the one hand, Facebook is following Stewart Brand’s credo of information wanting to be free. You can go on Facebook and search to your heart’s content for friends, acquaintances, former love interests, news, communities to join, and more. And it’s the same for Google, YouTube, and other social media.

It doesn’t cost a penny to join Facebook, search Google, or watch videos on YouTube. But there is a price to pay for that privilege. Social media profits by manipulating its customers. And therein lies the rub.

These sites make their money by selling ads, which means they need you to stay on their site as long as possible, so you can see the ads. Plus, they need as much data about you as they can possibly cull to be able to specifically direct their highly targeted advertising, in order to be attractive to advertisers. It’s an unprecedented reach into our lives, and it shapes how we work, communicate, shop, and, most importantly, think.

Through the use of algorithms designed by utilizing artificial intelligence, they have mastered the art of persuasive technology.

Persuasive technology is technology used to change your attitudes and behaviors, through the use of persuasion and social influence. One of the leading teachers is B.J. Fogg, a Stanford University professor and researcher, whose textbook, Persuasive Technology, is the go-to book for the field. He is also the founder and director of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, now known as the Behavior Design Lab.

The science of persuasive technology teaches programmers to combine psychology with persuasive techniques and tie them together with the human desire for approval and validation. If done right, persuasive technology can be irresistible for a user. And social media is doing it right.

Brain hacking is the trendy name for the attempt to control your mind, and the ones doing the hacking are Silicon Valley programmers, who are engineering their wares to get and keep you hooked.

Social media companies have a division called the Growth group, and within it are engineers hacking your brain to get you to spend more time on their site and engage more with ads. Their goal, with the help of AI, is to determine which content will keep you highly engaged—and that’s the information that’s used to monetize you. Your viewing, search, and belief habits will then be reinforced every time you come on the site, which will then shape your thoughts, opinions, behaviors, habits, and life.

And herein lies the rub, which was recently articulated by Steve Hayden, who wrote the “1984” ad for Apple. Hayden said in looking back at the ad:

“The tools that were originally intended to help free you now are used as a way of enslaving you with conspiracy theories and unproved stories and unsourced news that’s not really news. We’re realizing Joseph Goebbels’s idea [Goebbels was Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda], of getting people so confused they have no idea what to believe other than an authority figure. In that sense, we failed.”

And this has direct impact on why democracy is teetering in America. You have Donald Trump and his authoritarian tendencies; he is also a master manipulator who intentionally confuses people through what Trump and his cabal call “flooding the zone with shit.” Then there’s Elon Musk, who as a tech-billionaire, controls one of the primary social media outlets, Twitter/X, and uses it as a way to hack the brains of gullible minds. And Musk now is using his propaganda vehicle to aid him in running roughshod over the government as he slices and dices democracy to pieces.

Once our imaginations led us to dreams of “all the people living life in peace,” as John Lennon sang in his anthem, Imagine. Or of a society in which all were taken care of, all were fed, all could have their basic needs met and could aspire and flourish to the best of their potential.

Now we live in a society of tribal angst, and of cruelties towards the least of us, to those most marginalized. We currently live in a society in which there is a false belief that government has to be cut to the bone because there’s not enough for everyone; at the same time, even more tax cuts for the wealthiest will be served up soon.

In addition, we have the wealth class stashing their money in tax havens so they can pay no taxes, which also starves governments of resources to take care of all their citizens.

Our imaginations have been enclosed. But if we allow ourselves to take away the barriers, and start not only imagining a better world but putting it into action, we can cut down those fences and walls that enclose us.

There is a fierce resistance that has risen up as a countervailing force to the dystopia that Donald Trump and his cabal want. It is essential that it is coalescing.

At the same time, the question is, what are we for? That’s the real work, one that will take unshackling the walls enclosing our imaginations, and from there, making that society a reality.