The Taking of the Common
How surveillance capitalism repeats the oldest move in the history of property
Introduction: An Old Story in a New Medium
Every few centuries, a powerful class discovers that something everyone relies on can be fenced off, labeled property, and sold. The pasture, the forest, the river, the shared field: each was once understood as belonging to no one in particular because it belonged to everyone. And each, in turn, was claimed.
Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Business School professor emerita and author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), argues that we are living through the latest chapter of this story. The thing being enclosed this time is not land. It is human experience itself: what we do, say, feel, search for, and where we go. Her thesis is that the large technology firms did not merely collect data. They claimed a territory, declared it theirs, and built an economy on the claim.
This article walks through that argument: what the historical enclosure of the commons was, how Zuboff maps it onto the digital world, what the claim actually consists of, why the metaphor is powerful, where it strains, and what a recovery of the common might look like.
What Was Taken the First Time: The Enclosure of the Commons
In England, from the late Middle Ages through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, common land was gradually enclosed. Villagers had long held customary rights to graze animals, gather firewood, cut peat, and glean fields. These were not rights written in a modern property deed. They were rights embedded in community practice, sustained by use and mutual obligation.
Enclosure converted those practices into private holdings, often through acts of Parliament that gave legal form to what landowners wanted. The consequences were profound. Many rural people lost the means of independent subsistence and were pushed toward wage labor. Karl Marx called the process "primitive accumulation," the founding act that creates a class with property and a class with nothing to sell but its labor. Karl Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, described how market society required turning land, labor, and money into commodities, things that were never produced to be sold but were treated as if they were.
Two features of enclosure matter for what follows. First, it was unilateral: those who gained did not negotiate with those who lost. Second, it relied on a change in how a thing was described. What had been a shared resource was redefined as an idle, unclaimed, or underused asset waiting for a proper owner. The redescription came first, and the fences followed.
Zuboff's Move: Human Experience as Free Raw Material
Zuboff's central claim is that surveillance capitalism begins with exactly this kind of redescription. Early in the history of the commercial internet, Google discovered that the traces users left behind as they searched, clicked, and lingered contained far more information than was needed to improve the service. She calls this excess behavioral surplus.
The companies that followed this path, Google first and then Facebook and many others, made a decision that was never put to public vote: human experience would be treated as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Not only what people deliberately share, but typing speed, location, pauses, facial expressions, and emotional states became inputs.
Zuboff stresses that this was a claim, not a discovery. Nothing in nature made experience into raw material. A company asserted that it could take it, and then it took it. She draws an analogy to the Spanish Requerimiento of the sixteenth century, a document read aloud to indigenous peoples declaring that they were now subject to the Crown, often in a language they could not understand. The point is the structure of the act: a unilateral declaration of ownership over something that was not offered.
She also describes how the claim became normal through what she calls a dispossession cycle. A company makes an incursion into private life, often before the law has caught up. The public, caught off guard, protests and then habituates. The company adapts cosmetically, perhaps adding a setting or a policy page, while the underlying extraction continues. Finally the practice is redirected into a new, more acceptable-sounding frame. Street View, tracking cookies, and location services all followed some version of this path.
From Raw Material to Prediction Products
Collecting data is only the first stage. The second is manufacturing. Behavioral surplus is fed into machine intelligence to produce prediction products: calculations about what particular people, or kinds of people, will do now, soon, and later.
These predictions are sold in what Zuboff calls behavioral futures markets, where the buyers are advertisers and, increasingly, insurers, lenders, employers, and others who profit from knowing or shaping what people will do. The more accurate the prediction, the more valuable the product. And the most reliable way to improve a prediction is to improve certainty about the outcome, which means moving from watching behavior to influencing it.
Zuboff describes this as the turn from knowing to doing: tuning, herding, and nudging behavior through feeds, notifications, rewards, and design. She uses the term instrumentarian power for the capacity to shape behavior at scale through ubiquitous digital instruments, and distinguishes it from the totalitarian power of the twentieth century, which sought to control through violence and ideology rather than through measurement and modification.
This is where the parallel to the commons becomes sharper. The pasture was valuable because it supported life in common. Once enclosed, it supported rent for someone else. Human experience, likewise, was once lived and shared; once enclosed, it feeds a pipeline whose output is sold to third parties whose interests may have nothing to do with the people whose lives supplied the material.
Exiled From Our Own Commons
One of the most striking features of Zuboff's analysis is how she describes the position of ordinary people. In industrial capitalism, firms depended on populations as workers and customers. That dependence created leverage. Strikes, boycotts, and labor law all grew out of the fact that capital needed people.
Surveillance capitalism, she argues, loosens that dependence. People remain users, but their primary role is as sources of raw material. The customers are the businesses buying predictions. The result is a different relationship: the people whose lives are being mined are not the ones paying, and so are not the ones the system is designed to answer to.
A second asymmetry compounds the first. Zuboff speaks of an abnormal division of learning: a small number of firms know enormous amounts about us, while we know very little about them or about how their systems work. The processes are opaque, the terms of service are unreadable in practice, and the inferences made about us, often called the shadow text, are inaccessible to us. A commons can only be governed by people who understand and can see it. Here, those who would be the commoners are kept in the dark, which is a way of being exiled from a resource without leaving home.
What Exactly Is the "Common"?
The metaphor invites an obvious question: what is the commons in this case? There are at least three plausible answers, and the argument gets richer when they are held together.
Personal experience and inner life. Zuboff's own emphasis falls here. She frames the issue as a violation of a fundamental human claim to a private interior, which she describes through ideas like the right to the future tense (the ability to imagine and choose one's own future without having it pre-engineered) and the right to sanctuary (a place of refuge from observation).
Shared social life and knowledge. Much of what is harvested is collective by nature: conversations, relationships, cultural references, public posts, photographs, and the accumulated text of the web. This material was produced by millions of people, often in good faith, as part of a shared digital public sphere. Training and targeting systems built on it convert that collective output into private capital.
Shared institutions and self-government. If a handful of firms control the infrastructure of information, and use it to shape what people see and believe, then democratic deliberation itself becomes a kind of commons under enclosure. The pasture is not just the data but the conditions under which a free people can think and decide together.
The phrase "privatizing public data" in popular shorthand captures the second sense best. Zuboff's deeper concern is arguably the first and third.
Why the Metaphor Is Powerful
The enclosure analogy does real work. It reframes a debate that is often conducted in the language of individual consumer choice, as in "if you don't like it, don't use it," and shows it to be a question of collective rights and power. Nobody negotiated enclosure with a villager one on one, and nobody can meaningfully opt out of a society-wide infrastructure by declining a single app.
It also explains why individual privacy settings feel inadequate. A privacy toggle is the equivalent of asking a single villager to guard a corner of the field after the hedges are already up. The problem is the structure of ownership and the legal vacuum that permitted the claim.
And it carries historical memory. Enclosure was resisted, regulated, and eventually answered by new institutions: labor law, public parks, commons trusts, antitrust, consumer protection. Zuboff's implicit message is that the 21st-century version also requires new institutions, not just new etiquette.
Where the Metaphor Strains
A fair account should note the critiques. Several scholars have questioned whether surveillance capitalism is as radical a break as Zuboff claims. Evgeny Morozov, among others, has argued that her framing risks treating the problem as a rogue mutation of capitalism rather than capitalism's ordinary logic extended into new areas, and that it can understate the role of states, which also depend on mass data collection.
Other objections are more conceptual. Much personal data did not exist before these platforms created the conditions for generating it, so it is not clear that it was ever a "pre-existing commons" in the way a field was. Some argue the more fitting analogy is not enclosure but extraction from a mixed resource, where users knowingly or semi-knowingly trade data for services. Zuboff's response is that the exchange is not truly consensual when terms are opaque, alternatives are absent, and much of the extraction is invisible. Still, the disagreement is real, and it affects what remedies seem appropriate.
There is also a classic tension within commons theory itself. Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" suggested shared resources get overused unless privatized or tightly regulated by the state. Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics, showed that communities often govern commons successfully through rules they create themselves. For the digital realm, the Ostrom tradition suggests that the solution is not simply handing control to a different owner, but building governance in which those affected have a voice.
Reclaiming the Common
If the diagnosis is enclosure, then the remedy, in Zuboff's view, is democratic: to restore public authority over the systems that now operate beyond it. She has argued that the response must be collective and legal rather than merely individual, and that it should challenge the foundational economic logic rather than only its most obvious abuses.
Ideas that fit this approach include:
Restricting the markets themselves. Rather than only regulating how data is collected, limit or ban the trade in certain behavioral predictions, much as societies have barred markets in human organs or children.
Establishing enforceable rights. Strengthen legal protections for sanctuary and for the future tense, including limits on manipulative design and on inferring sensitive traits.
Transparency and audit. Close the division of learning by requiring meaningful disclosure of what is collected, what is inferred, and how systems act on it, with independent oversight.
Public and cooperative alternatives. Build data trusts, public-interest infrastructure, and cooperative models where communities govern the data they generate, in the spirit of Ostrom.
Collective action. Treat organized public pressure, from regulators, legislators, unions, and civil society, as the main lever, since individual opt-outs cannot change a structural arrangement.
Some of this has begun to take shape in laws such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation and its later digital regulation, and in various state-level privacy statutes in the United States. Whether these go far enough, and whether they challenge the business model or merely tidy its edges, remains actively disputed.
Conclusion
The force of Zuboff's argument lies in recognizing a pattern. A resource that was shared by default is redescribed as free for the taking. A few claim it unilaterally. The many are told the arrangement is natural, then inevitable, then beneficial. Only later does it become clear what was lost and that it was never given away.
Whether one accepts every part of her framework or not, the question she raises is hard to avoid: who gets to decide what becomes of human experience once it can be captured, analyzed, and sold? If the answer is "whoever got there first," then we have repeated the enclosure. If the answer is "all of us, through institutions we can see and shape," then the common can be reclaimed. The first enclosure took generations to challenge. The point of calling this one by its name is to shorten that time.
Further Reading
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)
Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (1944)
Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons (1990)
Evgeny Morozov's review essay on Zuboff in The Guardian (2019), for a critical view
Harvard Gazette (February 2020) and New Labor Forum (2019) discussions of Zuboff's work, as noted in your sources