This is how Mark Andrejevic describes the process of enclosure inherent in social platforms. From Infoglut pg 42:
What is really novel, however, is the fact that because these forms of communication take place within what I have elsewhere described as a “digital enclosure” — the interactive embrace of networked devices that record everything that takes place upon them – they can be captured, stored, sorted, and processed. It’s as if the casual conversations of daily life that once disappeared into the ether have now been captured and fixed on searchable, sortable, aggregate-able recording tape. The utterances might seem as casual and fleeting to us as comments we make to friends at the pub or around the water cooler, but once they are captured by the digital enclosure their temporal and spatial reach expands far beyond what we likely imagine.
Could generative AI have been developed without this process? If so, should we think of it as a matter of enclosure? Thanks to Milan Sturmer who helped me see how significant this question is to the broader issue of whether we regard our current moment as platform capitalism or technofeudalism
Mark Carrigan 