#lmsacasas — Public Fediverse posts

“The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order. Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. It marked a radical change in the attitudes of society toward the environment.”*…

Several days ago, juries in New Mexico and California found Facebook/Meta (and in California, also YouTube/Google) guilty of knowingly employing algorithms to serve content to minors that caused depression, anxiety, and other mental health harms… behavior par for the course of the (massive, “mechanical”) extractive behavior that is their business model. As NPR reports (on the California verdict):

While the financial punishment is miniscule for companies each worth trillions of dollars, the decision is still consequential. It represents the first time a jury has found that social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers… The outcome of this case could influence thousands of other consolidated cases against the social media companies. The litigation has drawn comparisons to the legal crusade in the 1990s against Big Tobacco, which forced the industry to to stop targeting minors with advertising…

L. M. Sacasas draws on a comparison to the English “enclosure movement” (and here) to put the stakes of this battle against algorithmic extraction into historical context…

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 longer version, which follows, unpacks that analogy and explains what the impact of “enclosing the human psyche” could– would likely– be. Sacasas concludes…

… 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.”…

Eminently worth reading in full: “The Enclosure of the Human Psyche“

* Ivan Illich, “Silence is a commons” in In the Mirror of the Past (to which Sacasas alludes in the essay linked above)

###

As we cosset commons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1867 that a bilateral treaty was signed effecting the sale of Alaska by Russia to the United States. It was ratified on May15 and American sovereignty took effect on October 18 of that year. The price for the 586,412 square miles that changed hands was $7.2 million in 1867 (equivalent to about $132 million in 2024), or about $0.02 per acre ($0.37 per acre in 2024).

Relevantly to the piece above, the land was and is largely commonly held, by the federal government, by the state, and by Native American tribes. Only roughly 1% of Alaska is in private hands. But that sliver is growing as the Trump Administration moves to “liquidate” federal real estate holdings (sell them to private owners) and in the meantime, licenses huge swathes of Alaska for oil and gas development, mineral extraction, and the infrastrucutre (roads, pipelines) needed to service them. Alaskans are worried.

“The enclosure of the commons inaugurates a new ecological order. Enclosure did not just physically transfer the control over grasslands from the peasants to the lord. It marked a radical change in the attitudes of society toward the environment.”*…

Several days ago, juries in New Mexico and California found Facebook/Meta (and in California, also YouTube/Google) guilty of knowingly employing algorithms to serve content to minors that caused depression, anxiety, and other mental health harms… behavior par for the course of the (massive, “mechanical”) extractive behavior that is their business model. As NPR reports (on the California verdict):

While the financial punishment is miniscule for companies each worth trillions of dollars, the decision is still consequential. It represents the first time a jury has found that social media apps should be treated as defective products for being engineered to exploit the developing brains of kids and teenagers… The outcome of this case could influence thousands of other consolidated cases against the social media companies. The litigation has drawn comparisons to the legal crusade in the 1990s against Big Tobacco, which forced the industry to to stop targeting minors with advertising…

L. M. Sacasas draws on a comparison to the English “enclosure movement” (and here) to put the stakes of this battle against algorithmic extraction into historical context…

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 longer version, which follows, unpacks that analogy and explains what the impact of “enclosing the human psyche” could– would likely– be. Sacasas concludes…

… 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.”…

Eminently worth reading in full: “The Enclosure of the Human Psyche“

* Ivan Illich, “Silence is a commons” in In the Mirror of the Past (to which Sacasas alludes in the essay linked above)

###

As we cosset commons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1867 that a bilateral treaty was signed effecting the sale of Alaska by Russia to the United States. It was ratified on May15 and American sovereignty took effect on October 18 of that year. The price for the 586,412 square miles that changed hands was $7.2 million in 1867 (equivalent to about $132 million in 2024), or about $0.02 per acre ($0.37 per acre in 2024).

Relevantly to the piece above, the land was and is largely commonly held, by the federal government, by the state, and by Native American tribes. Only roughly 1% of Alaska is in private hands. But that sliver is growing as the Trump Administration moves to “liquidate” federal real estate holdings (sell them to private owners) and in the meantime, licenses huge swathes of Alaska for oil and gas development, mineral extraction, and the infrastrucutre (roads, pipelines) needed to service them. Alaskans are worried.

I found this argument by L.M. Sacasas that ‘Enchantment is just the measure of the quality of our attention‘ immensely compelling. He’s one of the most interesting voices helping us escape from the panicked banalities of the digital distraction debate, by reconstructing the existential stakes which tend to get lost amidst the moral panic. I couldn’t agree more with this, nor could I express it with the clarity he does:

This form of attention and the knowledge it yields not only elicits more of the world, it elicits more of us. In waiting on the world in this way, applying time and strategic patience in the spirit of invitation, we draw out and are drawn out in turn. As the Latin root of attention suggests, as we extend ourselves into the world by attending to it, we may also find that we ourselves are also extended, that is to say that our consciousness is stretched and deepened. And this form of knowledge is ultimately relational. It yields a more richly personal rather than clinical or transactional relation with the object known, particularly insofar as affection may be one of its consequences.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

But increasingly I’d insist on recognising their psychic foundations. Recognising the moral force of attention is preciously, particularly when it helps us recognise the existential stakes of our daily habits and the choices we make (or fail to make) in relation to them. But I find the implicit ontology of the person underpinning these accounts increasingly implausible, at least in the sense of lacking an adequate account of the psychic foundations of moral attention. There’s so much to explore here but, as one suggest, we could connect the argument Sacasas makes to the psychoanalytic thought of Hans Loewald, which I summarise here from an earlier blog post:

Loewald was concerned with the possibility of “deadening insulation from the unconscious where human life and language are no longer vibrant and warmed by its fire” (quoted on pg 181). This leads to “an adult reality that has been wholly separated from infantile fantasy” existing in “a desiccated, meaningless, passionless world” (pg 194). This conceives of language as the “life-enriching link between past and present, body and world, fantasy and reality” (pg 181). Following Heidegger Loewald sees language in terms of what Taylor calls world-disclosure, with the capacity to “generate and link domains of experience” (pg 185). The quality of this link is the “difference between a present that is haunted by the past and a present that is enriched by the past” (pg 194).

For Loewald we need “links to the affective density of the unconscious, without which ‘human life becomes sterile and an empty shell’” (pg 195). He conceives of transference as a resource for change in this respect, rather than an obstacle to analysis; in transference there is a “revitalization, a relinking of the past and the present, fantasy and reality, primary process and secondary process” (pg 195). To talk of ghosts becoming ancestors isn’t just a matter of making peace with the past, it’s working with the power of the past to enrich the present, as Mitchell quotes Loewald on pg 194:

In the daylight of analysis the ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life, of the secondary process and contemporary objects.

Such a ghost is, as Mitchell describes it, “a piece of the past filled with passionate intensity, that was split off, through repression, from her present experience” (pg 197). Repression for Loewald is a failure of this link, a rigidity in differentiation which collapses the space in which resonance is possible.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/01/27/making-ghosts-into-ancestors/

This opens up the possibility of a subtle relationality in which the integration of our past experience (or lackthereof) shapes how we relate to present external experience. The richness and the vibrancy, the “sheer entertainment value” of the world’s “views, sounds, and smells” to use Arendt’s phrase, only shows up for us through the integration of the past experience into the present reality. I think this fits well with the argument Sacasas is making and opens up an additional horizon through which we can understand our propensity to get caught in deadening loops:

Habituated against attending to the world with patience and care, we are more likely to experience the world as a mute accumulation of inert things to be merely used or consumed as our needs dictate.

https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/if-your-world-is-not-enchanted-youre

The risk is that without this we lapse into a moral athleticism, in which only those who have cultivated themselves (with the time, energy, cultural resources and confidence to do so) can really experience the incipient beauty which can be found in each moment. There might be some truth to this as an empirical generalisation which we need to grapple with, but introducing the psychic dimension complicates the analysis so it’s no longer a matter of cultivation vs habituation. Overcoming that dichotomy opens up a very interesting sociotechnical & existential terrain to explore.

Claude Opus has questions 🧐

• How might we cultivate practices and design environments (both technological and physical) that support the kind of patient, invitational attention Sacasas describes? What individual and collective habits could help keep us vitally linked to the “affective density of the unconscious”?
• In an age of pervasive digital mediation, how do we balance the benefits of new connective technologies with the need to preserve space for unstructured, open-ended engagement with the world and with our own interiority?
• What role might practices like psychoanalysis, meditation, artistic creation, and immersion in nature play in re-enchanting our experience and rekindling the “passionate intensity” of the past in the present moment?
• How can we democratize access to the time, space, and resources needed for cultivating enchantment, so that it doesn’t become an elite pursuit? What social and political changes might be necessary to make this possible?
• What new language and conceptual frameworks do we need to articulate the existential stakes of attention in a hypermediated age? How can we translate these often abstract-sounding ideas into compelling visions and practical agendas for change?

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/29/the-moral-force-of-attention-and-their-psychic-foundations/

#arendt #attention #distraction #HansLoewald #integration #LMSacasas #psychoanalysis #relationality #trauma

I always enjoy reading L.M. Sacasas’ thoughts on the intersection of technology, society, and ethics. This article is no different. In addition to the quotation from G.K. Chesterton which provides the title for this post, Sacasas also quotes Wendell Berry as saying, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people […]

https://thoughtshrapnel.com/2023/04/10/the-madman-is-the-man-who-has-lost-everything-except-his-reason/