iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era (CultureAmerica)
by Mark Andrejevic (italics his - bold mine)
pg. 2
digital enclosure--the creation of an interactive realm wherein every action and transaction generates information about itself. Although the term implies a physical space, the same characteristics can apply to virtual spaces.
...
I use the term enclosure not just to invoke the notion of a space--virtual or otherwise--that is rendered interactive, but also to highlight the process of enclosure, whereby places and activities become encompassed by the monitoring embrace of an interactive (virtual) space. Accompanying this movement is a not-so-subtle shift in social relations: entry into the digital enclosure carries with it, in most cases, the condition of surveillance.
((re: Eyal Weisman: "the wall curls around itself"))
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pg. 3
The use of the term digital enclosure is also meant to evoke the land enclosure movement associated with the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the process whereby over time communal land was subjected to private control, allowing private landowners to set the conditions for its use. Over time, the enclosure movement leads to the formation of distinct classes: those who own the means of production and those who must sell their labor for access to these means, whether arable lands or factories. A similar division of groups can be discerned in the emerging digital enclosure between those who control privatized interactive spaces (virtual or otherwise), and those who submit to particular forms of monitoring in order to gain access to goods, services, and conveniences.
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...the use of interactive technologies--new media devices--lends itself to the generation of cybernetic information: feedback about the transactions themselves. This feedback becomes the property of private companies that can store, aggregate, sort, and in many cases, sell the information to others in the form of a database or a cybernetic commodity.
