Britain has seen this story before. A shared resource becomes private property — not through theft, but through law, economics, and the promise of improvement. Four hundred years ago it was common land. Forty years ago it was water and electricity. Today it is ordinary life itself: the bank you could walk into, the shop on the high street, the counter where a person would help you. Each time, the same people are squeezed out — those who relied on the shared thing and cannot reach the private one that replaces it. And each time it is done perfectly legally.
The people doing the enclosing never call it taking. They call it making something work better — and they are often half right, which is exactly what makes it hard to resist. But every enclosure ends the same way: a resource many relied on becomes something a few control, the means of access narrow to a single private channel, and what was a right becomes a service you can only reach on their terms. That process has a name. Enclosure. My argument is that it is happening now to the physical fabric of everyday life, that it is building a society of haves and have-nots divided by whether they can get online, and that the people left outside have no safety net and no one left to complain to. A commons does not survive this by accident. It never has.
I. The Pattern
The commons were fenced
Around 1500, perhaps half of England and Wales was common land held under shared rights. Villagers grazed livestock, collected fuel, and cut hay — not acts of charity but recognised legal rights that formed part of everyday life. Over the next four centuries Parliament enclosed millions of acres. It happened legally, gradually, and in the name of efficiency.
Agricultural productivity rose. So did the wealth of those who now owned the fields, and so did the dependence of those who no longer did. A shared resource became private property, and the people who had relied on the commons increasingly found themselves paying for access to something that had once been part of ordinary life. Take something held in common, convert it into property, justify the change as progress, and let the losses fall on those too dispersed to resist. It still happens: the enclosure of common land at Mynydd y Gwair for a wind farm, at Bryn Cadwgan and Mynydd Llanhilleth for energy parks, at Felton Common for Bristol Airport — each in the name of the common good.
Privatisation, same direction
The same logic returned in the 1980s: water, gas, electricity, telecommunications. The promise was efficiency and broader ownership. Some efficiencies arrived. But ownership moved steadily into the hands of the few, and essential infrastructure became something citizens rented back from private owners. Different century, different assets — Royal Mail, National Air Traffic Services, Eurostar, HS1 — same direction.
The High street, fenced
Enclosure has always fallen hardest on those least able to resist it, and the digital version is no different. Successive governments have rushed to make everything digital-by-default — benefits, tax, NHS appointments, council services — on the reasonable-sounding grounds of efficiency. Business followed: banking, travel, entertainment, the local shop, even the telephone directory. But “default” is doing a lot of quiet work in that phrase. It assumes a device, a connection, a card, and the literacy to use all three. For the very poor who cannot afford the hardware, for people who struggle to read, and for older people who never learned the interface, the default is not convenience. It is a locked door.
And unlike the enclosures before it, this one leaves nothing standing on the other side. When the bank shut its branch, it did not open a smaller one for those who could not bank online. When the council moved its services to a portal, it did not keep a desk for those who could not use it. The old world is not being scaled down for the excluded — it is being removed. To be outside the digital economy now is not to have less. It is to have nowhere to go.
II. The Digital Age
The fence is regressive
Enclosure has always fallen hardest on those least able to resist it, and the digital version is no different. Successive governments have rushed to make everything digital-by-default — benefits, tax, NHS appointments, council services — on the reasonable-sounding grounds of efficiency. Business followed: banking, travel, entertainment, the local shop, even the telephone directory. But “default” is doing a lot of quiet work in that phrase. It assumes a device, a connection, a card, and the literacy to use all three. For the very poor who cannot afford the hardware, for people who struggle to read, and for older people who never learned the interface, the default is not convenience. It is a locked door.
And unlike the enclosures before it, this one leaves nothing standing on the other side. When the bank shut its branch, it did not open a smaller one for those who could not bank online. When the council moved its services to a portal, it did not keep a desk for those who could not use it. The old world is not being scaled down for the excluded — it is being removed. To be outside the digital economy now is not to have less. It is to have nowhere to go.
No safety net, no one to complain to
That is the part the efficiency argument never mentions. Every previous enclosure at least left a person you could appeal to — a clerk, a counter, a queue, a face. The digital enclosure removes even that. There is no one at the branch because there is no branch. The complaint line is a chatbot, the appeal is a form you cannot open, and the office that would have helped you fill it in has closed. The system assumes you can already reach it, and if you cannot, it has no way of hearing that you exist. Exclusion becomes silent by design: the people shut out are precisely the people with no channel left to say so.
So the country quietly sorts itself into two. Those who can get online move through life more smoothly than ever. Those who cannot are not merely inconvenienced — they are removed from the ordinary business of being a citizen: unable to bank, book, claim, appeal, or be heard. A society of haves and have-nots, divided not by wealth alone but by whether the door will open for you at all.
The interactions we counted as nothing
There is a further loss hidden inside the convenience, and it falls on the same people. The transactions being digitised were never only transactions. The queue at the post office, the bank clerk who knew your name, the woman at the corner shop, the pharmacist who noticed you seemed unwell — these were the small, unremarkable human contacts that stitched a person into a community. For someone living alone, and for many older people especially, the walk to the bank or the chat at the till was often the only conversation of the day. Strip out the counter and you do not just remove a service. You remove the reason to leave the house, and the person who might have noticed you had stopped.
This is not sentimental. Everyday social contact is one of the things that keeps minds well; the 2020 Lancet Commission on dementia counts social isolation among the twelve modifiable risk factors behind roughly 40% of dementia cases worldwide, and the Alzheimer’s Society estimates that social isolation can raise the risk of developing dementia by around 60%. An economy that quietly deletes the reasons an isolated person had to go out and speak to another human being is not neutral about their wellbeing. It is running down the very interactions that protect it, and calling the result efficiency.
And the people who are online are not spared a version of the same fate. As the shared physical places thin out, life retreats onto private screens, and each person drifts onto their own digital island — a feed tuned to them alone, a set of opinions never tested against a neighbour who sees it differently. The high street, for all its friction, forced a kind of contact: you stood next to people unlike you. The echo chamber removes that too. So society fragments at both ends at once. The excluded are cut off from everyone; the included are cut off from anyone unlike themselves. Either way the commons of ordinary, unchosen human contact — the thing that made a place a society rather than a collection of accounts — is being quietly fenced off.
III. The Revolt That Cannot Happen
Consider how differently this would have gone two centuries ago. When the toll roads of west Wales enclosed the very act of travelling — charging poor farmers to move their own goods along roads they had always used — the response was the Rebecca Riots. Between 1839 and 1843, men gathered by night, disguised as “Rebecca and her daughters,” and pulled the tollgates down. It worked partly because it could be organised, and it could be organised because there was somewhere to organise: the chapel, the market, the pub, the farm kitchen. Resistance needs a commons of its own — a physical place where the aggrieved can find each other.
That is the quiet trap in this enclosure. The same move that shuts people out of banking and government has also dismantled the places where they might once have gathered to object. The pub has closed, the high street has emptied, the post office queue for pensions where grievances were once shared has gone the way of the counter. The tollgate is now a website, and there is no midnight crowd that can tear a website down — nor anywhere for that crowd to assemble in the first place. The people most harmed by the digital enclosure are the least able to protest it, because protest itself has been quietly enclosed along with everything else.
IV. A question of national resilience
There is another consequence that receives remarkably little attention. Information has become strategic infrastructure. The UK is becoming increasingly aware of the potential risks associated with foreign ownership of ports, power stations, communications networks and water supplies because these systems are essential to national resilience. Yet we are rapidly becoming dependent upon a small number of multinational technology companies for something equally fundamental: access to information itself.
If students, businesses, researchers, civil servants and eventually public services all rely upon privately digital platforms, then a significant part of the nation’s infrastructure potentially sits outside democratic control. No conspiracy is required. Commercial priorities change. Companies merge. Prices rise. Services close. Governments disagree. Regulations evolve. Access can be removed, features withdrawn or terms altered by decisions made thousands of miles away. None of these outcomes requires bad intentions. They simply reflect the reality that private companies exist to serve shareholders before societies.
Britain has spent centuries investing public money in informtion storage and accessibility by the public. We should pause before assuming that handing the principal gateway to that knowledge to a handful of private corporations carries no long-term cost.
V. The Fence We Can Still See
None of this is radical, and none of it is free. The enclosers of the eighteenth century broke no laws, and neither do these; everything being done by Government and to the high street right now is legal, orderly, and reasonable-sounding at every step. That is exactly why it will continue unless it is met with an equal and deliberate act in the other direction — a guaranteed non-digital route to every public service, a legal right to reach a human being, and the protection of the physical places that let a community function and, when it must, resist.
Britain already knows how a commons is taken: it is fenced, it is sold, and it is later remembered as freer than it ever really was. Every previous enclosure looked sensible while it happened, and only afterwards did people count what had been lost — and who had been left outside. This time we can see the fence going up while there is still something on both sides of it. The question is whether seeing it is enough to make us keep a door open for the people about to be shut out.
Such a thought-provoking read! The comparison to historical enclosures is a really good analogy that gives you a lot to think about. Thanks for sharing this!
Well put Pete.