Sumana Harihareswara recently tooted a link back to a 2019 post where she commiserated with Malka Older on all the extra labor we modern, USaian folk, get to deal with: tax returns, canceling subscriptions, customs and border crossing forms, and other, in Sumana’s words, ‘fiddly-expensive-if-you-make-a-mistake’ labor¹.

She quotes Teresa Nielsen Hayden in talking about the causes of these extra efforts imposed on us. That quote, in full, and in context:

It’s different now. There’s too much money at stake for [the internet] to stay open. Deceiving us has become an industrial process.

– Teresa Nielsen Hayden in Making Light, 3 December, 2004

The platforms, operating on behalf of the rich, have risen up and now extract our time and labor in the 20 years since Teresa Nielsen Hayden wrote that post.

We knew the wealthy would attempt an enclosure of our new internet commons in 2004, we have done little about it in the fifth of a century since.

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1. You should link your blog posts from your toots when it’s relevant, share your work!