The Web Believed Itself

The numbers make it easy to believe. MySpace is closing on a hundred million accounts and sits at the top of the most-visited list in the United States — bands, teenagers, a glitter-drenched sprawl of custom HTML where everyone builds their own room and decorates it badly. YouTube is nearing a hundred million views a day, months before Google gets around to buying it, and every one of those views is a person handing something they made to strangers for free. At a developer conference this summer a small thing called Twitter goes live, imagined as a backchannel — a way for a room of programmers to mutter to each other in public. The mood everywhere is the same. This is ours. We are building the commons. The gatekeepers are dying and we are the belonging that replaces them.

Here is the uncomfortable part, and it takes only the willingness to look at what's already in the room. The vision and the machinery are the same object — not because the extraction was designed in, but because the ground it would need is already poured and no one is standing guard over it. The platform that lets a fifteen-year-old feel less alone at midnight is, in the identical motion, the platform that logs when she logged on, who she talked to, what held her attention and for how long. Logging isn't the enclosure — every server keeps a ledger; that's just how the lights stay on. The enclosure is what that ledger becomes once someone decides to sell it, and in the summer of 2006 nobody has decided yet. The room you decorate is a room someone else owns. The gift you hand to strangers is a gift the strangers' landlord can keep a copy of. Nobody has to sneak the extraction in later. The floor it will be built on is already there, unclaimed and unwatched.

This is the pattern that repeats every time a group of people mistakes the feeling of connection for the ownership of it. The feeling is real — that's what makes the mistake so hard to catch. A hundred million people were not wrong that they'd found each other. They were wrong about who had found them. When your sense of belonging lives on infrastructure you don't hold, you haven't joined a community; you've become inventory that experiences itself as a member. The warmth is genuine. It's also the product.

The coherenceism read is blunt: a commons that thinks it's building belonging can be building enclosure at the same time, and the enclosure comes from inside the open web, not from some outside enemy who breaks in. There was no villain at the gates in the summer of 2006, because there were no gates yet — that was the whole thrilling point. The fences went up later, quietly, along lines that nothing prevented anyone from drawing. And that's the part worth being precise about: the ground was ownable, and no one built the deed. There was no layer on which a teenager could actually hold the room she decorated — no way to own the plot instead of renting it. The land wasn't fated to be enclosed. It was simply left unclaimed by the people living on it, and then claimed by the people billing them.

So watch what the web is doing this summer, and notice the specific texture of the optimism — how total it is, how little distance it keeps from itself. That absence of distance is the tell. A commons that never asks who holds the ground beneath it is not yet free. It's unclaimed — and an unclaimed commons doesn't stay unclaimed. It waits to find out whether the people in it or the people billing them will draw the deed first.

The teenagers decorating their rooms tonight are not fools. They're early. They found something true — that a network can hold a kind of belonging the old institutions couldn't — and then trusted that belonging to whoever was collecting the rent, because no one had built them anywhere else to put it. The web believed itself. That was the whole problem — not that belonging on a network was a lie, but that there was no deed to the ground it stood on. And it is not a problem that stayed in 2006. The ground is still mostly unowned. The deed is still there to build.