ABSTRACT
The absence of elected governments in cyberspace, on the one hand, has increased freedom of expression and creativity, and allowed the formation of online communities that are governed from the bottom up. On the other hand, the lack of a democratic process also allows corporations to step in as de facto governments, and privatize increasing areas of online space (e.g. Google, MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook). Once hailed as a place where users could escape hierarchical control and the tyrannies of government, the internet is now subject to an enclosure movement, wherein public “land” is being privatized, and citizens’ creative labor is appropriated to profit the corporations that administer these places. The extent of surveillance in these spaces may surpass any in the terrestrial world, yet the façade of democracycommunities laboring together as equals to create idealized spaces-is used to attract more citizens. It is a cruel joke that the unregulated spaces idealized by techno-libertarians of the nineties have now become sites of surveillance and control. The gap left by elected governments, especially nation-state governments, allows corporations to conquer online spaces. Unlike elected governments, these corporations are not accountable to their “citizens,” cannot be disposed of, and their practices and internal workings are opaque. The history of Second Life (SL), an online virtual world with over 14 million
“residents” in 2008 provides a paradigmatic example of the enclosure movement.
It is used throughout this paper to highlight the interplay between privatization, the promise of online democratic spaces, and surveillance. While these kinds of enclosure movements are taking place in many online spaces, I draw examples from a virtual world to further demonstrate how avatars, the characters that users choose to represent them in these worlds, facilitate surveillance and challenge traditional notions of online anonymity. While in time SL will likely be replaced by more technologically advanced virtual worlds, it has much to teach us about the corporate incursion into online spaces, the expansion of asymmetrical surveillance practices and power relations, and the resultant transformation of spaces originally created in light of the most democratic ideals. Second Life is just one instance where the hype of community participation and co-production of economic wealth in online spaces is underpinned by increasing corporatization, surveillance, and control.
