digitization in Mars, Medak & Sekulic 2016
and politics. Anyone could
become the media and address the global
public, emancipate from the constrictive
space of identity, and obtain access to entire
knowledge of the world. However, instead
of resulting in democratising and emancipatory processes, with the handing over of
Internet and technological innovation to the
market in 1990s it resulted in the gradual
disruption of previous social arrangements
in the allocation of goods and in the intensification of the commodification process.
That trajectory reached its full-blown development in the form of Internet platforms
that simultaneously enabled old owners of
goods to control more closely their accessibility and permited new owners to seek out
new forms of commercial exploitation. Take
for example Google Books, where the process of digitization of the entire printed culture of the world resulted in no more than
ad and retail space where only few books
can be accessed for free. Or Amazon Kinde,
where the owner of the platform has such
dramatic control over books that on behest
of copyright holders it can remotely delete
a purchased copy of a book, as quite indicatively happened in 2009 with Orwell's 1984.
The promised technological innovation that
would bring a new turn of the complexity in
the social allocation of goods resulted in a
simplification and reduction of everything
into private property.
The history of resistance to such extreme forms of enclosure of culture and
knowledge is only a bit younger than the
234
Taken literally
processes of commodification themselves
that had begun with the rise of trade in
books. As early
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