Sears HQ, 2025, Source youtube.com/@StringerMedia
From Sears to Surveillance
In the early 20th century, American shoppers discovered a new kind of marketplace. Instead of the local general store or corner shop, they encountered mail-order catalogs and chain stores that promised unprecedented variety and low prices. Companies like Sears, Roebuck & Co., Woolworth's, and the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company (A&P) leveraged the latest infrastructure of their day - railroads, telegraphs, and a national postal service - to reach consumers everywhere. This was a retail revolution: one that upended local markets and concentrated power in a few corporate hands. Over the next century, this revolution would evolve and accelerate through the rise of suburban malls, mass media advertising, and eventually the digital platforms that dominate today. A clear throughline emerges from this history. Each new logistical or discovery infrastructure - from rail lines to broadcast airwaves to internet algorithms - has enabled greater centralization, turning open markets into enclosed systems where access is tightly controlled, rent is extracted, and both labor and consumer choice are fundamentally reshaped. This essay traces that arc from Sears to surveillance capitalism, examining how retail and media have been progressively enclosed by ever-larger gatekeepers, and what that has meant for policy, labor, and society.
Railroads, Catalogs, and Chain Stores: The First Retail Revolution
At the dawn of the 20th century, innovations in distribution and communication created the first wave of retail centralization. Sears, Roebuck's famous mail-order catalog is a prime example. Using the extensive American railroad network and postal system, Sears could deliver an astonishing array of goods to rural farmhouses and urban apartments alike [0†L19-L22]. For isolated customers, the Sears catalog was a miracle - a “wish book” offering everything from kitchen appliances to entire house kits. It also became an object of resentment for local shopkeepers. In some towns, people burned Sears catalogs in protest, seeing the big mail-order houses as parasitic intruders siphoning money out of the community [7†L127-L135]. Sears even resorted to shipping products in plain unmarked packages, so that a customer's neighbors wouldn't know they'd ordered from the catalog.
If Sears used rail and mail to bypass the traditional marketplace, the new chain stores of the era used economies of scale and modern management to undercut independent retailers. A&P grew from a tea shop into a 15,000-store grocery empire by 1930 [7†L265-L273], blanketing cities and small towns with its outlets. Woolworth's five-and-dime stores replicated the same low-priced merchandise in hundreds of locations. These chains could buy in bulk, distribute goods efficiently, and sell at thinner profit margins than the family-run store. Prices dropped and selection grew - benefitting consumers on one level - but the competitive edge of chains was also viewed as an existential “chain store menace” to communities [7†L149-L157]. As one 1929 magazine writer put it, chain stores were a form of “absentee landlordism”: remote corporations setting the terms of trade in towns they'd never even visited. The local grocer or clothier, often a civic leader and employer of neighbors, was being supplanted by a branch manager “told exactly what to do” by distant owners. The human rapport of Main Street commerce was giving way to what one observer called a “machinelike atmosphere” in which customers were processed with industrial efficiency [7†L178-L187].
Behind this early-20th-century shift was a profound power imbalance. Large chains extracted wealth from communities and funneled it to corporate headquarters, a dynamic that provoked a populist backlash. Small retailers lacked political clout on their own, but they were championed by the network of independent wholesalers and suppliers who depended on them [5†L381-L389]. Together, these constituencies clamored for action against the chains. Unions and local activists organized boycotts and “trade-at-home” campaigns touting the virtues of independent shops [7†L139-L147]. Newspapers and radio stations (at least those not taking chain store advertising) ran scathing editorials accusing chains of paying “starvation wages” and “closing the door of opportunity” for the next generation of entrepreneurs [7†L153-L161]. Some states passed punitive taxes on chain stores, aiming to make it prohibitively expensive for a corporation to operate dozens of outlets [7†L141-L149]. By the mid-1930s, the anger reached Congress, where Rep. Wright Patman of Texas introduced a bill often called the “chain store death sentence” tax - a steep federal levy that would have effectively taxed chain stores out of existence [7†L247-L256]. Patman garnered dozens of co-sponsors and widespread public support; at one point over 75 Congressmen from 33 states backed his proposal [7†L247-L255].
Though Patman's drastic anti-chain tax failed to pass, it sent a chilling message to the largest retailers. In 1936, Congress did enact a more focused law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which outlawed price discrimination by suppliers in favor of big buyers [5†L389-L397]. This New Deal legislation targeted the way giants like A&P coerced manufacturers into giving them discounts not available to smaller stores [11†L143-L151]. Under Robinson-Patman, a supplier couldn't cut a special deal for A&P or Kroger unless the same terms were offered to independents. The law was explicitly aimed at checking the power of chain store Goliaths - “enacted in 1936 amid New Deal fervor against the power of chain stores, particularly A&P” [2†L47-L55]. And it had teeth. Almost immediately, President Roosevelt's Justice Department went after A&P for violating the act. The result was dramatic: after antitrust lawsuits and forced divestitures, A&P shrank from around 15,000 stores in the early 1930s to only 5,000 by 1950 [2†L55-L63]. The once-dominant grocer entered a long decline, ultimately disappearing from the market decades later [2†L55-L63]. Washington had shown that it could, at least temporarily, roll back the retail trusts in defense of small businesses and competitive markets.
At the heart of the anti-chain movement's rhetoric was a concern for democracy and labor as much as for prices. People like Supreme Court Justice (then Senator) Hugo Black warned that America was “rapidly becoming a nation of a few business masters and many clerks and servants,” as independent proprietors were pushed out [7†L237-L245]. Black noted that the proud, self-reliant storekeeper - a fixture of community life - was being replaced by a hired manager “at inadequate salaries,” while many former owners simply swelled the ranks of the unemployed [7†L237-L245]. The chain system's vaunted efficiency, he argued, was exacting a social cost: “a wild craze for efficiency in distribution has swept over the land, increasing the number of unemployed, building up a caste system dangerous to any government.” [7†L237-L245] In other words, the cost savings of chain retail came partly by disempowering workers - converting independent artisans and shopkeepers into wage laborers with little stake in the business. This critique resonates even now, as we'll see, in debates about Amazon warehouse workers or gig economy couriers. Then as now, economic concentration meant fewer owners and more employees, often under tighter corporate control.
It is important to note that despite these populist victories in the 1930s, the chain store model was far from defeated. Companies found ways around the rules (A&P, for instance, expanded its own private-label manufacturing to escape supplier pricing laws [5†L343-L351]). Courts often proved sympathetic to corporations: the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1920s struck down numerous state laws that tried to differentiate between big and small business, citing the “rights” of corporations under the 14th Amendment to not be discriminated against [7†L334-L342]. And economists increasingly argued that big chains were more efficient and beneficial in the long run, providing consumers with cheaper food and goods. In fact, A&P's defenders pointed out that its efficiencies enabled lower grocery prices, which improved nutrition for American families during the Depression and war years. Future Nobel laureate John Kenneth Galbraith praised A&P in 1952 as an example of “countervailing power” - a big retail buyer that could force manufacturers to cut prices, ultimately passing savings to the public [5†L453-L461]. These competing narratives - bigness as threatening monopolistic power versus bigness as modern efficiency - would persist through the century. But as we'll see, by the late 20th century the dominant view in policy circles shifted decisively in favor of the latter, paving the way for an even greater wave of consolidation.
Malls and Mass Media: Postwar Enclosure of Commerce and Culture
The decades after World War II brought unprecedented prosperity and consumption in America - and a new phase of retail transformation. If the first revolution had been about leveraging railroads and national brands to create chain stores, the second revolution was about the suburb, the mall, and television. The federal highway system, cheap gasoline, and FHA-backed suburban housing developments enabled middle-class Americans to live farther from city centers. In these sprawling new suburbs arose the shopping mall, an almost archetypal piece of privatized infrastructure. The mall took the logic of the chain store - standardized, centrally managed retail - and blew it up to regional scale. A mall developer (often a large real estate firm or REIT) would build an enclosed temple of consumption outside a city, anchor it with big-name department stores, and fill it with smaller chain outlets. By design, the mall enclosed what used to be open: it was a climate-controlled, privately policed simulacrum of a town square, except every activity ultimately revolved around buying something. Even community events at the mall were marketing opportunities. Urbanists noted that as malls flourished, many traditional downtowns withered - public streets replaced by private concourses. Social critics warned that civic life was being “relocated” into spaces where democratic freedoms did not fully apply [28†L143-L151]. Owners and security guards could simply expel protesters, petitioners, or unaccompanied teenagers, exerting a level of control impossible in real public squares. The mall exemplified a broader mid-century trend: the privatization of public space in the name of efficient consumerism. As one scholarly analysis put it, “the relocation of civic life to malls…erodes the value of the public sphere,” turning citizens into customers and limiting access based on economic capacity [28†L143-L151]. The mall was safe, clean, and convenient, but it was also, in the words of philosopher Henri Lefebvre, a “pseudo-public space” - a controlled environment engineered to keep out the undesirable and funnel the rest toward the cash registers [28†L159-L167].
If malls enclosed the physical space of retail, mass media enclosed the cultural space of consumer attention. The postwar era was truly the golden age of broadcast advertising. In the 1950s and 60s, a handful of television networks (CBS, NBC, ABC in the U.S.) and national magazines became the gatekeepers through which products were introduced to the public mind. This too represented a centralization of what had once been a decentralized affair. A generation earlier, a company might reach consumers through a patchwork of local newspapers, radio shows, traveling salesmen, or billboards. By 1960, a marketer with the budget could blanket the nation with a single TV commercial aired during I Love Lucy. A few big corporate ad agencies in New York could shape tastes from coast to coast. The result was the creation of truly national brands and trends, often crowding out regional diversity. The same toys, fashions, and foods became popular from California to Maine, promoted by the same celebrity endorsers. Consumers gained the convenience of trust - if it was on TV, it must be reputable - but lost some measure of local flavor and choice. In effect, the broadcast networks and top publishers acted as discovery intermediaries for consumer culture, analogous to how Amazon or Google act today. They decided which new cereal or laundry detergent or automobile millions would learn about. Importantly, entry into this magic circle of mass advertising was extremely expensive - only the largest companies could afford it. Thus, mass media reinforced the advantages of scale: Procter & Gamble or General Motors could out-market any upstart. Smaller businesses, lacking a national ad budget, were increasingly confined to the margins or forced into niche roles.
Media itself became big business, subject to the same consolidation pressures as retail. Through the 1960s and 70s, a wave of mergers created conglomerates that owned film studios, publishing houses, and television stations under one roof. Regulators initially kept some checks - for example, a rule (the Fin-Syn rules and FCC ownership caps) prevented any one company from owning too many TV stations or controlling too large a share of audience. But those rules eroded over time, especially starting in the 1980s. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 removed many remaining barriers, triggering a cascade of media mergers. The statistics are stark: In 1984, about 50 corporations owned the bulk of American media outlets; today, that number is down to six [13†L25-L33]. This media oligopoly - companies like Disney, Comcast, News Corp, Viacom, AT&T/Warner, and CBS - exerts enormous influence over what content is produced and how it's distributed. Fewer owners have meant fewer distinct voices and less local news coverage [13†L25-L33]. Just as the mall homogenized the retail landscape (the same chain stores in every city), conglomerate media homogenized the information landscape. A local newspaper might be shuttered or bought out by a national chain; a local TV station might simply syndicate content from New York. Here again, we see the enclosure of the commons: in this case, the civic commons of information and discourse, increasingly mediated by corporate gatekeepers.
While malls and mass media were ascendant, policy responses to corporate concentration largely stalled in the mid-century decades. In part, this was because the New Deal reforms initially worked - for a time, markets were more competitive. Robinson-Patman was enforced for over 40 years, and as a result independent retailers coexisted with chains through the 1950s-1970s [11†L157-L165]. Throughout that period, independents still accounted for roughly half of retail sales in sectors like groceries [11†L115-L123]. The antitrust authorities also remained active, blocking some mergers and pursuing obvious cases of collusion. For example, the government pursued A&P again in the 1940s for antitrust, nearly forcing a breakup of the company into separate regional entities [5†L419-L428]. But the intellectual currents were shifting. By the 1970s, a new orthodoxy in economics - the Chicago School - argued that big firms were often beneficial and that antitrust should focus narrowly on consumer prices, not on protecting competitors. Under this view, the anti-chain store fervor of the 1930s looked quaint or even foolish. Influential critics like Robert Bork derided the Robinson-Patman Act as “anti-consumer,” claiming it propped up inefficient small businesses at the expense of low prices for the public [2†L68-L77]. This mindset took hold in the late 1970s and 1980s, leading regulators to all but abandon Robinson-Patman (the FTC stopped enforcing it in 1981 [11†L121-L129]) and to clear the way for large mergers in both retail and media.
Deregulation and the Big-Box Boom: The 1980s-2000s
The Reagan era ushered in a wave of deregulation and laissez-faire attitudes that dramatically accelerated concentration. With Robinson-Patman dormant and antitrust agencies adopting a light touch, large chains scaled up rapidly. This was the age of the “Big Box” retailers - Walmart, Home Depot, Toys “R” Us, and others - which expanded nationally, often decimating local competitors. Walmart in particular became a symbol of the new order. Founded in 1962, Walmart was still relatively small in 1980, but by using advanced logistics (its own trucking fleet, regional distribution centers, early adoption of computer inventory systems) and cut-throat pricing, it grew into the largest retailer in the world by the 1990s. Walmart seized on the lack of price discrimination enforcement to demand deep volume discounts from suppliers [11†L167-L175]. Suppliers, fearing the loss of Walmart's huge orders, granted those discounts and in turn often charged higher prices to small stores, which could no longer compete [11†L169-L177]. The predictable result was a mass extinction of independent retailers, especially in small towns. By the early 2000s, the idyllic Main Streets of many American towns - once filled with local grocers, hardware stores, pharmacies, and clothing shops - were hollowed out, replaced by Walmart's gigantic one-stop supercenters on the outskirts. “Food desert” entered the lexicon in the 1990s to describe neighborhoods or towns where no local grocery remained [11†L183-L191]. Consumers might have saved money at the Walmart checkout, but at the cost of choice and community - there were simply far fewer vendors, and most were low-wage employees of distant corporations.
In these years, finance capital also played a key role in reshaping retail. With deregulation and a booming stock market, conglomerates and private equity firms bought up brands and chains, seeking efficiencies and market dominance. The 1980s saw a spree of mergers: department stores combined into federated groups; regional grocery chains merged into national ones. By exploiting economies of scale and often leveraging debt, the new conglomerates sought to maximize shareholder returns - frequently by cutting labor costs, squeezing suppliers, and standardizing products across their stores. One outcome was the erosion of the old variety of retail formats. The personalized service of a local shop gave way to the impersonal aisles of a category killer warehouse. Labor unions, which had at times gained footholds in grocery and department store chains mid-century, were largely beaten back or dismantled in this era. Walmart famously forbade unions, and its low wages set a new norm in retail employment that competitors felt pressured to follow. The result was a stark shift in who held power in the marketplace: not the workers, not small producers, but the corporate owners and shareholders of a few massive firms.
Meanwhile, the media landscape was undergoing a parallel consolidation, supercharged by the deregulatory climate. The 1980s saw the rise of cable television, which paradoxically both increased channel choices and concentrated control in new hands (e.g. Ted Turner's CNN, Rupert Murdoch's expanding News Corp empire). The Telecommunications Act of 1996, as noted, lifted ownership caps and allowed cross-ownership of TV, radio, and newspapers in the same market. Overnight, radio went from a highly local medium (with thousands of independent station owners) to one dominated by a few networks like Clear Channel, which at one point owned 1,200+ stations nationwide [13†L51-L58]. Clear Channel's centralized playlists made local DJs and diverse music programming an endangered species. Similar consolidation occurred in television and print. By the early 2000s, 90% of U.S. media was controlled by six conglomerates - a situation unthinkable a few decades prior [13†L25-L33]. Critics argued that this reduction in independent voices was a threat to the free flow of information and even to democracy. Stories emerged of how media consolidation hurt public safety or civic awareness - for example, when a chemical disaster struck Minot, North Dakota in 2002, local emergency warnings failed to reach residents because all six radio stations in town were owned by Clear Channel and piped in remote content with no local newsbreaks [13†L119-L127]. The privatization of the public discourse had real consequences.
By the turn of the millennium, one might have assumed that the high-water mark of corporate enclosure had been reached. In retail, big-box chains and mega-malls ruled; in media, conglomerates were king. Yet an even more sweeping transformation was on the horizon - one that would make the Sears catalog and broadcast TV era look positively quaint by comparison. The infrastructure of the 21st century would be digital, and it would enable a level of centralization and surveillance that earlier titans could only dream of.
Platforms, Algorithms, and the New Digital Enclosures
OpenAI's Project Stargates 800+ Acre Data Center
In the late 20th century, the internet was born as an open network - a decentralized web of computers with no central gatekeeper. Early optimists believed this new medium would disrupt the old hierarchies, empowering small voices and distributed commerce. And for a brief period it did. Anyone could start an online store, a blog, or a media website and potentially reach the world. But by the 2010s, a starkly different reality had emerged: online life became dominated by a few giant “platform” corporations. Google, Amazon, Facebook (now Meta), Apple, and a handful of others erected what are essentially digital malls and private highways on the internet. They succeeded by offering irresistible convenience and using network effects to entrench their positions. Now, they function as central intermediaries for daily activities: search, social interaction, news consumption, and shopping flow through their channels. In doing so, these companies have built a new form of enclosure - not of physical space, but of information, attention, and even identity.
Consider Amazon, often dubbed “the Everything Store.” Amazon built a logistics system that rivals the reach of Sears' rail network, with warehouses (“fulfillment centers”) strategically located near major markets and a shipping operation that can get packages to your door in one day. That infrastructure is costly, and Amazon's early investors poured in billions of dollars (tolerating years of losses) to establish its dominance. The result is that for many consumers, Amazon is the marketplace - the default place to search for any product. But unlike a traditional open market or even a shopping mall, Amazon's marketplace is entirely proprietary. Third-party sellers operate there at Amazon's sufferance, paying hefty fees and commissions for access to its millions of customers. In essence, Amazon has enclosed the bazaar. It controls the digital shelf space and can dictate terms to sellers: what fees they pay, how their products are displayed, whether they can reach customers at all. The company has been repeatedly accused of using its platform power to favor its own products (e.g. AmazonBasics house brands) by giving them better search placement, or by undercutting successful third-party sellers using data those sellers themselves generated. Even if one avoids Amazon, nearly every major online retailer relies on Amazon's infrastructure behind the scenes - many large websites run on Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud servers. AWS, along with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, now forms an oligopoly in cloud computing that hosts well over half of all internet applications and data [19†L281-L289]. (As of 2025, the top three cloud firms control about 63% of the global cloud infrastructure market.) If a company or individual falls afoul of these big providers, they can literally be “de-platformed” - knocked offline, as happened to some controversial services that found themselves expelled from app stores or cloud hosts in recent years. It's a level of centralized control over infrastructure that echoes the railroad and telegraph monopolies of the 19th century, but with even broader reach: a few CEOs in Silicon Valley can determine whether a startup lives or dies by controlling its access to computing power and users.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of the digital enclosure is how it controls discovery and attention through algorithms. If mass-media gatekeepers of the 1960s decided what ads or news reached your eyes, today's gatekeepers are the recommendation engines and ranking algorithms of platforms. When you search for a piece of information on Google, or scroll through Facebook's feed, or browse Netflix or YouTube, you are not seeing a neutral, exhaustive list of options. You are seeing what a proprietary algorithm - tuned for the platform's business goals - has selected for you. Often, that means prioritizing content which is more profitable or beneficial to the platform. Google's search results, for example, are typically led by a block of paid ads that closely resemble organic results. Studies have found that the presence of ads at the top dramatically reduces traffic to the genuine results below [17†L821-L829]. In other words, the platform can steer user attention toward sponsored or internal content and away from organic content, effectively charging tolls to whoever wants to be seen [17†L799-L807]. Scholars describe this as extracting “attention rents” [17†L799-L807]. The idea is that a dominant platform, by interjecting itself as the curator of information, can levy fees on businesses who need access to consumers' eyeballs [17†L805-L813]. Amazon, for instance, now earns tens of billions from ads sold to merchants - products that would appear high in search on their merit must now pay Amazon for premium placement, because Amazon intentionally intermixes paid results with “relevant” ones [17†L781-L789]. Facebook and Instagram tweak their feeds to show more sponsored posts or to favor content that keeps people engaged (so they see more ads). This algorithmic gatekeeping is the digital parallel to the chain store squeezing suppliers: those who don't pay or appease the gatekeeper find themselves shunted to the side, effectively unable to reach the market. A key difference, however, is the subtlety - users often don't even realize their field of choices is being skewed. At least a shopper in the 1950s knew the mall was a commercial space; a social media user today may not realize how their news feed is quietly pruned and shaped by invisible code.
Alongside the big tech platforms' control of markets and information flows is their control over data - including personal data and identity. The business model of these firms has often been described as “surveillance capitalism”: harvesting detailed behavioral data on users in order to monetize it [22†L117-L124]. Every click, view, pause, and purchase becomes grist for predictive algorithms. Companies like Google and Facebook amassed fortunes by turning this data into targeted advertising opportunities of unprecedented precision. More recently, this data appetite has extended to biometric and location data - our faces, fingerprints, physical movements, and heartbeats are now captured by smartphones, fitness wearables, smart home devices, and public cameras. As Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff observed, companies are monetizing our behavioral and biometric data at scale, often without our awareness or meaningful consent [22†L117-L124]. The endgame of such data collection is not just better ad targeting, but potentially gating access to services or even spaces based on digital profiles. We see early glimmers of this: biometric identity systems are being woven into everyday life. Facial recognition gates at airports decide who can pass. Smartphones use fingerprint or face scans to unlock and to authorize payments. In China, platforms like Alipay and WeChat integrate payments, IDs, and social credit, creating a tightly monitored sphere in which one's ability to transact or travel can be throttled by centralized data controllers. The western tech giants are not far behind - Facebook has experimented with facial recognition for tagging photos, Amazon's Ring cameras create privatized surveillance networks in neighborhoods, and Apple and Google provide the APIs for digital ID and vaccine passport apps. In the name of seamless convenience and security, we may be trading away the decentralization of identity. Whereas cash and anonymous browsing once allowed consumers a degree of privacy and freedom, now every transaction and interaction is tracked and tied to profiles. This gives the platform owners unprecedented power to shape behavior and exclude actors they deem undesirable (sometimes at the behest of governments). It is a new form of enclosure - not of land, but of the informational commons and even our own personal representation in digital society.
Finally, the digital enclosure has proven immensely lucrative for its proprietors, yielding economic concentrations as extreme as any in history. In advertising, for instance, the lion's share of all digital ad spending globally goes to just three companies: Google, Meta (Facebook/Instagram), and Amazon. Together these three capture over 70% of all digital ad revenues among publicly traded companies [25†L83-L87], dwarfing all other players [25†L99-L107]. This has crushing implications for traditional media and independent content creators - they struggle to compete for ad dollars in a world where the platforms harvest most of the value (often by aggregating content those very publishers created). In e-commerce, Amazon's dominance is such that most online sellers feel they have little choice but to use its marketplace - even as Amazon competes with them and dictates fees. In mobile ecosystems, Apple and Google effectively duopolize the app economy, deciding which apps can exist on phones and skimming a 15-30% cut of all app sales and subscriptions as rent. In cloud computing, we saw that a few firms control the backbone of the internet. Across each layer of the digital economy, centralization begets more centralization: the giants use their profits and data advantages to acquire nascent rivals, invest in AI and other scale-driven technologies, and deepen their moats. By the 2020s, the largest tech firms were each worth trillions of dollars, their market caps and workforces eclipsing those of industrial giants of old. It is not an exaggeration to say that power over key economic and social functions has migrated into a few private hands. And as history teaches, such power, left unchecked, tends to be used to extract rent and entrench itself further.
The Arc of Enclosure and the Challenge Ahead
Tracing this history from the chain store wars of the 1920s to the platform battles of today, we see a recurring pattern. A new technology or infrastructure emerges that dramatically improves efficiency or connectivity - whether it's the railroad, the automobile and highway, or the internet. Early on, this new infrastructure is relatively open; it empowers those who learn to use it. Sears harnessed rail and mail to break the old geographic constraints on retail. Early internet entrepreneurs used the web's openness to challenge established industries. Consumers reap great benefits: lower prices, wider selection, marvelous convenience. But over time, power concentrates. A few players achieve dominance in leveraging the infrastructure - by fair means or foul - and then move to wall off their gardens, exclude competitors, and lock in users. They become the new gatekeepers, able to charge tolls (explicit or implicit) for others to participate. Essentially, what was a public thoroughfare becomes a company town.
We also see that each cycle of enclosure extends the reach of corporate control further into daily life. The chain stores centralized retail sales, but at least the streets and sidewalks outside were public. The malls privatized the very space of community gathering and commerce. The digital platforms have gone further to privatize and monetize our data, our attention, our social interactions, even our personal identities. Each iteration leaves less room outside the system - it becomes harder to live, work, or transact without yielding to the dominant intermediaries. And each iteration has made markets less a realm of open competition and more a feudal estate where a few lords grant access in exchange for tribute (fees, data, or other concessions).
History also shows that pushback and policy can make a difference, even if temporary. The Robinson-Patman Act and related anti-chain measures in the 1930s were effective [2†L56-L64] - for a generation, chain dominance was kept partly in check and small businesses retained a sizeable share of markets [11†L157-L165]. In the digital age, we are arguably at a similar inflection point. After decades of lax oversight, there is a growing movement to rein in Big Tech. In the U.S., this is sometimes called the “New Brandeis” or hipster antitrust movement - reviving Justice Brandeis's early 20th-century warnings about the “curse of bigness” and applying them to Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Antitrust cases have finally been launched (the Department of Justice suing Google for monopolizing search advertising, the FTC suing Facebook for anticompetitive acquisitions, and in 2023 the FTC suing Amazon for monopolistic practices in e-commerce). There are calls to revive laws like Robinson-Patman to prevent giant retailers (online or offline) from abusing their buying power over suppliers [1†L26-L33]. At the state level, some legislators are echoing the past with proposals to limit the fees app stores can charge or to enforce data privacy rules that could blunt surveillance tactics. The European Union has been even more proactive with its Digital Markets Act, explicitly designating the biggest platforms as “gatekeepers” that must adhere to fair competition and interoperability requirements [14†L13-L21]. This is reminiscent of how railroads were eventually regulated as common carriers. The question is whether these measures will be sufficient and timely. History suggests that once giants become deeply entrenched, it is extraordinarily difficult to dismantle their power - but not impossible, if the public and policymakers recognize what is at stake.
The role of labor and public pressure remains as critical as ever. In the 1930s, it was a coalition of farmers, workers, and independent merchants that forced Congress to act against chain stores [7†L251-L259]. Today, we see stirrings of a similar coalition: warehouse workers attempting to unionize at Amazon, gig drivers agitating for better terms, small business alliances complaining about Amazon and Google's dominance, privacy advocates and civil rights groups highlighting how Big Tech's algorithms and surveillance harm society. The challenge is forging these disparate concerns into a unified movement with enough clout to overcome the immense lobbying power and cultural influence of the tech behemoths. We should recall that even A&P, in its heyday, used every trick to preserve its empire - from high-priced lobbyists to PR campaigns claiming that any action against it would raise food prices [5†L393-L397]. (Today's equivalent might be Amazon insisting that Prime's free shipping or Google's free services could vanish if they are restrained.) In the end, A&P did decline - not only because of government action, but because competitors (like new supermarkets and Walmart later) innovated on its model. This underscores another point: enclosures can eventually collapse under their own weight or be outflanked by new paradigms. The mall boom, for instance, gave way to a mall bust; many are now dead or repurposed as their formula became outdated and e-commerce arose. Facebook's iron grip on social networking is already slipping as younger users flock to new platforms like TikTok. Yet, without deliberate intervention, there's a risk that the new boss may be the same as the old boss, or even more powerful - TikTok itself is creating an Amazon-like shopping and media ecosystem, and being owned by a Chinese company raises additional state-control issues. The cycle could simply repeat.
Ultimately, breaking the cycle of enclosure - or at least mitigating its harms - will likely require reimagining the rules of our infrastructure. In the 19th century, public utilities and common carrier regulations were tools used to ensure railroads and telegraphs served the public interest rather than only their shareholders. In the 20th, antitrust law was employed to keep manufacturing and retail giants from snuffing out all competition. In the 21st, we may need new analogs for data, algorithms, and platforms. This could include treating certain digital platforms as utilities or essential facilities, subject to neutrality and non-discrimination requirements (as was attempted with net neutrality for internet providers, to prevent them from favoring some content over others [13†L32-L34]). It might involve data portability and interoperability mandates, so that users can move between platforms and upstart competitors can plug into dominant networks (reducing the network effect moat). It might even involve breaking up companies - separating, for example, Amazon's marketplace business from its own product brands, or Google's search from its advertising operations - if their integrated structure is deemed unfairly anticompetitive. None of these are simple solutions, and each carries risks and complexities. But if the past is prologue, doing nothing would allow the enclosures to tighten further.
From the Sears catalog to the app store, from the A&P grocery chain to the Facebook news feed, the story is remarkably consistent. Those who control the channels of distribution - whether of goods, information, or attention - can become gatekeepers of enormous power. They can use that power to extract wealth, stifle rivals, and mold the choices available to consumers and citizens. Over time, this power tends to concentrate, to the detriment of a diverse and open marketplace. Yet, history also shows that people do not acquiesce quietly to such concentration. The enclosure of the commons has always provoked resistance, from the peasant revolts in the days of land enclosures to the anti-chain store movement of the 1930s to the antitrust tech hearings in Congress today. There is a persistent ideal in the American (and indeed global) economic culture that values openness, competition, and decentralization of power - in a word, freedom. The technologies change, but the crux of the struggle remains: how to enjoy the benefits of modern infrastructure without ceding our markets and societies entirely to a few private gatekeepers.
The fight for an open marketplace is never definitively won - it must be waged anew in each era, against each new form of enclosure. The stakes only grow higher as the enclosures shift from the tangible (stores and malls) to the intangible (information and identity). But so too grows our historical understanding of the problem. We can learn from the Sears and A&P era when formulating responses to Amazon and Google. The particulars differ, yet the echo is clear. The task now is to apply that understanding, through smart policy and collective action, to ensure that the infrastructures of the AI-driven, algorithmic age serve as liberating tools of discovery and commerce - not merely as instruments of control and rent extraction by the new monopolists. In charting a course forward, we might paraphrase the question Wright Patman posed about A&P long ago [7†L280-L289]: Is our country better off with millions of independent participants in our markets, or with those markets owned and controlled by a few giant entities? [7†L281-L289] The answer will decide whether the next chapter of this story tends toward democratization or further enclosure of our economic life.