Digital Lokeanism
Lately, I’ve felt a subtle dissonance every time I hover over the “Subscribe” button on Substack. Not because I don’t want to support writers -- many of them deserve to be paid far more than what a newsletter subscription offers -- but because something about the exchange feels… off. Like I’m participating in a subtle shift I can’t quite name. A gate quietly swinging shut behind me.
After some reflection (and maybe too much overthinking), I realized: It feels very John Locke.
But instead of land, it’s the digital landscape.
Locke, the 17th-century philosopher, believed that when someone mixed their labor with the commons, either by farming, building, working – they earned the right to claim it as private property. This idea helped justify land ownership, colonialism, and the enclosure of what once belonged to everyone.
Now, centuries later, that same logic seems to be playing out online.
Once, the internet was a sprawling commons. A digital wilderness of blogs, forums, fanfiction, and footnotes. People wrote and shared because they wanted to, because they had something to say, because the act of expression was the reward.
But slowly, we began to “cultivate” our digital spaces. Curate them. Design them. Brand them. Labour was mixed. And by Locke’s logic, ownership followed.
So now we have paywalled thought, gated newsletters, subscription-only musings. A growing intellectual landscape where access depends on one’s ability to pay.
It’s not malicious. Often, it’s necessary -- people deserve to make a living from their ideas. But still, the tension lingers.
Because when everything becomes content, and every idea becomes property, we risk building fences across a place that once felt free and literally gatekeeping thought to those who can afford to pay. Where access is dictated not by curiousity or desire to connect, but purchasing power.
I recently met up with an ex-colleague who worked in measurement, and he introduced me to a book called The Big Sort, which explores how clustering and bubbles are slowly tearing society apart. I haven’t read it yet, but it resonated. Perhaps this is part of the unease I feel when subscribing to Substack. A subtle sorting. A winnowing. The formation of yet another layer of gated thought.
And this unease extends beyond writing. It’s in the ever present pressure to monetize everything we love.
Knit a scarf? Open an Etsy store.
Bake a cake? Take orders.
Make art? Launch a print shop.
Every time I talk about a little side hobby - cake decorating, painting, writing, anything really -- someone inevitably asks: “So… do you make money from it?”
As if joy isn’t reason enough… As if the value of a thing is only justified once it becomes productive, once it’s commercialized.
The hobbies that once offered joy without consequence now come with the question:
“But could this be income?”
And I get it. I really do.
Not everyone has the privilege to keep their passions purely personal. Not everyone can afford to write, paint, or create just for the love of it.
I say this with the full awareness that I was born into a set of circumstances; either by birth, geography, and sheer luck - that have given me the space to reflect on this rather than rely on it for survival.
But still. I think something is lost when every act of care or creativity is viewed through the lens of monetization. When rest becomes content, where thought becomes product. Monetized serendipity.
Medium once promised it would be free. And for a time, it was. Now, it too has become sorted, tiered, restricted.
So maybe this, keeping my thoughts here, open and unpaywalled; is my small act of defiance.
A reminder that not everything needs a price tag to matter. That some ideas are meant to be left in the wild - unclaimed, unowned, shared for the joy of it.
Until then, I’ll keep wrestling with this quiet unease that I’m still struggling to articulate. Because even digital fences deserve to be noticed before we walk past them.
Love, Vx
