Mobile privatization and the COVID-19 pandemic: Charting the interregnum

Rather than reaffirming technological determinist predictions of a total movement toward the domestication of labor and the full enclosure of the commons, the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown preexisting shifts in societal relations into high relief, demonstrating how technological change operates in conjunction with the larger political economy to structure class formation. This essay puts these developments in historical perspective through the lens of Raymond Williams’s notion of “mobile privatization.”3 Mobile privatization has not been a linear process; rather, it has been dialectical, contradictory, and experienced differently among different social groups at different times. While mobility and privacy are generally seen as marks of privilege, COVID-19 inverted that in significant ways.4 Making sense of these inversions is critical to mapping the terrain on which we now struggle to build a new social order amid deep crisis.