There's no room where the people who raised the rent and the people who built the highway and the people who designed the app all sit together and coordinate. The connection is structural — it's the kind of connection that doesn't require anyone to plan it, because it emerges under specific conditions — conditions we can name.
The word comes from a specific historical moment: the fencing of English common land from roughly the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Fields where the village's sheep grazed together were parceled out for individuals to do as they like with. Within a generation in most villages, one or two families owned all of it. The commons — the shared resource, the collective arrangement, the thing that belonged to everyone who needed it — was enclosed. Made to yield profit rather than sustain life.
That process did not stop in the nineteenth century. It is the operating logic of the economy we live in now. Every rent increase, every hospital bill that can't be explained, every highway through a neighborhood, every app that monetizes your presence — these are enclosures. They are the conversion of something that was shared into something that is for extraction.
The people who designed this road were not bad people. The people who maintain it are not bad people. The city planners who have absorbed its existence as a given are not bad people. They are operating inside a template — a set of assumptions about what infrastructure is for, who it serves, what counts as a problem worth solving — that feels so natural it doesn't feel like a template at all. It feels like reality.
It's easy not to see Hampton Boulevard as a choice, and that's not a failure. It is the nature of hegemony — the way that existing arrangements sink into the category of the inevitable, the natural. It takes the experience of an alternative to make the existing arrangement visible as an arrangement.
This is common sense: the sediment of prior thought that tells you what's natural, what's possible, what a realistic person thinks. Common sense is not false consciousness — it's not that people are fooled. It's that the assumptions built into the infrastructure, the institutions, the daily texture of life wear in like trails — pressed by every passage until the ground holds the route, and the body follows automatically. Common sense is the trail, not the decision. A tracker reads the same ground differently: reads the signs, and compiles in the body a map of the terrain — including the pressures that pressed the trail into it.
Michel Foucault, working in Paris in the 1970s, identified something Gramsci had named but not fully anatomized. Power, he argued, had undergone a transformation. Classical sovereign power — the power of the king — was the right to take life or let live. Modern power is something different. It doesn't primarily kill; it domesticates. A wolf is not hunted into a dog — it is bred into one, generation by generation, its development bent toward tameness until the docility looks like its own nature. Neoteny is the mechanism: the domesticated animal keeps its juvenile traits for life, the dependence and the pliancy that the wild adult would have outgrown, because those are the traits that serve the keeper. This is what biopower does to a population. It does not take your life; it administers it. It manages, regulates, optimizes — bends the body's development toward usefulness until the usefulness feels like character. The prison, the hospital, the school, the factory: not just places where bodies are controlled but where the definition of normal and deviant, productive and useless, is manufactured and maintained.
Antonio Negri built the answer to Foucault's unfinished question over decades. Arrested in Italy in 1979 on charges widely understood to be political, he wrote The Savage Anomaly from prison. He was elected to Parliament from his cell, and used parliamentary immunity to escape to France in 1983. From exile through the 1990s, he and Michael Hardt would write Empire. He died in Paris in December 2023, at ninety.
What Negri and Hardt built across Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth: if biopower is power operating through life, then biopolitical production is what capitalism now primarily depends on. Not the extraction of value from raw materials or repetitive factory labor, but from life itself — from language, from affect, from care, from knowledge, from the accumulated capacity of human beings to cooperate, communicate, and create. The call center worker selling warmth. The nurse managing pain and fear. The teacher producing the capacity to learn. The neighborhood whose longtime residents make it desirable enough for developers to gentrify. None of this produces a material good you can hold. All of it produces value that capital captures.
At the far end of domestication is the thing that does not breed its host but rewrites it. A fungus infects an ant, and the ant climbs — not where the ant was going, but where the fungus needs to fruit; it locks its jaws onto a leaf at the right height and dies there so the fungus can grow out of its head. The ant does the climbing. The ant feels, presumably, like it is doing what ants do. That is biopolitical production at its limit: not the body coerced, but the body's own striving turned to another's harvest, the worker selling warmth and calling it a career, the neighborhood making itself lovely for the developer who will price it out. The capacity is yours. The fruiting is someone else's.
And what is the substrate of all this production?
Think about a moment when you encountered an idea — maybe about how housing could work, or how a workplace could be organized differently — and your immediate response was that's not realistic, before you'd actually thought about whether it was. Not an argument. A reflex. The kind of dismissal that doesn't feel like a decision because it doesn't feel like anything at all. It just feels like knowing.
That reflex has a history. It was built — in the schools that taught you what counts as common sense, in the institutions of daily life that organized your first understanding of how the world works. None of these conspired. They only kept functioning normally, kept producing the same assumptions, and those assumptions accumulated as the sediment of prior thought that tells you what's natural before you've been asked to decide.
Gramsci had a word for how this works: hegemony. Not force, but the prior production of the terrain on which force operates. The ruling group maintains power not only through the army and the police and the prison. It maintains it by making its worldview everyone's common sense — by shaping what feels realistic, what feels extreme, what a reasonable person thinks. Force is visible. You can resist force because you can see it. Hegemony isn't. It works through the school, the church, the newspaper, the professional association, the family form — not commanding these institutions but needing only them to keep operating normally, producing the same assumptions, until those assumptions are the air everyone breathes.