{"id":1747,"date":"2009-09-07T15:07:20","date_gmt":"2009-09-07T20:07:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=1747"},"modified":"2009-09-07T15:07:20","modified_gmt":"2009-09-07T20:07:20","slug":"the-freedom-to-swim-in-a-river-without-the-act-being-marketed-as-wild-swimming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2009\/09\/07\/the-freedom-to-swim-in-a-river-without-the-act-being-marketed-as-wild-swimming\/","title":{"rendered":"the freedom to swim in a river without the act being marketed as wild swimming"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nM. John Harrison gets annoyed about what he calls <a href=\"http:\/\/ambientehotel.wordpress.com\/2009\/08\/28\/acts-of-enclosure\">the new enclosures<\/a>  &#8212; the way perfectly ordinary activities have been commodified by business and government into something you need to pay for or ask permission for.\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\nMy point is simply that everyone must have the freedom to swim in a river without the act being marketed to them as \u201cwild swimming\u201d. The label is a danger because it\u2019s the first step towards commodification.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe councils, lobbies, sports-regulatory bodies and swimming-hat manufacturers can\u2019t take \u201cwild swimming\u201d indoors to control it as a commodity &#038; meter it out to the participants in paid-for units (although that was ably done to rock climbing, which thought of itself as a \u201cwild\u201d, fully exterior activity, across the 1990s); but they can construct the kind of linguistic &#038; cultural enclosure around it that will allow them to take profit in other ways.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nIn this sense, &#038; in lots of others, the UK outdoors has been moved relentlessly indoors over the last two and half decades.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI don\u2019t see how this observation has anything to do with elitism. What I am trying to disentangle\u2013from political, commercial &#038; media constraints\u2013is the individual human freedom to decide to go swimming, or walking, or riding a bike without that action being a privilege granted by someone else and\/or a source of profit for someone else.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe difference is between the activity as an action &#038; the activity as a captive resource which is then offered back under the terms of whatever group has captured it.\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>M. John Harrison gets annoyed about what he calls the new enclosures &#8212; the way perfectly ordinary activities have been commodified by business and government into something you need to pay for or ask permission for. My point is simply that everyone must have the freedom to swim in a river without the act being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-under-capitalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1747"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1750,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1747\/revisions\/1750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}