Has Capitalism Gone Virtual? Content Containment and the Obsolescence of Commodity

Authors

  • Olga Sezneva
  • Sebastien Chauvin

Abstract

This article examines how recent strategies of commodification have responded

to challenges posed by digital and other self-reproducing contents. The examples

of digitized cultural goods, plant patenting, and online gaming suggest that

challenges to commodification have not come from intangibility per se but from

forms of physical inscription associated with negligible costs of reproduction,

sharing, and transmission. Whereas the physical characteristics of industrial

products more or less met the requirements of content containment, selfreproducing

and digital goods have demanded increasingly costly prosthetics to

insure their maintenance as commodities. Three conclusions follow. First, and

ironically, technological and physical devices embedded into objects confer

renewed materiality on the commodity form. Second, and paradoxically,

physical materializations of the commodity also provide a fresh handle for its

manipulability. Finally, expanded prosthetics of commodification can be read as

an indicator of the increasingly blatant historical inadequacy of the commodity’s

forcibly prolonged maintenance.

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Published
24-07-2019
How to Cite
Sezneva, O., & Chauvin, S. (2019). Has Capitalism Gone Virtual? Content Containment and the Obsolescence of Commodity. Historical Sociology, (9), 262–294. Retrieved from https://revistas.um.es/sh/article/view/390961