Has Capitalism Gone Virtual? Content Containment and the Obsolescence of Commodity
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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References
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Nuestra argumentación exige reiterar la clásica distinción entre la materialidad de la física y la materialidad de la praxis: al distinguirse de los objetos, la forma mercancía siempre ha sido «inmaterial» en el primer sentido y «material» en el segundo. Por eso escogemos emplear palabras como «físico» y «tangible» para referirnos tanto a las propiedades de los contenidos como a las tecnologías de mercantilización, así como para distinguir esa materialidad [physicality] de la más amplia materialidad [materiality] de las relaciones sociales.
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