The Desiring Machines of Capital and Technology

Capitalism and technology, working for each other, like the two-headed monster Janus and also like a transnational condominium, have both created various machines that enslave us all by transforming human life on earth. What follows is a brief historical sketch of how capital and technology brought this about. Beginning in the mid-1970s through the early 1980s in the West, the capitalistic process assigned value to information (and knowledge): that is, capital valued information as a form of labor and merchandise. Briefly, within the capitalistic process, what is valued is what can be exchanged: that is, a form of merchandise is what has exchange-value. Once this process began to value words and ideas, as distinct from material goods, the new time of capital, armed with the new labor-power of (information), began to free itself from the time of concrete labor. As a result, capitalism became less concerned with organizing space into functional sectors than with subsuming the totality of time under its own laws of unequal exchange.