The commodity is capitalism’s ‘elementary form’ (Marx 1976: 125). Marx’s commodity analysis and critique allow us to understand the media’s forms of commodification.

Information is a peculiar commodity: It is not used up in consumption, can easily and quickly be copied and distributed, has high initial production costs and low copy costs, involves high risks and uncertainty about whether it is saleable or not, is non-rivalrous in consumption and requires special protective measures to be turned into a scarce good from whose consumption others can be excluded.

Capital accumulation in the information economy therefore requires special strategies, such as the commodification of content along with intellectual property rights and copyrights; the commodification of access to content (e.g. subscriptions); the commodification of production, distribution and consumption technologies; the commodification of audiences in advertising; the multiplication of media formats and the re-use of content; or the commodification of users and the data they generate in targeted online advertising.

A new administrative discipline known as “information resource management” is finding broad application across the business world. This discipline attempts to treat information “as a resource like other resources such as money, personnel and property, which have values and costs and are used in achieving program goals” (Horton, 1983). In short, as one authority declares, we “can no longer deny that information is becoming a commodity” (Spero, 1982).

Not just any commodity, either, but a fundamental source of growth for the market system as a whole; information, some say, has become the essential site of capital accumulation within the world economy.

There is a tendency to treat privacy as the right to be left alone or as a tradable commodity, something we give up such as information about ourselves, to receive something we want, such as access to a social media platform or to email. These are serviceable but also narrow, weak, and tell us little about why privacy is important. They are also almost entirely focused on the individual as the repository of privacy. To deepen understanding of this issue, it is essential to change how we think about privacy. Specifically, we need to see privacy in spatial terms. It is the psychological space that individuals need for self-development and the space that social groups require to form a community. Developing a unique self requires the personal space to experiement, perform different roles, take risks, try out new values, get to know ourselves and ultimately form a coherent personality that, while constantly evolving, contains a core identity.

Protecting individual privacy means preserving personal control over this vital space against forces that make the formation of a self-directed personality or integral character more difficult, if not impossible.

The ability of capital to be transported or transmitted depends on both the economic and material form that capital takes – this materiality also includes electromagnetic waves and the encoding of digital data. For example, the mobility of commodity capital depends on the means of communication and the natural qualities of the commodity, such as weight, size, fragility and perishability. It is in this process that capital relies upon various media to bind space and time in ways commensurable to its logic of acceleration. The digital form takes this logic to its natural end.

To situate the development of specifically capitalist media within a broader history of media change (which allows us to foreground formative, material, and technical differences in different media), we turn to the medium theory tradition (Innis, McLuhan) to get a sense of how this logic is reflected in the material and technical composition of media. Specifically, we find an analysis of how media are central to the organization of space and time that bridges phenomenology and political economy. As Harold Innis (1964; 1995) argues, media organize space and time and thereby contribute to the reproduction (or disintegration) of social/power structures.

Analyzed comparatively, different media emphasize different space/time ratios, reflecting the relative bias of a given medium. In comparison to media that emphasize their persistence through time (architecture, stone engraving, religious rituals and institutions), media that emphasized the control of space are said to possess a spatial bias. For Innis, spatial bias refers to media, such as the price system and the market that break up time into “discrete, uniform, measurable chunks that can be valuated in money terms” (Babe 2000, 73; Innis 1995, 66–87). For example, Innis notes that the spatial bias of the price system in Western political economies “facilitated the use of credit, the rise of exchanges, and calculations of the predictable future essential to the development of insurance” as a way to predict the future and minimize risk (Babe 2000, 72; see Innis 1964, 33–34). Moreover, the concept of bias is also a reflection of a medium’s capacity to bind space and time in accordance with the reproduction of a given political economic configuration.

In the effort to overcome the physical, spatial and temporal barriers to circulation, digital code is one of the dominant forms in which capital now invests itself because digitization is acceleration. In digital form, capital’s real circulation approaches its formal ideal. Indeed, digital data appears to be the perfect medium for self-valorizing value. When something is digitized it exists only conceptually or symbolically, which represents the primacy of images and signs over material objects. Any object rendered digitally is a numerical representation (Manovich 2001, 52).

No doubt intellectual property is not personal but private property. No doubt these are productive commodities. They produce surplus value and also lay the foundation for future commodities that produce even more surplus value. Information produces more information, news produces more news, knowledge produces more knowledge, and art produces more art. Therefore intellectual property is an invention that in capitalism does not protect the creators of these immaterial objects. Instead it helps capitalist accumulation.

The digital devices that enable our articulation as communicating subjects also act to absorb and translate our behaviour into usable flows of data. As many recent commentators have suggested, we live in an era of big data in which the production of data is no longer a competitive obstacle for capital (Hardy 2012; Lohr 2012); now it is the ability to store, process, and mine an immense accumulation of personalized or scalable data. The collection of this data then becomes of paramount importance, and their collection occurs at the moment of exchange, i.e. at the point of sale (pos). This confirms what the prophet Marshall McLuhan observed: there is a “steady progression of commercial exchange as the movement of information itself”(1964, 149). The cybernetic actualization of this potential is the diagrammatization of capital. […]

As we argue, this process is the most advanced in its articulation by the apps ecosystem, through which “capital has gained a targeting system. This targeting system has the function of predicting who will buy what, where, and when. The system thus calibrates its predictive targeting by aggregating and processing [data] extracted from the devices of individual consumers” (Manzerolle and Kjøsen, 154).

Whether they are gathering information, telecommunicating, running washing machines, doing sums, or making videos, all digital computers translate information into the zeros and ones of machine code. These binary digits are known as bits and strung together in bytes of eight.

The zeros and ones of machine code seem to offer themselves as perfect symbols of the orders of Western reality, the ancient logical codes which make the difference between on and off, right and left, light and dark, form and matter, mind and body, white and black, good and evil, right and wrong, life and death, something and nothing, this and that, here and there, inside and out, active and passive, true and false, yes and no, sanity and madness, health and sickness, up and down, sense and nonsense, west and east, north and south.

And they made a lovely couple when it comes to sex. Man and woman, male and female, masculine and feminine: one and zero looked just right, made for eachother: 1, the definite upright line; and 0, the diagram of nothing at all: penis and vagina, thing and hole … hand in glove. A perfect match.

It takes two to make a binary, but all these pairs are two of a kind, and the kind of one. 1 and 0 make another 1. Male and female add up to man. There is no female equivalent. No universal woman at his side. The male is one, one is everything, and the female has “nothing you can see.” Woman “functions as a hole,” a gap, a space, “a nothing — that is a nothingthe same, identical, identifiable … a fault, a flaw, a lack, an absence, outside the system of representations and autorepresentations.”

The era of big data challenges the way we live and interact with the world. Most strikingly, society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations: not knowing why but only what. This overturns centuries of established practices and challenges our most basic understanding of how to make decisions and comprehend reality.

Big data marks the beginning of a major transformation. Like so many new technologies, big data will be a victim of Silicon Valley’s notorious hype cycle: after being feted on the cover of magazines and at industry conferences, the trend will be dismissed and many of the data-smitten startups will flounder. But both the infatuation and the damnation profoundly misunderstand the importance of what is taking place. Just as the telescope enabled us to comprehend the universe and the microscope allowed us to understand germs, the new techniques for collecting and analyzing huge bodies of data will help us make sense of our world in ways we are just starting to appreciate.

Public communication and advertisement have likewise started to merge, while the dichotomy between the virtual and the real is falling apart and becoming more and more irrelevant (see Prodnik 2012b). One could also point to the formerly strict separation lines between the sovereign nation states and the wider global order that now dissipated because of the disintegration of the national borders for capital flows. Similarly, separation between public and private ownership has started disintegrate both in the form of public-private ownerships and in recent socializations of private debts. There has also been an incorporation of our most intimate information into the circuit of capital via digital surveillance, which makes possible new types of quantification and amassment of data (the so-called “big data”) that via economic surveillance lead to commodification of personal characteristics of the Internet users and their everyday life activities (see Allmer 2012; Fuchs et al. 2011; Sandoval 2012). The same disintegrative process, as already mentioned above, is happening between the formerly very distinct spheres of production and reproduction, or between leisure time and work time (Gorz 2010). While none of these boundaries were ever impenetrable and their slow disintegration is evident for several decades now, they are becoming increasingly porous and vague as somehow clear demarcation lines.

Whenever new information emerges, it incorporates the whole societal history of information, that is, information has a historical character. Hence, it seems to be self-evident that information should be a common good, freely available to all. But in global informational capitalism, information has become an important productive force that favours new forms of capital accumulation.

Information is today often not treated as a public good and common, but rather as a commodity. There is an antagonism between information as a common good and as a commodity.