Integrated commodities in the digital economy

The great integration

The advent of the digital society has to be understood as a radical transformation of social and economic institutions. Given the predominance of a technologically determined prognosis in the public imagination, this transformative status is hardly a novel or contentious proposition in itself. It is, of course, one that we have heard many times, and in various forms, from the Californian school of futurism, the Harvard school of business, the Austrian school of economics and just about every politician, technocrat and media pundit spreading their streams across the vast expanses of the World Wide Web (Benkler, 2006; Brynjolfsson and McAfee, 2016; Ford, 2016; Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier, 2013; O’Reilly, 2017; Schmidt and Cohen, 2014). At the same time, while the implications of digital society can be felt in every corner of our everyday experience, they have yet to be adequately explicated in ways that allow us to grasp their social and economic fundamentals. In the absence of explanation, the constant proposition of technological novelty emerging from Silicon Valley tends to generate so much froth that it becomes difficult to focus our minds upon the essential nature of the transformation itself. In the face of what some call ‘Big Data’, what Andrejevic calls ‘Infoglut’ and what Virilio identified early on as the ‘Information Bomb’, it may well appear indulgent or even just impossible to address the first principles of the age (Andrejevic, 2013; Davenport, 2014; Virilio, 2006).

Nonetheless, I will attempt something of that nature here in terms of one single, albeit central, component of digital society: the commodity form that lies at the heart of its economic logics. This discussion is important because at least one explanation for the novelty of digital society rests in the commodities that have been conceived and operationalized within digital media systems. My central argument is that the expansive integration of markets and economies via digital systems rests upon an integrated commodity form that allows all transactions to become subsumed within a single market process. In that respect, the integrated commodity finds its antecedents in the distinctive characteristics of media economies, where infrastructure, content, and customers are configured as mutually reinforcing commodity markets (Albarran, 2016; Picard, 1989). Within the apparatus of mobile media, these markets have become ubiquitous and simultaneous in their operation, converging hardware and software, interaction and observation, and inputs and outputs in real time. The integrated commodity is therefore offered as a descriptor for the powerful nexus of value arising within this mutually constituted economic process. It signifies the convergence of goods and services, time and information, and interaction and expression, which, in turn, allows for a cascading set of derivative markets centred upon the aggregation and algorithmic processing of transaction records of all kinds. The purpose of this article is to prompt discussion on the commodity form of communication at a time when a cluster of ‘technology companies’ have established their position among the richest and most highly valued commercial operations of our times.

This has been the decade of the so-called FAANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google), as well as being the decade in which Asian competitors such as Alibaba, Huawei, SoftBank and ZTE have become economically significant on a global scale. The term ‘technology companies’ is evidently a misnomer since the provision of technological manufactures is only one component of a much larger range of products and profits within the business model of these companies. They are all variously engaged in the provision of media content; the facilitation of social communication; the provision of data services and cloud infrastructure; the manufacture of devices and components; the enabling of peer-to-peer marketplaces; the rollout of digital financial mechanisms; the diffusion of advertising, marketing and political communication; and the retail of consumer goods and social data of all kinds. All of these activities are bundled together within the devices, operating environments and platforms that dominate the digital economy. Consequently, these multi-sided markets are almost impossible to explicate through any single industrial process (see Cohen, 2017). The constituent components of the digital stack work in concert to extract value from across the social domain, with the immediate implication that digital publics cannot be adequately understood as a group of ‘end users’ for products. They are, in both labour and leisure, an intrinsic component of the ‘bundle’ of commodities that make the digital economy work. Thus, the integrated commodity arises as a consequence of the mediatization of all aspects of social and economic processes, reflecting the logical intent of a mediated economy in a strategic setting (Couldry and Hepp, 2013).

This ‘great integration’ encompasses what we already assume to be the social relations of production across what were previously understood to be distinct industrial domains, both formal and informal. Critically, it has also given rise to new configurations of sociability as a set of effectively endless resources. The digital economy has been purposefully oriented towards the extraction of commissions and data from the interactions between users and, increasingly, seeks to generate new forms of value from users simply existing within digital society. With the advent of social media, the orchestrated commercialization of mundane sociability has constituted the signal achievement: an expansive marketization that has established a new tidemark for the commodification process. This is the truly novel characteristic that is becoming institutionalized as user data becomes the central component of the integrated commodity form. Taking a substantivist approach, this article argues that the design and evolution of the integrated commodity (and thereby our present digital economy) has been a conscious process dependent upon the prior establishment of new digital forms of what Karl Polanyi (1944) once described as ‘fictitious commodities’: land, labour and money. Thus, in contrast to formalist approaches that position the market economy as an external domain governed by timeless theorems and/or naturalized mathematics, this article follows Polanyi’s central propositions that commodity relations evolve in tandem with historical contingencies and that the realization of value is always derived from, and deeply embedded in, the social domain (Pearson and Polanyi, 1977).

Communication as commodity

The commodity question has, of course, proved vexatious since the early days of political economy. It has been particularly so for media commodities which scarcely conform to the normative proscriptions of formalist approaches to political economy. In the narrow sense enforced by the prevailing doctrine of neoliberal economics, commodities are delimited as a category of fungible primary goods exchanged within formal market systems. Commodities, by this logic, are the raw materials of market exchange and their particular qualities, and uses are only relevant in respect to interruptions in supply or demand. The generic qualities of any commodity, however, are considered to be essential. You must be able to own it exclusively and have the capacity to transfer that ownership, whether permanently or temporarily. Hence, contractual norms and an agreeable currency are necessary mechanisms of commodity exchange. In a market society, the rationality of buyer and seller is taken to determine the utility of the commodity, and the collective will of the market determines price and profit within a comparative scheme of value. This universal logic is taken to apply to primary resources, to manufactures and to the provision of services and labour. Over the past century, this logic has been extended to encompass various forms of information as well as increasingly mediated forms of social communication. Without these prior evolutions of commodity status, the digital economy would not have become feasible.

Nonetheless, the advent of what Daniel Bell (1973) called post-industrial society, and the proliferation of commodities of communication, raises a number of challenges for a universal commodity principle. To begin with, whereas exclusive ownership is taken to be a prerequisite for commodity status, sole possession is inherently problematic in a context where the product is often intangible and replicable (in whole or in part). Even among content producers, exclusivity of ownership is substantially deferred into the contested terrain of various ‘rights’ and the outer frontiers of what can be usefully understood as contractual ownership. Perhaps more critically, the utility of communication commodities is largely determined by the extent to which they become widely diffused. Music accrues value by being popular, newspapers by the size of the readership and digital platforms by the size of their user base. Thus, when it comes to media content or platform access, exclusivity is rarely a determinate of demand. Fundamentally, there is no comparable commodity that can be owned simultaneously by so many people and only a fraction of this ‘popularity’ can be monetized. Thus, whereas transferability of ownership is taken to be an equally inherent characteristic of a commodity, the excessive transferability of media content raises a host of issues that physical manufactures do not. This is because mediation is not exhausted by its consumption and does not typically carry prohibitive per unit costs that inhibit reproduction at decreasing price points. Equally, there are heavy sunk costs in the establishment of a mobile phone network, but negligible per unit costs in the addition of any numbers of users.

This does not mean that there are no material constraints (indeed, the resources consumed by the digital economy are jaw-dropping in scale), but, for producers, it does imply the inversion of diminishing returns. The central status of ‘production’ is a holdover from the political economy established in the 19th century of industrial capitalism. Since then, a Marxian approach to the commodity form has been more richly developed than the current textbook definition. The analytical focus centres upon the subsumption of available resources to the means of production and the contestation over ownership of the surplus generated by the efforts of labour (Mosco, 1996). Correspondingly, there are useful contemporary applications in regard to ownership, labour relations and the evident crisis of accumulation in the data economy (Fuchs, 2015; Schiller, 2000). Nonetheless, here too, it has to be recognized that the goods and services, assets and values operative across media processes are necessarily different from the 19th-century model of extraction, labour, manufacture and sale that has dominated our understanding of ‘industries’ (Lash and Urry, 1994). A continuing focus on the productive operations of ‘cultural’ or ‘creative’ industries tends to position ‘media content’ as the central commodity of social communication. In practice, however, when we situate media content as the central commodity of media markets, we are immediately faced with apparent ‘market failure’. The production of media content almost invariably operates at a loss, and the evident lack of exclusivity and exchange value in the face of its sunk production costs produces an obvious conundrum (see Srinivas, 2018). By extension, Dallas Smythe (1977) once argued that it is the public that constitutes the ‘audience commodity’, which clearly requires a different political economy altogether.

Audience as commodity

From that perspective, the uptake of media platforms will always be a more significant measure of value than unit pricing. This is why media companies, in the traditional sense, or technology companies, in their present incarnation, pursue market share above all else. If we follow the money, it is access to bandwidth and the attention of audiences that appears to explicate investments in the media economies of the pre-digital era. In the digital era, the interactive capabilities of digital platforms have been configured to engage the audience in an iterative process, a feedback loop where attention and influence operate in tandem with surveillance and prediction. In the case of Facebook, the value of this audience commodity is rendered precisely in the differential gap between the modest book price (assets) and the eye-popping share valuations (capitalization) of a ‘technology’ company that provides an ostensibly ‘free’ product. In a traditional media economy, the produced content must exist to bring the audience commodity into being. This no longer appears to apply in an era of user-generated content, where the establishment of a social footprint is the point at which a media ‘product’ gains its status as a commodity. Nonetheless, as expressive forms, all communication commodities are able to declare their worth in a persuasive fashion. Following Bruno Latour, we are therefore prompted to consider media products as agents within the negotiation of their own exchange (Latour, 2005). In that sense, the potentials of media outputs, whether amateur or professional, are constituted through their own articulation.

Our understanding of the socialization of media products into effective commodities is necessarily complicated by their functional role as carriers of social communication (see Mosco, 1996). It is obviously significant that media are not ‘dumb’ goods and that the symbolic nature of their consumption consistently trumps any consideration of utility. Even more critically, the use of media technologies for social communication at all scales establishes them as channels for everyday social exchanges. This not only accentuates their embedding within the patterns of everyday life, but it simultaneously extends the logics of commodification to the content of social communication. Consequently, the communication process commodifies meaning, expression and social networks along with time, volume and opportunity. Turning our attention to ‘the social life of things’ directs us to Arjun Appadurai (2013), who has argued that we think of commodities not in the narrow sense of a store of value (as claimed by contemporary economics) or in the politics of possession (as emphasized by Marx). As an alternative, he suggests that rather than seeing value as inherent to the commodity itself, we should consider value as becoming established through the social context of its exchange. Thus, Appadurai makes a case for a theory of value that owes more to Georg Simmel than it does to Marx (1976 [1867]) or Adam Smith (1776). Here, value is not inherent to the commodity, but is attributed through the judgement passed upon each commodity by the actors involved in its exchange (Simmel, 1978 [1907]).

This reconstitutes a substantivist view of political economy, where value is both subjective and socially determined, and commodity status is achieved through the generation and satisfaction of proven demand. This inverts the formalist account of exchange value because rather than interlocutors exchanging a commodity of value, a commodity only becomes valuable as and when it becomes subject to exchange (Appadurai, 2013: 10). Consequently, each and every commodity exchange is negotiated as a social transaction, and in the case of media, the value of the attendant and accompanying social transactions is always priced into investments. Appadurai’s endorsement of Simmel’s formulation thus seems better suited to an analysis of the digital economy, whose commodities are rarely stable repositories of value but always eminently suitable for the proliferation of exchange. The more expansive each set of exchanges becomes, the more value is generated. This explicates the economic multipliers that arise with the growth of network effects (and, correspondingly, with the mass personalization of consumption). Logically, the most widely exchanged commodities will require the greatest degree of social consensus regarding their value, and as a consequence, they are likely to become more deeply embedded in their usage. As such, a germane conclusion to draw from the mismatch between digital products and the ‘classic’ commodity form is that the value of communication commodities is always determined relative to the scale and form of social transactions that are involved.

Integration as convergence

In a world of ‘digital natives’, it is worth remembering that it is only very recently that social communication has come to be considered central to economic processes (Palfrey and Gasser, 2010). For much of the 20th century, an important distinction was maintained between communication systems per se and the various businesses of entertainment. In the first instance, private communications were generally held in various forms of public ownership and taken to provide a guarantee of basic democratic rights, individual and commercial privacy and a neutral logistical system that allowed for free competition in the conduct of actual economic affairs. In the latter instance, the commercial business of entertainment was seen to constitute a tertiary sector oriented towards the distraction of labour in its ‘off-duty’ capacity as private citizens. Both of these functions of mediation were subject in important ways to the interests of the state and the political process. As contemporary media platforms have forcefully integrated communication, commerce and entertainment over the past decade, these earlier distinctions between the various usages of media have been largely negated. In that respect, the putting aside of the Paramount decisions on vertical integration by the Reagan administration in 1986 was analogous with Clinton’s repeal of the Glass–Steagall legislation in 1999, with the consequences of both interacting in important ways (not least in the emergence of Fintech as a dominant interest in the global economy).

A decade ago, Henry Jenkins (2006) attempted to capture the rapid integration of media forms within digital culture under the heading of ‘convergence’. At the personal level, this umbrella term seemed axiomatic. Each mobile handset enables the technical integration of previously distinct content streams, blending commercially produced entertainment with personalized logistics and everyday speech. Synchronization across media devices via the cloud allows for the seamless personalization of media environments, while simultaneously enabling ‘mutable content’ streams that carry across what were previously referred to as ‘media platforms’ (Anand, 2006). Access to this proliferation of cross-media content has gone hand in hand with opportunities to interact with that content in novel ways. The malleability of digital code allows for the inscription of audience engagement upon content, thereby stimulating the proliferation of portals for sharing, commenting and re-shaping content (as argued by Burgess and Green, 2015). By Jenkins’ reading, this cornucopia of content and the destruction of editorial controls signalled the empowerment of the audience over the top down models of content creation and distribution. At the shop front, then, the integration of all forms and scales of communication and entertainment has fashioned a commodity experience focused around, attuned to and ultimately controlled by individual users. From this angle, the integrated commodity is encountered as a sensory environment that is entirely ubiquitous, personalized and responsive to consumer demand.

The contradiction, as Jenkins (2004) himself noted, is that this ‘liberation’ of form and function has gone hand in hand with the concentration of ownership and control across the World Wide Web. In this respect, the cohabitation of communication and entertainment and the synchronization of multi-modal content have been predicated upon the horizontal integration of the dominant ‘technology companies’ across the spectrum of hardware and software. While the symbiosis of multi-media brands and multi-national corporations was evident throughout the last decades of the 20th century, it was the concerted effort to commercialize Internet usage that aligned this consolidation with a new focus on user activity as the primary site of commodification. To this end, the commercial re-launch of the Internet as Web 2.0 was forcefully supported by the coercive brand values of the consumer electronics industry and underwritten by the commodity interests of Internet companies, advertisers and service providers of many kinds (see Brodmerkel and Carah, 2016; Wu, 2017). Naturally, then, the integrated commodity form that it seeks to institutionalize reflects these all-encompassing interests. For each user, the provision of content and the availability of social media portals are predicated upon the conjoined purchase of the necessary media hardware, subscriptions for media access and the acceptance of commercial monitoring. The real point of novelty in Web 2.0 platforms was the effective ‘convergence’ of these commodities into a single self-sustaining market process, thereby allowing for, as Pierro Sraffa (1960) once put it: ‘the production of commodities by commodities’.

Data as commodity

The granularity of digital systems allows for both unprecedented aggregation and individual addressability. As with any network system, the commercial value of data collection increases exponentially as the user base expands. Web 2.0 was bankrolled by an Internet advertising boom for two reasons: first, it created a vast body of detailed consumer profiles and second, individual users could be effectively targeted with advertising upon the basis of those profiles. Google’s growing monopoly on the search facilities required to trawl through the vast proliferation of content left the company uniquely placed to build profiles of users viewing habits (Halavais, 2017). The subsequent launch of Google Maps, Mail and Android as mobile Internet became the dominant mode of usage allowed Google to aggressively market the individual addressability of advertising and rapidly become one of the world’s largest companies. At one level, the mania for targeted advertising is simply a more sophisticated manifestation of America’s rejection of planned production in favour of guided consumption. What is more significant is the multiple vectors of ‘market information’ coming on stream, and their seamless automated operation. In this context, Google has to be understood as primarily a data collection company rather than a service provider that happens to produce customer data. It certainly cannot be understood as a media producer in the sense of the earlier industrial process.

With the emergence of user data as a commodity form on this scale, the tastes, behaviours, actions and opinions of users became more central to the digital economy than any form of content production. As the data harvest has increased, the wholesale ‘scraping’ of user data has engendered markets for new commodity forms of data. In normalizing the soliciting of personal data as a prerequisite for service access, the road ahead was opened for businesses such as Ancestry.com to shift their value creation from peddling dodgy heraldry to harvesting DNA samples to aggregate and sell to medical research institutes and insurance companies. The convergence of computer science with the aspirations of advertisers also plotted a rapid extension of predictive analysis across the social domain. In this respect, the collection of such vast quantities of data has been driven by the pursuit of a new commodity for clients seeking to explore the potentials of various numerological procedures. For the audience, however, media experiences remain time-bound through an exquisite system of rents (whether collected for units of mundane phone conversation or access to ‘content banks’ such as Netflix). Nonetheless, even from the ‘rats eye’ view of social media, we have quickly come to understand that it is not only content and audience time, but the data exhausts being produced by the audience that constitutes the central commodity in these transactions (Neef, 2014). Clearly, then, there is more to the convergence of digital commodities than the interoperability of devices and the proliferation of the product range.

Media fictions

When we consider this ‘convergence’ through the prism of its commodity form, as opposed to its technical apparatus, it becomes apparent that our present digital economy has been predicated upon the prior establishment of a number of ‘fictitious commodities’. The category of ‘fictitious commodities’, of course, brings us into direct contact with Polanyi’s (1944) account of the ‘great transformation’ wrought by the institution of market society. In his account, this variant of capitalism established itself through the prior imposition of commodity status on land and labour, using the instrument of token money. Polanyi’s (1944) describes all three of these as ‘fictitious’ commodities since ‘the postulate that anything that is bought and sold must have been produced for sale is emphatically untrue in regard to them’ (p. 72). Appropriating and adapting this notion of ‘fictitious commodities’ in the 21st century prompts us to do two things: first, to excavate the enabling structures of the digital economy and second, to comprehend the emergence of the integrated commodity form as something more than a happenstance affair. My underlying argument is similar: that the application of prices to both the mundane and performative content of personal interaction via time units and the harvesting of data trails has been effectively predicated upon several preceding and parallel acts of ‘fiction’. Each of these constituting a necessary prerequisite for our personal address books to become directly enmeshed within this novel complex of speech and profit.

To begin with, we have to reconsider the reconfiguration of contractual relationships necessary to enshrine data within the integrated commodity form. One of the more fallacious distinctions between the periods of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 rested upon a putative contest between producers and consumers of media content (O’Reilly, 2005). In this reading, the advent of Web 2.0 was taken as an indication that the ‘active audience’ had triumphed over elitist authors and old media companies intent on hoarding their copyright rents (Cover, 2006). Similarly, the legal tussle in the latter 1990s was significantly misunderstood by Lawrence Lessig and others as a contest between free speech and creative ownership (Lessig, 2005). In actuality, the Web 1.0/2.0 transition marked the commodification of everyday Internet usage in terms of its content (as opposed to merely time and volume). The critical policy interventions were both legal and technical and were preconceived within a nexus of commercial, political and military concerns. To begin with, widespread governmental denunciations of the Internet as a haven for perverts and terrorists furnished public consent for the introduction of individual addressability in the latter 1990s. From this point, technology companies redesigned browsers and devices to match users to each and every piece of data that they produced and to record their usage activity in absolute detail. This, then, was the digital equivalent to the requirement of printer’s marks in the 17th century – a legal mechanism that was central to both censorial control and the commodification of authorship.

This seamless matching of data with users provided a producer or originator for each data point, to whom responsibility and ownership could be conferred, whether they wanted it or not. With the technical infrastructure in place, the most significant piece of legislation was the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) passed by the United States in 1998. By claiming a jurisdiction over Internet activity regardless of user location, the DMCA was intended to create a single global market for data and its arbitration. In this respect, the DMCA was designed to put the United States at the centre of the digital economy in much the same way that London’s arbitration of shipping contracts and insurance bestowed hegemonic status over maritime commerce in the 18th century. This expropriation was further extended in 2018 with the passing of the CLOUD Act into U.S. federal legislation. Even more critically, the DMCA extended the ambit of copyright to include all acts of digital replication. A personal e-mail, a digital performance and a set of search results became subject to a uniform copyright law (Lessig, 2005). This is the point at which every point of data became a commodity with the potential for transferable ownership. We all became copyright producers within a formal digital economy. Thus, regardless of the extended protections for ‘intangible products’ such as software and films, the blanket extension of copyright to all forms of digital content immediately introduced a universe of ‘fictitious’ commodities, where the data in question did not have to intentionally produced as a commodity by its originator but acquired commodity status by virtue of its digitality.

Farming fictions

Equally fundamental to Web 2.0 and the era of the ‘prosumer’ was the DMCA provision of a ‘safe harbor’ clause protecting content aggregators from copyright holders and from their users. The DMCA engendered a clear understanding in Silicon Valley that the newly formalized rights to our own data could be signed away as a precondition of access. The harvesting of those rights then became an entrepreneurial challenge for teams of designers, lawyers, financiers, psychologists and technicians. These newly formulated commodity relationships thereby stimulated a comprehensive restructuring of the Internet. Peer-to-peer sharing was recast from being an existential threat to content-producing industries to becoming the central site of digital production. Capturing users and their content provided the rationale for dovetailing YouTube, a platform designed to aggregate user-generated content, with the suite of services derived from Google’s near monopoly on search data. On a larger scale, the overarching aim of ‘cloud’ computing was the aggregation of Internet users and their data in vast numbers within proprietary portals and data centres (Parks and Starosielski, 2015). This was easily achieved by offering free and convenient tools for the exchange of user-generated content. The central ambition of Web 2.0 platforms, as Lanier (2010) has noted, is to capture a substantial portion of the user base within their platform, allowing their operators to become ‘lords of the cloud’. Once a portal establishes a critical mass of users, network effects amplify their value and effectively compel other users to relocate themselves within the larger constituency. This aggregation and privatization of user activity can be seen as analogous with the establishment of private estates within the digital economy.

The necessary convenience of these portals impels what Andrejevic (2007) calls ‘digital enclosures’, a set of affordances that capture users within a small number of privatized domains. Ring-fencing users and their data provide the basis for technology brands to consolidate advertising revenues, investment capital and clients for user data analytics in a series of cascading markets. Thus, by a combination of legal and technical means, digital platforms carved estates out of the digital commons, and literally out of common speech. The institution of what Srnicek (2017) calls ‘Platform Capitalism’ is thereby symptomatic of the extension of ‘fictitious’ commodity status to the virtual ‘land’ of the Internet. This plantation model has provoked a reconfiguration of commodity forms of labour. Over the past three decades, a combination of atomization and automation has been the predominant means of dismantling organized labour and instating a medieval ‘putting out’ economy, where producers labour in their own homes under piece work rates. The digital economy with its penchant for outsourcing and the ‘electronic cottage’ has long been a trailblazer in this regard. It is not the increasing precarity of content producers, however, that is most remarkable about the platform economy. Whereas content producers may be aware that they are performing underpaid or unpaid labour in order to compete for attention, their collective efforts constitute less than 5% of Internet activity. The majority of production on the world’s server farms comes from the actions of those consuming, rather than producing, digital content.

It has long been argued, of course, that a consumption-led economic model in the developed world has turned shopping into a form of labour. Most of us do some of that online, but this proposition is not entirely novel. Instead, for the bulk of us, it is our contribution to the digital economy purely as users that produces a new form of unwitting labour commodity. When shopping on Amazon, does each user intend for his transaction record to become a commodity for sale? When building a friends network of Facebook, does each user intend that his or her social life becomes remediated as a commodity for sale? When feeding on clickbait, does each user intend that his or her ideological compulsions be recorded as a commodity for sale? It seems even more unlikely that users of GPS apps actively consider their daily movements as a form of labour or that users of Fitbits consider their bodily vital signs as a site of commodity production (Lutpon, 2016). Nonetheless, in each of these moments of usage, we are engaged in the production of data as a market commodity. It is the fact that we do not perceive or intend this to be productive labour which makes these inputs and outputs ‘fictitious’ commodities in the Polanyian sense. The new equivalence of content, personal communication, service provision and behavourial records within the integrated commodity form implies that a substantial portion of the ‘labour’ producing the data surplus will be unwitting labour. Furthermore, through device purchases and access rents, the population of each digital plantation is required to cover the material costs of the system, invariably fashioned offshore by manufacturing labour (Qui, 2017).

Token fictions

Much has been happening when it comes to Polanyi’s third fictitious commodity: token money. For Polanyi, the point at which a given number or weight of a precious commodity taken from the earth was replaced as a token of exchange by a system of promissory notes (whose only value rests in trust for the issuer) marked the establishment of an essential founding fiction for the market society. The commodity status of money was given the greatest scrutiny, of course, by Georg Simmel (1978 [1907]), who strongly emphasized the social nature of monetary value. Despite its everyday naturalization, money is an extraordinarily complex commodity, given it is used to price everything else but also trades as a commodity in multifarious forms (Keynes, 1936). In our own times, this duality has similarly enormous ramifications. At the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, the global ‘markets’ already largely consisted of lightning speed transactions of purely electronic money with no readily redeemable value outside of the bourses themselves (Ford, 2009). Our response to the systemic crash of those operations was a sudden flood of electronic funds into financial institutions. For these worthy beneficiaries, virtual money was created on an unprecedented scale. This conjuration of trillions of dollars of electronic money was dramatic enough to bring to light the arbitrary value and fictitious status of the cash commodity among the general public. Consequently, our widespread uncertainty about the value of money over the past 10 years has prompted the ‘everything bubble’ in all the other asset classes (King, 2018).

Nonetheless, as a novel intervention, electronic money creation prevented the ever-patient gold bugs from reaping the expected returns of the Great Recession. It diverted inflation elsewhere (both overseas and off the books) due to the simple fact that it could not be readily accessed or spent in a fashion that impacted upon the ‘real economy’ associated with production. On the basis of this lesson, a new order has subsequently been suggested: a cashless society that will operate solely through electronic payments (and, conveniently, where no money can effectively leave the banking system) (Rogoff, 2016). One of the trailblazers of the cashless agenda has been PayPal, which aggregated its user base via the ‘friction free’ user-trading portal eBay (Jackson, 2004). As a technological expression of the free market, eBay captured most of us in the early 2000s with its barrier-free entry to recycling and re-selling our redundant stuff, thereby allowing us to pick up bargains and make a bit of money. The benefits of this particular aggregation of previously informal economic activity were such that PayPal became, in effect, the world’s ‘money transmitter’ within a very short period (Gonzalez, 2004). Clearly, both the technology and financial sectors have much to gain from the abolition of physical currencies since any such system will make them custodians and rules setters for the global economy (Maurer, 2015). For the purposes of my argument, however, this digital enclosure of token money signifies its subsumption within the integrated commodity.

The looming hegemony of electronic payment systems has already inculcated an expectation that every transaction produces a record. A cashless world, by contrast, will ensure that each transaction exists only as a record. The obvious extension of this logic was the development of Blockchain technologies to mine ‘virtual currencies’ such as Bitcoin (Dupont, 2018). Here the securitization of transaction records becomes a form of currency in its own right (Popper, 2016). Paradoxically, the debasement of fiat currencies and the ‘everything bubble’ caused by virtual money creation prompted huge enthusiasm for Bitcoin investments. Touted as the currency of the future, Bitcoin has produced its own series of bubbles and corrections, with wild swings in its perceived worth (Dallyn, 2017). This volatility is in a large part due to the fact that the value of Bitcoins is entirely notional. As a currency, Bitcoin has no intrinsic worth and can scarcely be spent on anything. Thus, it has become apparent that Bitcoin and other ‘crypto-currencies’ are more akin to digital gold than to digital money. Over the past 2 years, there has been a growing concern among governments that perverts and terrorists may be using Blockchain, which suggests that state regulations are on the way. The far larger point is that the datafication of money and the monetization of data are conjoined processes. In that respect, any discussion of the digital economy also needs to account for the emergence of a host of informal currencies within digital platforms.

Currency fictions

The lack of a subscription base in the early years of the Internet fostered a commercial model based upon harvesting page views and clicks as evidence of an audience presence for advertisers. Even as this ‘hack’ became redundant, the culture of click-baiting users remained firmly entrenched. This unitization of user activity continues to determine pricing within digital systems, being the operational currency of online advertising as well as the currency of popularity among social media users. Thus, clicks, followers and likes have all attained a form of currency status. These virtual currencies are not money in any orthodox sense, although their accumulation generates exchange value. ‘Real likes’ can be manufactured, purchased and exchanged for ‘real money’ in a number of circumstances (notably, the political process). As such, virtual currency units, in various forms, serve as exchange commodities across a series of interdependent markets. In his exploration of mobile money, Bill Maurer has also noted how units of what he calls ‘airtime’

can be a commodity in one instance, an actualized technologically-mediated relationship in another (through talk and text) and a method of payment, means of exchange and store of value in a third moment (when used as an alternative currency). It can continuously pass into and out of each of these moments. (Maurer, 2012: 591)

It is upon this basis that Maurer (2012) concludes that ‘new socialities are remaking money’. Unlike classical forms of money, the unitization of sociability is not subject to scarcity, since these social currencies are derived from interactions that are effectively infinite.

Within this novel ecology, users become aware of, and internalize the commodity form, as they seek to ‘prosume’ themselves across the discernable spectrum of personal opportunity (Kinports, 2017). The present phenomenon of ‘Instagram influencers’ as a category of users seeking to strategize and monetize units of personal popularity for subsequent on-sale is indicative both of the final collapse of boundaries between personal and public communication and of the massification of identity performances as a symbolic commodity (Marwick, 2015). This competitive pursuit of personal publics is quantified in fine detail by a panoply of page views, click trails, recommendations and likes which operate as effective currencies of social capital. The substantive point is that the integration of all forms of user data within a commodity system necessarily infers the simultaneous integration of commodity logics within the nooks and corners of everyday speech and action. In the operations of the digital economy, the productive sociability of media users, the creative mechanisms of technicians and the symbolic functions of demotic celebrity are all priced into the overall equation (Turner, 2009). Although this total monetization of social communication was resisted in various forms throughout the 20th century, the attention span of audiences, our influence over a close friend and a laugh out loud have been thoroughly commodified. At the very least, such examples demonstrate the profusion of implicit market exchanges across the social domain. At the most, they suggest that the integrated commodity form has, by fictitious means, established its hegemonic status.

Disintegrating the commodity

We could be pedantic and, by returning to the formalist definitions, simply conclude that none of the things discussed in this article are commodities at all. This would allow us the easy option of delegating the digital economy to the catchall category of services, allowing it to evade any holistic analysis. In doing so, however, we would miss the opportunity to account for the characteristic integration of digital products across a range of goods, services and actions that are interdependent in their logic. For me, this interdependency is absolutely central to understanding our digital society and for explicating the forms and consequences of commodification in our times. Given the disaggregation of both production and consumption across many different layers of exchange, we can see how Marx’s (1976 [1867]) heterogenous mode of production has become inseparable from a heterogenous mode of consumption. In this context, the socialization of media forms and the conjoined mediation of social relationships are both part and parcel of the commodification process. This makes it quite difficult, I think, for neoliberal economists to maintain the notion that individuals can exercise free choice or make external judgements over the terms of exchange (as per Hayek, 1944). In practice, platforms, users and currencies all become subsumed within a larger transactional economy. As a consequence, all exchanges are mutually iterative, and they collectively articulate the logics of the integrated commodity form, where

The immediate implication is that, within the digital economy, all communicative actions be regarded as social transactions embedded within an economy of integrated markets. Within this larger whole, the sum value of fictitious commodities tends to be greater than the production of ‘content’. Thus, in a purely literal sense, it is media content that could be called the truly ‘fictitious’ commodity at the heart of the digital economy, partly because it provides an immaterial product but mostly because it is so rarely the primary source of value. Consequently, deleting Facebook may impact upon the fortunes of that brand, but it would be akin to boycotting BP service stations and still driving a petrol car. This is because the integrated commodity form facilitates not simply a market economy, but rather an ‘economy of markets’ within which the bait itself has become more or less dispensable. It is obvious that such a form could scarcely be implemented in totality at the outset. Rather, it has evolved through a series of strategic advances in commodification. Restoring intention to this socio-technical process, as Raymond Williams (1974) would put it, allows us to explicate its crystallization as a series of intersecting markets. Thus, the integrated commodity is not a symptom of technology but rather an intended consequence of its application within a preconceived system of commodity relations. Regardless of which strand of political economy we follow, we can agree that the unifying purpose of commodification under market capitalism is the creation of secondary markets for monetary investments (Weber, 1947). To this end, all of the fictitious commodities discussed in this article constitute necessary preconditions of the integrated commodity, operationalize its exchange functions and articulate its value system. They achieve this by ensuring that

Polanyi (1944) made a critical advance in his time by establishing that the market society was predicated upon the prior establishment of fictitious commodities, which served as prerequisites for formalizing a market society within existing social relations. The present extension of this process, the next great integration, has embedded market logics into everyday personal interaction in order to extract additive value through an equivalence of time, money and sociability. By invoking Polanyi’s account of the ‘great transformation’, we are prompted to think of his central proposition: that the inevitable and immediate consequences of that transformation was the material destruction of human life and the environment that sustains it. Likewise, it is not too hard to establish, I think, that there are clear and present risks to both life and soil with the coming of digital society. It is not my primary intention, however, to detail the analogy between the two periods. Rather, my overarching interest here in Polanyi’s legacy is that it provides us with a rubric for considering the novelty of commodity relations in any given period. Nonetheless, Polanyi clearly regarded the effects of the market process on the life-world as deleterious, and argued forcefully for the de-commodification of land and labour. Were we to argue today for a similar intervention in the digital domain, we would have to entirely withdraw commodity status from personal data and the content of everyday social interaction. To do so would be to dismantle the integrated commodity and to turn away from the digital society that has been conceived in our time.