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

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, self-reproducing 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.