The Commodification of Information and Social Inequality

Abstract

The commodification of information has contributed to the growth in social inequality over the last 30 years. An ideal type of an information commodity describes the features of a political, social, cultural, and legal apparatus that became institutionalized in the mid to late 1970s. This apparatus permitted the collection of rents, established a new mode of capital accumulation, and diminished the apparent importance of labor, especially abstract labor, in the making of exchange value. The proliferation of celebrity, conceptualized as excessively valorized labor, is also a consequence of the apparent change in the commodity form.