Digital computing boosted circulation and exchange, not productive output.

Evidence

It is as if the pressures of circulation-forward capitalism compel a brand competition among synonyms for circulation. Alongside these, economic historians often narrate the transformative potential of networked computing and microelectronics as “the third industrial revolution.” But the analogy is rather off because, as the same historians admit, computational and communicational advances forever altered information management but only minimally increased productivity. For circulation, though, the results were significant: the virtualization of the exchange sphere enables the circulation of goods that circumvents the brick-and-mortar costs of retail, facilitates the coordination of information that circumvents on-the-ground human resources costs of journalism and communications, and underwrites the gig economy that circumvents the whole apparatus of a workplace as abode of production. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 76

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘third industrial revolution’ analogy being ‘rather off’ because computing buoyed circulation-not-production is core evidence for the reader’s causal thesis that compressed capital circulation time drives cultural immediacy. — connects to: Digital connection is a means to commercial ends, not intrinsically pro-social — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 38; Early computers boosted finance far more than industrial productivity — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 226; Computers multiplied financial instrument complexity and accelerated trading to near light speed. — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 226