Digital networking chiefly accelerated circulation, not productivity

Evidence

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. It also converts exchange itself into a commodity, since automated and computerized interactions can be discretized into data that in turn commands a high price among firms and licenses ever greater expansion of surveillance and securitization. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 76

Categorization

• XREF: This reframes the reader’s tree-as-infrastructure article: ‘exchange as commodity’ parallels nature made into data/service; also connects to surveillance-capitalism claims elsewhere in her corpus.