Market production for unknown buyers erodes personal knowledge between parties

Evidence

What is essential here as regards the economic-psychological aspect of the problem is that in less advanced cultures production was for the customer who ordered the product so that the producer and the purchaser knew one another. The modern city, however, is supplied almost exclusively by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never appear in the actual field of vision of the producers themselves. Thereby, the interests of each party acquire a relentless matter-of-factness, and its rationally calculated economic egoism need not fear any divergence from its set path because of the imponderability of personal relationships. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 750

Categorization

• XREF: Feeds the essay’s civil-inattention argument — anonymity is the precondition for treating strangers as categories. — connects to: Market ideology fragments classes into individual consumers and hides production; Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor; Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production (+6 more)

Related

• Markets conceal their own mechanisms of visibility and knowledge production. (similarity 0.81)
• Mass markets forced consumers to trust unseen strangers and corporations (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Trust substitutes knowledge of system structure for unavailable information about others. #expands (0.85)
• Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor #expands (0.80)
• Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production #corroborates (0.80)
• The exchange sphere masks exploitative production relations and produces the illusion of isolated individuals #corroborates (0.80)
• Market ideology fragments classes into individual consumers and hides production #corroborates (0.75)