Marx’s trinity of fetishized objects now gains data as a fourth

Evidence

Older critiques of historical capitalism can provide valuable insights here. One important idea is that of the “fetish.” For Karl Marx, the fetish (classically the “commodity fetish”) made the economic relations of capitalism seem necessary. Marx delineated a trinity of fetishized objects: interest as the fruit of capital, rent as the fruit of land, and wage as the fruit of labor. Now we can add a fourth object: data as the fruit of life processes. This is exactly how business now speaks (think of the mantra of data as the new oil). — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 102

Categorization

• DEFINE: Extends the commodity-fetish concept by adding ‘data as the fruit of life processes,’ a core definitional move of the data-colonialism thesis.
• SEED: An essay could contrast ‘data as the new oil’ with ‘data as the fruit of life processes’ — resource metaphor versus life-appropriation metaphor.
• XREF: Connects directly to surveillance-capitalism literature (Zuboff) where data extraction is likewise the central mechanism, but here grounded in Marx rather than an autonomous logic. — connects to: Data can be added to Marx’s fetishized trinity as the fruit of life processes

Broader Connections

• Data can be added to Marx’s fetishized trinity as the fruit of life processes #corroborates (0.95)