The garage workshop’s true commodity is the self, not any product.

Evidence

The garage is part of the architecture that invents this subject. In it, we find not someone working on producing a product, per se. We find someone producing their self as a commodity to be sold. Capital fills the vacuum produced by the garage’s openness after the car is removed; where family and domesticity are left behind, the self as capital emerges. The entrepreneur in Silicon Valley does not sell their product to the venture capitalist. They sell their capacity as one who has ideas in which capital invests and which it cultivates. Even if the product is vaporware, failing to manifest as a real thing, value is produced through a range of fictitious financial investments as long as the next Uber or Airbnb generates enough hype for its IPO. But there’s still a material commodity produced here. The “person” becomes capital to be bought, sold, and exchanged. The garage is the workshop for this subject. And today, as many cannot even accumulate the capital to invest in their own house, their own garage, the car itself has taken on the qualities of an any-space-whatever, a generic heterogeneous background against which the subject produces their own self as a commodity to be bought and sold. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 200

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the garage as one of the four infrastructures by identifying the commodity produced there as the personhood itself.
• XREF: Connects to the stated reading frame: whose labor produces the self-commodity, and who realizes the surplus — here the VC invests in cultivated capacity, echoing the labor theory of value question.