Value under digital capitalism rests on appearing, not possessing.
Evidence
Vectoralist power is based firmly on an ontology of visibility: ‘If capitalist power reduced being to having, then vectoralist power reduces having to appearing. The actual qualities of things become secondary to the logistics and poetics that decorate the commodity.’ It is the accumulation of gazes and attention that constitutes value. The vector has no proper substance: like media apparatuses, it only exists through those who pass through it – and from whom it makes every effort to profit. What is true for TV channels is even more so for digital vectors like Facebook and Google. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 204
Categorization
- XREF: The being-having-appearing progression directly extends the Frankfurt critique of commodity fetishism into the digital age. — connects to: Value emerges from relational valuation practices, not from objects themselves. — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 23; Internet self-representation conceals a capitalist infrastructure producing the self as commodity; Digital connection is a means to commercial ends, not intrinsically pro-social — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 38
- DEEPTHINKING: The move from ‘having’ to ‘appearing’ as the locus of capitalist value is a dense, paradigm-shifting aphorism-level formula worth sitting with.