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Abstract:
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This paper investigates the contemporary form of capitalism typically defined as digital capitalism. The
purpose of this project is to provide a critical investigation into ambivalences of contemporary digital
value creation. In the era of digital capitalism, the self-creating individual is drawing on a range of
technologies enabling him to both live a digital life and tap into networks of value creation. This paper
argues that the digital capitalism is rooted in, and extracting capital value from, a sphere constituted of
both physical and virtual elements through which the individual is navigating. The human body with
its intellectual capacities, desires, affections, and inclinations is at the center of this industry. The
valorization of cognitive capital and measurement of vital data is key both for the process of selfcreation
for the individual and value creation in this form of capitalism. This paper argues that the
creation of the self is directly linked to the value creation in modern capitalism. In the last two
decades, innovations in the fields of computing and communication technologies started to gather
around a new single paradigm of accumulation and valorization. In this paradigm, the individual is
embedded in a tight web of interlinked technologies, which primary modus operandi is data collection
and sense-making. On the macro level the gathering, collection, sense-making and distribution of
these personal data are the resource of an information industry of unprecedented scale.
Independently of the dominant convention, contemporary digital capitalism has proven to be able to
absorb and capitalize new social and vital circles, involving the vital faculties of human beings, thus
paradoxically rendering digital systems of value creation the most corporal form of capitalism yet. The
focus of the analysis is to elucidate the zone where self-creation and value-creation coincide; a zone
that is bypassed by a large part of the contemporary political discourse and economic analysis. The
aim is to show that an analysis of contemporary technologies, creation of value and the human
condition must take in a broader recognition and understanding of the importance of interdisciplinary
methods of questioning when examining tensions between the conceptualization of value theory and
human life. This paper proposes an alternative approach to the analysis of production and subjectivity.
The author employs and evaluates an exploratory method to identify fiction and narratives as a valid
method for social and economic science. The paper presents fictional stories as a tool to show the
need for an approach capable of highlighting zones of indistinction and ambivalence inherently linked
to the subject of contemporary value creation. These fictional stories enable a critical double move,
which in the description of individual – micro – occurrences generates a view on highly capitalized
human conditions and social relations. |
