The Medium is the Marketplace: Digital Systems and the Intensification of Consumption

Abstract

Taking Marx’s analysis as the point of departure, and drawing on a range of concrete examples, this article argues that rather than concentrating on the “new” forms of social and economic intercourse animated by digital media, and especially internet-enabled mobile devices, critical analysis needs to trace the ways in which digital consumption is intensifying the progressive integration of marketing, marketplaces, and forms of payment that have been central to the generation of surplus value and the maintenance of “business as usual,” from the emergence of the modern consumer system at the turn of the twentieth century.