Valor, imagem e transubstanciação: a produção de dados para o capital em crise e a mediação tecnológica da forma-mercadoria

Abstract

The growing economy based on data production is discussed from the perspective of the critique of the political economy of information. It explores how the relationships between “value” and “image” determine forms of production and consumption in virtual spaces of socialization, yielding the possibility of new interpretations of the phenomenon. Through a bibliographic review, the different interpretations of human activity on digital platforms are analyzed, in which the specific form of the image in social perception would be an immanent and historical manifestation of the commodity form. It describes how data production is established in the current cultural industry through the internal contradiction of the very development of value in social relations. As a direct consequence of a reality/image split in the product of the commodity form, the production of social wealth would undergo an abstraction that would cause all digitalized human activity to undergo a qualitative inversion into an abstract wealth of capital, in what has been called “transubstantiation.” In this way, we observe the historical character of consumption as a field of action of social perception in capitalism, which in the fundamental relationship of the commodity itself, would be responsible for abstracting human activity in the form of data, launching it into the very movement of self-valorization of value in the work of the mechanisms of technology.