¿Se ha vuelto virtual el capitalismo? Contención del contenido y obsolescencia de la mercancía

This article examines how recent strategies of commodification have responded to challenges posed by digital and other self-reproducing contents. The examples of digitized cultural goods, plant patenting, and online gaming suggest that challenges to commodification have not come from intangibility per se but from forms of physical inscription associated with negligible costs of reproduction, sharing, and transmission. Whereas the physical characteristics of industrial products more or less met the requirements of content containment, selfreproducing and digital goods have demanded increasingly costly prosthetics to insure their maintenance as commodities. Three conclusions follow. First, and ironically, technological and physical devices embedded into objects confer renewed materiality on the commodity form. Second, and paradoxically, physical materializations of the commodity also provide a fresh handle for its manipulability. Finally, expanded prosthetics of commodification can be read as an indicator of the increasingly blatant historical inadequacy of the commodity’s forcibly prolonged maintenance.Este artículo examina el modo en que las recientes estrategias de mercantilización han tratado de responder a los desafíos planteados por los contenidos digitales y otros contenidos autorreproducibles. Ejemplos como los bienes culturales digitalizados, las patentes de plantas y los videojuegos online sugieren que los desafíos a los que se enfrenta la mercantilización no se derivan de la propia intangibilidad, sino de unas formas de inscripción física asociadas a costes de reproducción, intercambio y transmisión insignificantes. Mientras que las características físicas de los productos industriales cumplen más o menos con los requisitos de control de su contenido, los bienes autorreproducibles y digitales han requerido de unas prótesis cada vez más costosas para asegurar su perpetuación como mercancías. Se extraen tres conclusiones de esto. La primera es que, irónicamente, los dispositivos tecnológicos y físicos insertos en objetos confieren una materialidad renovada a la forma mercancía. La segunda es que, paradójicamente, las materializaciones físicas de la mercancía proporcionan también nuevas vías para su manipulabilidad. Y, finalmente, cabe inferirse que estas prótesis ampliadas de mercantilización constituyen un indicador de la cada vez más flagrante inadecuación histórica del mantenimiento prolongado y forzado de la mercancía como tal

Has Capitalism Gone Virtual? Content Containment and the Obsolescence of the Commodity

Drawing on debates over the alleged virtualization of capitalism, this article examines how recent strategies of commodification have responded to challenges posed by digital and other self-reproducing contents. Using the examples of digitized cultural goods, plant patenting and online gaming, the paper argues that challenges to commodification have not come from intangibility per se but from forms of physical inscription associated with negligible costs of reproduction, sharing and transmission. The commodity form has always been intangible and analytically distinct from commodified content, if empirically intertwined with it. Successful commodification involves the containment of content within the boundaries of the form. Whereas the physical characteristics of industrial products more or less met the requirements of content containment, self-reproducing and digital goods have demanded increasingly costly prosthetics to insure their maintenance as commodities. The article offers three key conclusions. First, although containment has consistently assumed juridical forms, it also has recently taken the shape of technological and physical devices embedded into objects, ironically conferring renewed materiality on the commodity form. Secondly, and paradoxically, physical materializations of the commodity also provide a fresh handle for its manipulability: technological policing reintroduces some of the vulnerabilities that juridical containment aimed at curbing. Virtual worlds seem to offer a radical solution to these dilemmas by internalizing the space of valorization itself, but their unavoidable physical inscription maintains possibilities for piracy. Finally, expanded prosthetics of commodification carry ambivalent ideological implications. Heightened material obviousness contributes to reiterate fetishistic beliefs in the self-containment of commodity-objects. Yet, prosthetic swelling can also become a source of ideological failure and an indicator of obsolescence - not the decline of the commodity, but the increasingly blatant historical inadequacy of its forcibly prolonged maintenance

Building the City Now!: Towards a Pedagogy for Transdisciplinary Urban Design

This paper presents and discusses the unique experience of a training program in urban design, directed by the authors, which facilitated an exchange, integration and new advancement of the pedagogy and knowledge of diverse fields concerned with the city: Building The City Now! A joint effort between Catalan architects and Russian academia and businesses with support from European experts, BCNow!’s first edition became a training ground for fifteen Russian professionals and activists from diverse backgrounds in Saint Petersburg in 2014-2015 seeking to explore an alternative understanding of the city and its production in their practices. Based on the idea of transdisciplinarity, the program was developed with a hands-on approach. This paper reflects on the experience and lessons from BCNow! contextualizing it in the existing traditions of urban thinking, discusses the idea of transdisciplinarity by relating it to comparable experiences, and zooms onto the specifics of the curriculum providing concrete illustrations of the training and its outcomes.Peer Reviewe

Has Capitalism Gone Virtual? Content Containment and the Obsolescence of the Commodity

Este artículo examina el modo en que las recientes estrategias de mercantilización han tratado de responder a los desafíos planteados por los contenidos digitales y otros contenidos autorreproducibles. Ejemplos como los bienes culturales digitalizados, las patentes de plantas y los videojuegos online sugieren que los desafíos a los que se enfrenta la mercantilización no se derivan de la propia intangibilidad, sino de unas formas de inscripción física asociadas a costes de reproducción, intercambio y transmisión insignificantes. Mientras que las características físicas de los productos industriales cumplen más o menos con los requisitos de control de su contenido, los bienes autorreproducibles y digitales han requerido de unas prótesis cada vez más costosas para asegurar su perpetuación como mercancías. Se extraen tres conclusiones de esto. La primera es que, irónicamente, los dispositivos tecnológicos y físicos insertos en objetos confieren una materialidad renovada a la forma mercancía. La segunda es que, paradójicamente, las materializaciones físicas de la mercancía proporcionan también nuevas vías para su manipulabilidad. Y, finalmente, cabe inferirse que estas prótesis ampliadas de mercantilización constituyen un indicador de la cada vez más flagrante inadecuación histórica del mantenimiento prolongado y forzado de la mercancía como tal.ABSTRACT: This article examines how recent strategies of commodification have responded to challenges posed by digital and other self-reproducing contents. The examples of digitized cultural goods, plant patenting, and online gaming suggest that challenges to commodification have not come from intangibility per se but from forms of physical inscription associated with negligible costs of reproduction, sharing, and transmission. Whereas the physical characteristics of industrial products more or less met the requirements of content containment, self-reproducing and digital goods have demanded increasingly costly prosthetics to insure their maintenance as commodities. Three conclusions follow. First, and ironically, technological and physical devices embedded into objects confer renewed materiality on the commodity form. Second, and paradoxically, physical materializations of the commodity also provide a fresh handle for its manipulability. Finally, expanded prosthetics of commodification can be read as an indicator of the increasingly blatant historical inadequacy of the commodity’s forcibly prolonged maintenance

42. BLOQUE VII Building the City now: towards a pedagogy for transdisciplinary urban design | Enric Massip Bosch; Olga Sezneva. UPC; Universitat d'Amsterdam.

Ponència a càrrec d'Enric Massip Bosch, Departament de Projectes Arquitectònics ETSAV i Olga Sezneva, del Departament de Sociologia de la Universitat d'Amsterdam