It is worthwhile at this point to pause and emphasize the full significance of this likening of humans to machines. In the digital discourse, this likening is merely a prelude to a much more profound claim: that humans and network technology are commensurable to such a degree that they can merge into unity. This likening should not be underplayed as merely metaphorical; rather, it is substantive and, hence, instructive of the horizons opened up by such a discourse. Consider a more common metaphor: “time is money.” To treat this maxim—immortalized in eighteenth-century America by Benjamin Franklin—strictly as a metaphor implies that time has similar characteristics to money in that both are quantifiable, malleable to manipulation (such as loss or accumulation), dear, finite, and so forth. As a metaphor, “time is money” imbues time with a very particular set of meanings (associated with capitalism) rather than alternative sets of meanings.
But that maxim carries an even heavier cultural significance. Once time is shown to be commensurable with money, once proper practices are introduced by which time can really be translated into money, then this can no longer be treated as a mere literary metaphor; rather, it becomes an instrumental and practical equation. Thus, for example, time becomes money (i.e., it can be translated into money) in the most pragmatic and instrumental sense under the specific conditions of capitalism, which, as both Marx and Weber pointed out, is conditioned by the emergence of wage-labor. As Marx has shown, time becomes particularly crucial under capitalism, where value that can be diverted to capital accumulation rather than reproduction comes from the difference between the total hours of work and the hours needed to create the value required for their own reproduction—that is, their wages. Marx calls this difference surplus value. This “trick”—translating the laborer’s (work)time into the capitalist’s capital—is only possible with the commodification of labor—that is, with the creation of wage laborers who are compensated for their time and not for the market value they actually produce.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age