The understanding that emerges from a consideration of the implied series that spans the history of money, writing, photography, printing, and computerization (and, not incidentally, that of colonialism, the rise of corporate power, and U.S. imperialism) would insist that capital informs not only writing and image but their reception. However, this insistence only becomes fully convincing (which is to say realized) in the contemporary, when digital technologies underpin the world media system and when so-called cognitive capitalism, or the expropriation of what Paolo Virno calls the “cognitive-linguistic capacities of the species," reigns.² However, given this outcome in which cognition itself is today digitally mediated without question—not a trivial outcome and furthermore one thatis often undertheorized where cognitive practices are considered today—we might consider that the substitution of Quantity for Quality (the reconfiguration of quality by quantity), which has been occurring at least since capital's beginnings, informed the first as well as this, our computer-mediated penultimate digital culture. (Optimism of the will requires that we do not consider our current digital the ultimate culture but only a precursor: as Christian Fuchs would have it, the emergence of the digital computer is a necessary preconditionto the long-sought arrival of communism.) Nonetheless, we should, and indeed must, wager that the current digitization of cultural form finds its conditions of possibility not in what we most easily recognize as the computer but in the dynamics of an older machine language: that of use value/ exchange value imposed by wage labor and the commodity form—which is to say by capítalism itself. Price was already a snapshot, and a digital one at that.
Digitality and the Media of Dispossession
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