A man who resembles Alan Turing works in the foreground of others working.
It is said that information wants to be free. How should we understand this statement given the obvious entanglement of capital and computing? Marx’s method of analysis offers us a model through which we can assess if this statement makes any sense.
As Karl Marx infamously put it in the first volume of Capital, in capitalist society value “is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement; it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject.” In its status as such a subject, value acquires “the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.”
The specter of surplus-value in capitalism, in other words, blurs our ability to see straight. Money is capable of aggrandizing itself, and as such is minted as something mystical and occult, a prized possession, a gift that keeps on giving. However, though it appears mystically reproductive, money cannot actually grow value out of itself unless it is given the right kind of care, much like a living organism (albeit of an alien kind). To properly vegetate from an original state to a new state of itself with a surplus, money must circulate. It “grows” when it is moving in exchange, developing its interest, and only in circulation eventually returns to its owner in a greater quantity than the seed amount. (Thus the madman miser, who fetishizes money as valuable without circulation, is distinguished from the rational capitalist.) Marx’s analysis reveals that the golden-egg-laying principle of capital, the quasi-scientific belief that the economy simply does grow by virtue of it being the economy, is in fact supported by a specific set of social relations. The fetishism of money’s reproduction at the expense of humanity’s (and the environment’s) is the moral of the life and times of capital.
In this way, it makes sense to think of capital as an automatic subject. It operates as if it has no labor sustaining it, reducing the life and times of humanity operating within it to its schematic function as manpower for money’s reproduction, instead of seeing labor as the very reason and sake of the social system’s existence in the first place. Capital is programmed not as a rising tide that lifts all boats but as an engine that churns out economic growth. This machine is indifferent to humanity and the environment as life-forms, treating them only as inputs. Capital strives as an automatic subject toward the reproduction of surplus value, and in doing so it comes to appear as if it has a will of its own, a kind of desire to pullulate that operates independently of our own needs and wants. The system first and foremost serves and services its own desires, like a parent who puts on their own oxygen mask before their child’s. Money, capital’s prodigal son, acquires the occult capacity to add value to itself. Capital nepotistically puts the growth of money first, endowing its object with the subjective quality of wanting: money wants to come back around with a surplus.
Information, on the other hand, wants to be free. Or, at least, so goes the mantra of American free-software pioneers such as Stewart Brand, one of the more influential “thought leaders” of the early Internet. If information wants to be free and capital wants money to increase, how should we understand the intimate and ongoing affair between computing and capital?
We could start out by denying that information wants to be free at all. Information does not want to be anything, we might reasonably say, as it is not a person with desires but a lifeless collection of data. On this logic, it would be similarly stupid to say that money wants to grow in value, for it too is not a subject but an object, a tool that we (as subjects) think through in particular ways to achieve our economic, political, and social ends. Marx’s theory of capital can, it would seem, accordingly be dismissed because it confuses inert and inanimate objects—commodities or numbers—with living entities
Yet the subject-object distortion of the commodity as an object of thought is, as we know, the point de capiton of Capital. Marx’s theory is not a critical account of how we should think when it comes to capital, money, commodities, and so on. It is rather an account of how capital itself thinks, how it critically disfigures our capacity to think, and how it wants us to think. This is the argument that Moishe Postone advances in his important book, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (1996). Marx critiques capital not by standing outside it and pointing at its stupidities with unbiased tools of thought, but by reproducing the bias of its own logic so as to expose what it stupidly cannot conceptualize.
It makes a certain kind of sense, in this Marxian manner, to say that information wants to be free. There is some structure at work that disfigures information, evidently a simple object of thought, into a subject of sorts, capable of its own desires. If commodity fetishism causes tables to seem to want to dance as if of their own free will, as Marx puts forward, perhaps information can be said to move itself too. So let us suspend disbelief for a moment and accept that the statement “information wants to be free” makes a certain kind of sense. Now: that a statement makes sense does not necessarily mean that it rings true. The question we should ask is: how credible is this truism as an axiom? Can we work from it as a principle and derive a social logic that is sensible in the materiality of the present day, as Marx did with the axiom of value’s endless increase in formulating his theory of capital?
Due to the way that capitalism produces this misthinking on our part (what some refer to as an “alienated” subjectivity), it appears in capital that money has a mystical and occult quality to reproduce itself with interest when it is in circulation in exchange. Perhaps information is like money, in this sense. It appears as if it wants to be free on account of a social relation that has distorted our capacity to see it straight. If information does indeed have a tendency towards its own “freedom”—that is, toward being freely duplicated and shared for its own better social use—what is the structure that sustains this tendency? Could one derive a reasonable account of this fetishism that sustains an informatic axiom of data proliferation, or would closer scrutiny reveal that it cannot really even be counted as fetishism and is just pure ideology or dissimulation? There are surely contradictions at work in this freedom theory of information, just as there were in the theory of British political economy (put forward by economists like David Ricardo and Adam Smith) in Marx’s time, and they demand more dialectical analysis if we are to take them seriously.
This view on information begs some even bigger questions. If our societies are now characterized by a logic that produces a fetishism or ideology of information, does this logic supplant the logic of capital or complement it? Perhaps information does not want to be free (to proliferate) at all, but rather loves its own detention. Or is it that there is a world where information wants to be free, but ours is one in which it simply cannot realize that desire, as capital is holding it captive?
Karl Marx. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol. 1. Penguin Classics, 1992, p. 255.
Lachlan Kermode is PhD student in modern culture and media, Brown University. He was a Digital Humanism Fellow at the IWM in 2024.
