Digital information from capital subjects is being used on platforms to dictate our social, political, and economic activities

Intangible resources—defined, extracted, and exploited at scale—play central roles in informational capitalism’s logics and production processes. Such resources include the patents, copyrights, and trademarks upon which industrial-economy actors relied, now routinely assembled into portfolios and leveraged in combination with each other. Also, and notably, they include other categories of intangible informational and economic constructs, such as datasets and algorithms, that are more fluid. Datasets, algorithms, and data-driven algorithmic processes both work to produce and are themselves produced by emergent economic arrangements. In particular, as we will see in Part 3, they have emerged as powerful strategies for extracting rents in ways that underlying physical constraints did not permit. Not coincidentally, another signal aspect of the political economy of informational capitalism is the increasingly pervasive datafication of categories of resources that have long been thought both essential to capitalist production and resistant to full commodification. As conceptualized by Polanyi, resources such as land, labor, and money are fictitious commodities because they are not produced by or for markets, and attempting to subject their supply and demand to market governance produces profound disruptive effects—including human suffering, social dislocation, and consequent social and political unrest—that reverberate far beyond markets.3 Datafication of fictitious commodity resources has begun to produce comparably far- reaching consequences.4 In the era of informational capitalism, moreover, a new basic factor of production with fictitious commodity attributes has emerged. A particularly significant new resource category has become people themselves, as new data-extractive strategies and practices targeting populations underwrite surveillance-based business models.5 A third signal aspect of the the political economy of informational capitalism is an organizational logic based on platformization. Platformization is a form of nonmarket ordering that relies on intermediation of information flows configured for scaled-up interconnection using modular protocols. Whereas the market was “an idealized site of encounter between buyers and sellers within which the characteristics, quantities, and prices of goods and services were regulated autonomically by the laws of supply and demand,” the platform is “a site of encounter where interactions are materially and algorithmically intermediated.”6 Platformization has pervasively reshaped patterns of resource appropriation and extraction and, in so doing, has also pervasively reshaped a wide range of other economic, social, and civic activities, including information transmission, social interaction, political discourse, entertainment, and the consumption of goods and services. Much as a thermodynamic phase shift acts on the nature and structure of molecular interactions, producing large-scale change in the behavior of chemical substances, so the three constitutive transformations of information capitalism have acted on the nature and structure of transactions and interactions, producing large-scale change in the behavior of economic, social, and political systems. Parts 3 and 4 explore two systemic changes that have particularly significant implications for digital constitutionalism movements.