Semio-capitalistic greed subsumes informational brandings and therefore riddles Intellectual Property with semiotics. It takes the cognitive resources of an informational worker and reproduces knowledge to solidify their power in the semiotic ecosystem.

This section covers a period that begins halfway through the 1970s and takes¶ us up to the present day. The first classes that concern us here are, naturally, the¶ cognitive workers and capitalists. These take the specific form of informational¶ workers and capitalists (6 and 2). What do we mean when we refer to informational work? An activity in which the worker has a PC, tablet, netbook – or¶ something similar – as a principal work tool and whose principal output in the¶ productive process is an informational good – that basically produces digital¶ information (Zukerfeld 2013). The output of informational workers could usually be reproduced by close to zero marginal costs. Thus, when capitalists buy¶ labour time from the informational workers, they receive a product that bears¶ reproducible knowledge. Indeed, it is not uncommon for informational workers to turn out to be exploited both through alienation and through reproduction in the same productive process.¶ Informational work has been measured particularly in the USA and it has¶ been found that at the beginning of the millennium it already occupied the¶ greater part of the work force (Apte and Nath 2007; Wolf 2006). Definitively, in¶ its activity, access to physical ownership over the productive resource par excellence (digital technologies, with falling prices for a constant capacity) doesn’t¶ carry great costs or importance, except for their own cognitive resources¶ applied during the productive process and now objectified in an informational¶ good, regulated fundamentally by intellectual property.¶ An important point in relation to this type of worker – and that is related,¶ among other things, to the ambivalence of their main instrument of labour – is¶ that their cognitive resources, in contrast with the previous stage, aren’t necessarily acquired in formal institutions, or rather, that these skilled workers¶ don’t necessarily have formal qualifications. The instrument of labour itself is a¶ powerful tool for the incorporation of informal knowledge (through tutorials,¶ videos, forums etc.). In the same way, the previously mentioned ambivalence of¶ this tool is manifested in its potential to construct networks of recognition, or¶ social capital in Bourdieu’s terminology (1985). At the same time, it is important to note that – unlike the workers of the previous stage, liberal professionals and physical workers in the service sectors – informational workers have a¶ smooth path to freelance work (5). Certainly, the falling prices of the means of¶ production such as the computer, are a defining factor. But not only that: the¶ infrastructure that an informational worker requires (space, energy, devices of¶ a different nature like modems, telephones, etc.) is easily assimilated into either¶ the domestic environment itself or a less costly (in relative terms) space. Naturally, the conditions of the infrastructure, although in different proportions, are¶ also modified in the case of companies.¶ In the capitalist sphere, the most profitable economic activities are concentrated in the exclusive form of intellectual property, but in addition, these are the most diverse: the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, the audiovisual and music content industry, software production and informatics services; all these productive areas come together in the stratum of informational¶ capitalist (2), that is constituted as a hegemonic fraction of capital during¶ this period. Said heterogeneity and unity corresponds, naturally, to the marriage that the institution of intellectual property had managed to consummate¶ between knowledge with an industrial or technological application and artistic¶ knowledge, that up until the 1970s had not combined. Indeed, just as the access¶ to goods regulated by private property loses significance in the face of access¶ to knowledge for the informational worker, this type of capitalist is not concerned with monopolising physical intensive resources, but rather, and above¶ all, knowledge intensive resources. In this regard, Nike is a good example, not¶ owning ‘a single factory, or machinery, equipment or real estate property’ but¶ only intellectual property (Rifkin 2000, 32). That said, if a company like Nike¶ represents the ideal type of informational capitalist, the case of the Ford Motor¶ Company represents the ideal type of pure capitalist (1). Indeed, a significant¶ layer of capitalists base their profits on patents, or more generically, on intellectual property rights over their products or parts of them and, at the same¶ time, on the sale of these articles. So it is that Ford (but also Sony and others) own both factories and R&D laboratories. A particular characteristic that¶ capitalists assume in this period is that if, to some degree, they need the industrial workers, they have a much greater need for the informational worker, and¶ consequently their research departments. In fact, the product life cycle is an¶ important factor: the profits of these capitalists come much more from new and¶ innovative products than from the prolonged sale of a standardized product.¶ The quantitative growth of informational workers takes place in a¶ simultaneous – and complementary – way alongside the quantitative growth¶ of physical workers, particularly a fraction of precarious manual workers (8)¶ and the excluded (9), radically increasing the polarisation between these classes¶ (Castells 1998; Rifkin 2000; Fuchs and Sandoval 2014). The well-known fact¶ that Nike’s subcontractors utilise child and semi-slave labour to lower their¶ costs points to this relationship between informational capitalists and workers¶ on the one hand and precarious manual workers, on the other (Rifkin 2000, 75).¶ This is a stratum of ‘vulnerable’ physical workers (Castel 2009) concentrated in¶ the marginal elements of the productive processes, although not completely¶ excluded from them. In contrast, the excluded (8) (Castel 2009; Nun 2003),¶ in the present stage take the concrete form of the chronically unemployed and¶ structurally impoverished. This social class, unlike the vulnerable group, ‘are¶ superfluous, they are not needed’ (Nun 2003), but they also manifest an unusual quantitative explosion (Castells 1998). Naturally, the watershed between¶ these two classes is very diffuse. Although nation states in different locations¶ and decades adopt varying attitudes regarding these sectors, the most pertinent¶ difference compared with the previous period is that the capitalist productive