To what extent is information the missing “complement” to the commodity? There is only one kind of (proto-) information in Marx, and that is the general equivalent—money. The materiality of a thing—let’s say “coats”—its use value, is doubled by its informational quantity, its exchange value, and it is exchanged against the general equivalent, or information as quantity. But notice the missing step. Before one can exchange the thing “coats” for money, one needs the information “coats.” What the general equivalent meets in the market is not the thing but another kind of information—let’s call it the general nonequivalent—a general, shared, agreed-upon kind of information about the qualities of things.24

Putting these sketches together, one might then ask what role computing plays in the rise of a political economy (or a post-political one) in which not only is exchange value dominant over use value, but where use value further recedes behind the general nonequivalent, or information about use value. In such a world, fetishism would be mistaking the body for the information, not the other way around, for it is the information that controls the body.

Thus we want to think bodies matter, lives matter, things matter—when actually they are just props for the accumulation of information and information as accumulation. “Neo”liberal is perhaps too retro a term for a world which does not just set bodies “free” to accumulate property, but sets information “free” from bodies, and makes information property in itself. Perhaps bodies are shaped now by more than one kind of code. Perhaps it is no longer a time in which to use Foucault and Derrida to explain computing, but rather to see them as side effects of the era of computing itself.25