From Shrink Wrap to Services. The Universal Machine and Universal Exchange

Abstract

The shift within digital media from software to services represents a level of ubiquity above and beyond that of multimedia, the digital’s relation of previously-existing forms of media within its binary system of equivalence, and into the relation of social relations themselves. In this sense, it both mirrors and complements the global spread of capitalism, which also seeks to make both goods and relations equivalent (but not equal) through the money form. Tracing this shift, this chapter examines connections between the development of end-user Software as a Service and the service economy enabled by mobile apps like Uber and TaskRabbit to argue that “service” in this context should be understood as the universal medium’s extraction of value from the increasingly universalized process of exchange.