Kean Birch - Assetization: Turning Things Into Assets in Technoscientific Capitalism

Kean Birch and Fabian Muniesa

Contemporary capitalism is increasingly defined by its technoscientific aspectsthat is, by the development of new technological products and services (e.g., smartphones, apps, platforms), the emergence of trendy scientific specialties (e.g., big data, AI, biotech, fintech), and the alignment of innovation processes, actors, and institutions with powerful investment rationalities and financial imperatives. The very notion of technoscientific capitalismterminology whose origins can be traced back at least to Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984, 1992)aptly captures the defining problematics of our political-economic time.

But how can we best characterize the gist of this moment? What is the prevailing form that things take within technoscientific capitalism? Because of its innovation-based nature and its concomitant promissory rationale, technoscientific capitalism has often been interpreted in terms of a speculative logic (e.g., Sunder Rajan 2006, 2017). The prevalence of processes of commercialization and privatization have repeatedly motivated a reading of technoscientific capitalism as a commodification movement that orients science and technology toward a market destiny (e.g., Mirowski 2011; Berman 2012). It is undeniable that the market plays a crucial role in technoscientific capitalism, offering the commodity form as a template of choice for all things scientific and technological, and prompting accordingly the relevance of a speculative gaze. The full picture, though, lacks analytic traction if we rely solely on this perspective.

Our argument in this book is that the dominant form that technoscientific capitalism affords is not the commodity but the asset, and that the financial contours it entails are not those of market speculation but of capital investment. Those are very different things, and the aim of contributors to this book is to flesh out this central point. Our perspective, then, is that we cannot characterize and analyze technoscientific capitalism solely in commodity terms anymore, not in the era of Uber and Airbnb, Google and Amgen. Can we understand the unicorns stalking Silicon Valley (i.e., firms whose notional valuations top $1 billion, promising huge returns to shrewd investors), the biopharmaceutical firms ramping up drug prices (while buying back their shares to shore up their share value), and governments turning the atmosphere into financial assets (and giving them away to polluters) without struggling within prevailing conceptions of the commercialization, marketization, and commodification of technoscientific research and innovation? As the latest stage of capitalism entrenches, it becomes even more difficult to see what is driving the accumulation of capital. As the marginal cost of production approaches zero, it is increasingly evident that productivity increases will not lead to sustainable profits. What will? Business model sorcery perhaps?

Intriguing things are going on indeed, we contend, as a consequence of an emerging asset form that has come to replace the commodity as the primary basis of contemporary capitalism. By asset, we mean something that can be owned or controlled, traded, and capitalized as a revenue stream, often involving the valuation of discounted future earnings in the presentit could be a piece of land, a skill or experience, a sum of money, a bodily function or affective personality, a life-form, a patent or copyright, and so on. Discounting reflects an assumption about the future value of money, which is framed by expectations about future inflation, risks, and uncertainties (Muniesa et al. 2017). Assets can be bought and sold, yes. But the point is to get a durable economic rent from them, not to sell them in the market today; here we use the term