How the asset--anything that can be controlled, traded, and
capitalized as a revenue stream--has become the primary basis of
technoscientific capitalism.
In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines argue that the
asset--meaning anything that can be controlled, traded, and capitalized
as a revenue stream--has become the primary basis of technoscientific
capitalism. An asset can be an object or an experience, a sum of money
or a life form, a patent or a bodily function. A process of assetization
prevails, imposing investment and return as the key rationale, and
overtaking commodification and its speculative logic. Although assets
can be bought and sold, the point is to get a durable economic rent from
them rather than make a killing on the market. Assetization examines
how assets are constructed and how a variety of things can be turned
into assets, analyzing the interests, activities, skills, organizations,
and relations entangled in this process.
The contributors consider the assetization of knowledge, including
patents, personal data, and biomedical innovation; of infrastructure,
including railways and energy; of nature, including mineral deposits,
agricultural seeds, and "natural capital"; and of publics, including
such public goods as higher education and "monetizable social ills."
Taken together, the chapters show the usefulness of assetization as an
analytical tool and as an element in the critique of capitalism.
Contributors
Thomas Beauvisage, Kean Birch, Veit Braun, Natalia Buier, Béatrice
Cointe, Paul Robert Gilbert, Hyo Yoon Kang, Les Levidow, Kevin Mellet,
Sveta Milyaeva, Fabian Muniesa, Alain Nadaï, Daniel Neyland, Victor Roy,
James W. Williams
