CONCEPT
Commodification of Knowledge
The transformation of knowing from an activity into an artifact — the text, the brief, the output — whose value is set by the market rather than by the practice that produced it.
The commodification of knowledge names the progressive conversion of knowing from an ongoing activity (understanding, thinking, judging) into a discrete artifact (the report, the article, the deliverable) whose value is determined by market exchange rather than by the internal standards of the practice that produced it. Berg and Seeber identify this conversion as the structural pathology of the corporatized university, where scholarship — an activity — is progressively replaced by scholarly outputs — artifacts. The AI transition radicalizes the conversion: when tools can produce the artifacts without the activity, the distinction between knowing and producing knowledge-artifacts collapses into visibility, and the specific thing that was commodified becomes legible as what was always at stake.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept has a long lineage in critical theory — Marx on commodity fetishism, Polanyi on fictitious commodities, Bourdieu on cultural capital, Illich on the commodification of learning. Berg and Seeber's contribution is to apply the framework