Consumer of Capability

In solid modernity, the producer's identity was built through sustained engagement with materials, tools, and craft. The labor was difficult, and the difficulty was constitutive of meaning. The joiner's satisfaction in a well-fitted joint, the programmer's pleasure in an elegant algorithm—these were inseparable from the resistance that preceded them. The consumer's relationship to the world is fundamentally different: selection among options rather than transformation of materials. The consumer of capability does not produce code; she specifies it. She does not build features; she directs their construction. The output may be identical, but the relationship between worker and work has changed from constitutive to instrumental. The producer was shaped by the making; the consumer merely uses the made. Bauman traced this transformation in Consuming Life (2007), observing that workers themselves had become consumers—not of goods but of their own potential, assembled from services, evaluated by output, and discarded when the output could be obtained more cheaply elsewhere.