CONCEPT
Fictitious Commodity
Polanyi's term for things the market treats as products for sale that were never produced for that purpose — labor, land, money, and now intelligence — and that cannot survive commodification without social destruction.
A fictitious commodity is something the market prices and trades as if it were produced for sale, when in fact it is an element of human life or nature that exists for other reasons. Polanyi identified three originals: labor (which is human activity inseparable from the person), land (which is nature existing independently of markets), and money (which is a social convention). Each is governed by the market mechanism as if supply and demand were the appropriate regulator, when the actual effect is to subject human life, ecology, and monetary stability to a logic that cannot sustain them. The fiction is not that these things are bought and sold — they are — but that the market is the appropriate institution for their governance. The attempt to govern them by market logic produces characteristic destruction that provokes protective counter-movements.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The classical economists assumed the commodity form was the natural mode of existence