In considering the interconnected realms of the digital and material commons/commoning in prior chapters, one clear underlying theme has been the continuous tension between compeerist-aligned forms of economic activity and a still dominant capitalist mode of production. Recall that a mode of production consists of the self-reinforcing economic and social arrangements that determine how the production and consumption of goods and services takes place. These assemblages/apparatuses, in turn, are agglomerations of animate and inanimate forces, meaning that we are not only dealing with the materialities of physical and social (re)production, but also with the realm of affect, state of mind, and mental frameworks.

Some mental frameworks are so ingrained and pervasive that they are barely acknowledged. We can call these hegemonic, as their taken-for-granted validity have become foundational in the scaffolding of our entire worldview, keeping us locked into a particular mode of thinking and operation. There is an apt story that captures this inability to see past our taken for granted way of perceiving the world. It goes something like this: two fish swimming in the river encounter an older fish swimming towards them. The older fish asks, “How's the water?” The two fish swim on until one finally turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

One immensely important hegemonic frame through which we see the world is our currently dominant conceptualization of value, which is well captured in the words of the ancient Latin thinker Publilius Syrus who is credited with saying, ‘everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it’. It is a view that has become so firmly entrenched under capitalism that it is embraced as dogma by economists and as ‘common sense’ by everyone else. It has become the water that we swim in. Here the obfuscated working of the market – the invisible hand – is unconsciously accepted as a kind of omnipotent God, or supercomputer, ‘cranking out the current value of everything in the form of price’ (Gerhardt, 2020). It is a world described by the concept of commodity fetishism, in which we cannot help but see the world through an exchange-value lens. Any thought of intrinsic or derived value in natural or humanly crafted things never comes to mind.

Yet, this sterile market approach to value is actually quite recent.