On this reading of Marx, at the core of industrial capitalism’s longterm transformation of the social world was how work (the everyday productive activities that have gone on since the beginning of time) acquired an abstract dimension that enabled it to be commodified, that is, turned into a commodity that could be exchanged. It is this possibility of abstracting value from life processes, even when they are not directly productive activities, that leaves open the prospect of new types of commodified social relations and, through them, a new social order for capitalism.

Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, loc. 146