Let us consider Terranova’s “cultural politics of information” as a direct address in response to a “new” class of capitalists – what McKenzie Wark has called the vectorialists. [12] Situated historically after the pastoralist class, who toiled for then subsequently deposed the feudalists through the invocation of private property, and the capitalist class, who sought work away from the land in cities and factories, as the increasingly productive agricultural industry of the pastoralists ran off excess farmers, the vectoralist class monopolizes information, “like land or capital, [as] a form of property.” [13]
Capitalism will not only need all available information to function, but will need to invent new ways to monitor, categorize, collect, and valorize that excess of information. [14] 20 years ago, perhaps, a simple phone number would suffice for a corporation's marketing department. Today, that need has been fragmented and intensified to the degree that it is necessary, for example, not just to predict when an individual consumer will likely become pregnant but, by discovering and possessing both the necessary information and the means to process it, determine how to know if a consumer is already pregnant. [15] Ads can then be more effectively suited to certain hyper-specific [16] needs, and the method of obtaining and analyzing that data, much like Google’s search algorithms, is proprietary. [17]