Machinery, technology, industry: “all organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.” Prophetically – “the development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production.” Dubbing it the "general intellect," Marx is referring to a total social character of knowledge and technological development, that is idealized in, shall we say, computer machinery; "an articulation of fixed capital (machines) and living labor (the workers),” a co-operation of the two.
The computer network is proliferated, recreational, rhizomatic, and user-friendly. The general intellect can also be social life subordinate to general knowledge if and when the general intellect is exploited by capitalism. Surplus production and surplus population are necessary conditions of fixed capital and wealth. A fully developed and idealized capitalism requires a significant population of people that do not work at all, contributing to a general social knowledge that, in the informational economy, becomes the mode of production all on its own. [2]
That is achieved primarily through the creation of disposable time, and large quantities of it. Capitalism, thus, is “instrumental in creating means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labor time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development.” The problem is that, today, we cannot guarantee that our time is our own.