I Dis-Agre

In “Surveillance and Capture,” Agre makes the distinction between surveillance and capture. Writing that “surveillance is a cultural phenomenon,” he argues that the surveillance model of privacy derives from historical experiences such as secret police. The alternative, the “capture model,” he argues, is predicated on linguistic metaphors for human activities as well as structural metaphors.
Towards the end of his argument, he writes (speculatively) that according to Ciborra’s theory of “transaction costs,” information technology, when “applied accordance with the capture model,” by accelerating the reduction of ambiguity in market-interaction, can reduce transaction costs through defining more clearly relationships between economic actors (753-754). It can also reduce, he argues, information costs because of the “grammars” that it can impose upon an organization’s activities (which, he writes, structure the relationship among the organizational members). What exactly is Agre’s theory of political economy of captured information and commodifed information? As information becomes a commodity within a market economy, as Agre writes, it is possible to think of captured information as a commodity. He then writes that captured information is simultaneously product and representation of the human activities on which it is imposed (755). Capture, he writes, by imposing “previously unformalized activities” prepares them for the transition to market-based relationships.
Earlier in his essay he raises some interesting questions about truth and information, writing that information is presumed to be true because of the historical way in which computers have been used, not because of any existing/real properties of computers (745). What is the relationship between truth, commodified information, captured information, and the political economy of captured information?