The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy

This article argues that the information economy is split in two. On the one hand, there is the traditional capitalist economy that works with monetary incentives. This economy still handles the main part of material production: the production of cars, shoes, computer chips, and the transportation and maintenance of these goods. But immaterial productionthe production of the ideas, innovations, experiences and other intangibles that virtually everybody agrees to be the most important source of value and developmentis increasingly performed by another economy that does not primarily move according to monetary incentives. We provide a provisional analysis of the value logic of this non-monetary, ethical economy and point at three future scenarios in which the ethical economy challenges the hegemony of global capitalism.