Commodities are attracted to money, argues Marx. Indeed, "commodities are in love with money." 1 But what appears as a love affair for things is a fetish between humans; love is exchange value. Hence, where commodities and money find love, their guardians must go; individuals are, after all, but personifications of economic categories-fleeting, repeating inhabitants of economic functions and forms. 2 Once upon a time this meant people journeying to downtowns, stores, plazas, malls, and other places where commodities used to gather in large numbers in hope of finding their significant equivalent. More and more, "because of the Internet and smartphones" (as the sublime and seductive rhetoric of the technological evangelist explains), commodities have begun to follow the money wherever it might be. In fact, commodities must now stalk money and, by extension, their guardians. The circuit of capital-the basic metaphor of capital as "value in motion" 3describes a cybernetic love story based on the cyclical attraction between the economic forms of money and commodities, an attraction consummated at the moment of exchange. The story of courtship then immediately ends just where it began. This libidinal feedback loop is a metaphor for the movement of capital itself, and it captures the contradictions, tensions, and crises characteristic of any loving relationship. The ubiquity and instantaneity of personalized digital media, however, offer greater resources in algorithmic "matchmaking" for commodities that want to find their significant other: value in the form of money. Inseparably tethered to digital information supply chains, though not central protagonists in the love story they make possible, individual users offer dynamic inputs of capta 4 that ensure the regular, often serendipitous reunion of commodities and money. As mere input and access points from the perspective of capital, apps are a crucial means of mediating and articulating the communicative, attentional, collaborative, and creative capacities of
