It's capitalism 101, but don't you think that emphasis is important when it comes to thinking about our capacities? Sure, capitalism has always depended on extremely cheap and/or unpaid labor. At the same time, what that looks like changes. The reproduction of the industrial working class relied upon a lot of unpaid home and childcare labor, for example. Along with that configuration were the roles of the time and a resistance that was a response to those roles. Then with deindustrialization there comes the resistance to "consumer society" ...often more a resistance to the roles than to capitalism generally. The differences between these forms of capitalism seem significant to me, even if it is still just capitalism doing what it does. I think it's a big deal when anarchists go from heavily focusing on labor issues to heavily focusing on consumer issues ...what some have called lifestylism.

I'd make the same arguments for the configuration of capitalism favoring emphasis on consumer/office worker roles to this "prosumer"/precarious worker configuration, where what may have formerly been considered resistance has become a model for profits ...not just as an employee, but also as a customer. If for any reason at all, at least because this shift implies different forms of resistance that seek to undermine different forms of value extraction. For instance, creating "situations" (a response to the consumer society a.k.a. the Spectacle) doesn't seem like it would challenge much of anything about contemporary capitalism, even though it had challenged the atomized society held together by the consumption of idealized images of what it lacked. Going on and on about consumer issues, like Nike's crimes against humanity ...what would that even mean now? So the prosumer will just go off and custom design some 3D-printed shoes they'll pay some techie startup for and no one will think less of them for rejecting name brands.

Ok - yeah so there's the service/servant sector bit, there's the ongoing automation helping these changes along, the State is also loving the citizen/community participation game for their power, there are a lot of tensions to put pressure on.

pre-colonial people acknowledged their inhabitant-habitat non-duality. peoples with relational language architectures continue to acknowledge that in the natural world of our actual experience, inhabitant and habitat are a non-duality.

colonialism sprang from an agreement between the Christian Church and the kings of Europe to split apart authority over the spiritual and temporal realms, thus notionally splitting apart people and land, creating a notional 'independence' between 'inhabitant' and 'habitat' (a dualist worldview).

in the dualist view, man is seen as an independent machine with inputs and outputs; i.e. he consumes and produces. picturing biota as 'independent systems' forces upon us the adjunct logic of 'pro-ducer' and 'con-sumer' that is unnecessary until we impose 'independent being' on relational forms.

in the non-dualist view, the relational space that includes man in the manner that the flow includes a storm-cell is the source of inflowent and outflowent circulation that constitutes the 'inhabitants' in the 'habitat'; i.e. inhabitant and habitat are a non-duality.

as schroedinger and the relational understanding of the world would have it, 'consuming' and 'producing' are conjugate aspects of the one dynamic of transformation; i.e. the world is given only once and dualist separations are illusion set up by noun-and-verb language-and-grammar and the language games this offers. 'production' and 'consumption' and not two separate dynamics as in the dualist view [the semantic reality we construct] of a world of machines, they are one circular dynamic. the storm-cell does not CONSUME thermal energy and PRODUCE winds, that is just a semantic word-play depiction deriving from the use of noun-and-verb constructs to impute 'independent being' to relational forms in the flow, and then having to impute to the now notionally 'independent' forms, 'input/consumption' and 'output/production' to explain the world [the transforming relational continuum] in the reduced terms of 'things' and 'what things do'. in non-euclidian (relational) space, the fish and snails and plants in the aquarium persist by consuming what they are producing within a relational food-web. it is only noun-and-verb language that imputes independent being to them that stops us from acknowledging that these forms ARE relational features in a flow-field; i.e. they are the nexus of inflowence and outflowence [epigenetic inductive influence that actualizes genetic expression] as in Lamarck's understanding of biota. In a fluid dynamic, consumption/inflowence and production/outflowence are a non-duality (a circulation or circling); that is what things in general are; energy in transformation.

so, consider this. some powerful people convince the masses that 'land' and 'people' are two separate and independent things, so that one powerful person can 'own' vast tracts of land and fence people off from it, extorting labours from them so as to extract nurturances from the land, most of which is hoarded by the landowner who use it to extort services out of others and to trade goods with other extortionists. the powerful make use of sovereigntism with its flags and anthems and its pledges of allegiance to perpetuate this abstract separation of inhabitant and habitat [the independently existing 'land' is deified in sovereigntism], keeping people mentally conditioned and thus continuously prey to such extortion. it is all sprachspiele or language games.

as moonhawk, MIT linguist observes, in affirming the sapir-whorf conjecture, the 'operative reality' that we are living in is a semantic reality deriving from our sprachspiele;

"“What are these academics so afraid of that they can’t face and contemplate and answer student’s questions about Whorf’s actual text? Why the smoke and mirrors? I suspect that they fear, and rightly so, that the entire Western worldview — logic, reason, science, philosophy, categories — the entire ‘civilization’ enterprise of which academia is a part, in fact, is at stake; or at least the superior attitude that often accompanies it. It may be a fear that what we’re culturally heir to is ‘just another worldview and its langscapes’ rather than exemplifying, as we tend to want to believe, eternal and universal human logic, which we’re simply ‘better at’ than people who speak other languages outside of the Indo-European language family. As John Lucy says, relativity “challenges assumptions which lie at the heart of much modern social and behavior research — namely its claim to be discovering general laws and to be truly scientific.” – Dan (Moonhawk) Alford, MIT

it is from the logical separation of inhabitant and habitat by way of imputing 'independent being' to the inhabitants that we get the binary duality of 'production' and 'consumption'. this TWO (binary duo) dynamics are artefacts of a semantic reality that departs radically from the physical reality of our actual experience, a semantic reality that is the institutionalized underpinning of 'Western society'.

in the inhabitant-habitat non-duality of pre-literate people as well as the relational theorists and philosophers of modern physics, the duality of 'consumption/inflowence' and 'production/outflowence' disappears as the matter-space duality disappears, giving way to the 'energy-charged plenum' aka 'transforming relational continuum' which is continually gathering within itself relational forms as inhabitant-habitat non-dualities, not popping them out as independent machines that function/live by 'consuming' and 'producing'.

as Wittgenstein observed, we, as noun-and-verb language-and-grammar users, are making ourselves captive of sprachspiele that "bewitch our understanding".

evidently, we can't 'talk ourselves out of it'.

'prosumer', meanwhile, is a term that reflects the physical reality of the non-duality of pro-ducer and con-sumer, as the aquatic food web in the aquarium where the network of biotic forms are energy-in-relational-transformation rather than a collection of independent machines as in the semantic reality of Western dualist sprachspiele.