Rhetorical economy: Affect, labor, and capital in transnational digital circulation

ABSTRACT Web 3.0 informational capitalism and authoritarianism challenge our assumptions about rhetorical circulation in relation to affect, labor, and capital forces, particularly in transnationally networked publics. A new model is needed in tandem with the robust ecological model to analyze the axiological dimension of transnational digital rhetorical circulation, i.e., how rhetorics produce and accumulate what types of value as they circulate digitally. Drawing on theories of rhetorical capital and communicative labor, this article proposes a theorization of rhetorics that circulate in digitally networked publics as an economy: the changing totality and relationships of rhetorical value produced and accumulated as a result of constant interactions among digital prosumers, technologies, labor, affect, commodities, and capital. The article also seeks to recontextualize the model of rhetorical economies in a transnational context with complex circulatory conditions. The author then reads the rhetorical economy of a Chinese nationalist cyber campaign in response to the Xinjiang cotton controversy.