How Color Became a Technology: The Making of Chromatic Capitalism

Lida Zeitlin-Wu traces how color transformed from a property of nature into a marketable technology. Beginning with nineteenth-century industrialization and culminating in the digital present, Zeitlin-Wu moves across three distinct phases of capitalism—systematization, standardization, and privatization—to show how color adapts to different regimes of cultural production to benefit those in power. This, she argues, is not a top-down process. Instead, mass-produced color represents a portal to the “good life” for the everyday US civilian, whether in homes or on social media pages. She calls this phenomenon “chromatic capitalism,” in which color is used to sell ourselves to ourselves. From scientific racism’s obsession with the color grid to the techno-utopian “colorblind” fantasies of Web 2.0, Zeitlin-Wu reframes color as a sophisticated technology for managing and governing human beings. Ultimately, How Color Became a Technology reframes color as a key instrument of capitalist extraction that transcends media forms.