The most common objection to Alien Capital is that capital may be able to operate autonomously and automate production, but that manufactured goods – in order for production to continue – still have to be bought by someone and because the buying is still done by people and we are doing it "manually", capital is not really autonomous.
The simplest answer would be that people's everyday consumption is marginal/negligible in comparison with the trading done by capital within itself (mainly trading with financial instruments) but the (potential) automation of consumption nonetheless presents an interesting theoretical question that can be developed in two directions: 1) With algorithmic advertising that works on the level of affect (which is already an automated level of human activity), consumption is already largely automated; and 2) from the perspective of capital (which is indifferent to human needs), consumption is only a form of communication between individual production units – if there were a more effective form of communication than market relations, capital could exit the market and thus also consumption.
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