I would put thins in a sequence and say (1) Imagination, (2) Implementation. I bring over a TECHnician to assess the damage in the plumbing-stuff-thingies, and he/she will use (1) imagination to come up with the solution, and (2) pull out his/her tools and fix the darn thing. Now.. the 50yo guy with low cut jeans flashing a hairy butt-crack from under the kitchen sink, is not an 'artist' (in its typical/expected format - painter, sculptor, etc.) but he will use imagination (and/or experience) to fix the thing. Just as a painter would use the imagination (and/or experience in the types of paper/canvas/oil paint/water paint/etc.) to make one-more-painting (I am thinking for the similarities of Van Gogh's starry night, and similar paintings)
Instead I got a pretty interesting article about human nature and the economy as a whole.
Commodities only have the commodity-value (i.e. price); actual value (i.e. something's worth/weight/utility/what something means to you) is unrelated to commodification. Most valuable things in your life likely have no meaningful commodity value. Very much including the concept of friction.
If only commodities are "valuable", the word has lost all value.
Most software development is a lot of low value commodity stuff that you just have to do properly just in order to do whatever it is that makes whatever it is you do valuable/unique/desirable. You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right. But if you do it wrong, your product becomes less valuable.
A good example of something that is both a commodity and a common source of friction is all the signup and security friction that a lot of software providers have to do. If you do it poorly, it creates a lot of friction, hassle, and frustration. And support overhead. It's literally costing you money and customers. Doing it right isn't necessarily directly appreciated but it results in less friction, frustration, and overhead.
That's why good UX is so important. It's a commodity. But there's plenty of opportunity for turning that into friction by doing a poor job of it.
To give a non-software example: think of wearing a clean shirt in a job interview. Nobody will hire you for the clean shirt, but plenty of people will reject you for stains.
I think negative value would look something like bombing someone. Negative relative-[commodity-]value does not imply negative value.
Also, software is not a commodity at all. There's no cost to reproducing it.
> You can' charge anyone extra for doing this commodity stuff right.
I'm not sure what you mean by "commodity". I think you mean "commonplace" or something like that.
Only in abstract - before you get to do it. When you do start to write a specific poem this doesn't hold anymore, and a big part of the art is fitting the form you chose.
Imho the "art in poetry" begins when I had that dinner with that fascinating woman, and I had the "porch test" and in that test it was raining, and I came up with a haiku. But not (only) on the haiku itself.
The poet is limited to symbols. And every poet comes up against these limitations.
But the headline is really bad. It's not a commodity and it's not valuable. It is what creates value; it's what makes value meaningful.
Don't get hung up on the headline. It's a thesis equivalent to the notion that art comes from struggle against some kind of limitation. That limitation is usually arbitrary (the form of poetry, the rules of a game, the difficulty of oil paint and brush), but the result is meaningful despite and because of it.