Chapter 8 recapitulates the central narratives of the digital discourse about contemporary society, demonstrates how these narratives crystallize into a coherent “spirit of networks,” and situates this spirit within the broader context of contemporary political culture, specifically the discursive shifts that have been occurring in the last four decades—shifts from distribution to recognition, from equality to diversity, from political economy to identity politics, and from the social critique to the humanist critique of capitalism.
The digital discourse, I argue, represents a radical transformation in the techno-political culture between modernity and postmodernity. While the political metanarrative of modernity and, more specifically, the modern welfare state has been that of promise, in postmodernity political action has been reconstrued as a necessity and unavoidable adjustment. No longer is politics the management of social projects; now it is a degovernmentalization of the state. In this context the digital discourse offers a new technological metanarrative of postmodernity, which stands in stark contrast to that of the modernist era. During modernity, the discourse on technology delivered a utopia of planning, control, and proactivity; it situated technology as the axis of a sociopolitical project. The new metanarrative of technology during postmodernity is one of technology as a tool for flexibility, adaptability, and reactivity. In addition, this chapter offers concluding discussions regarding contemporary political culture and the role that the discourse on technology plays in it.
The New Spirit of Techno-capitalism
To conclude, at the center of this book is the argument that network technology has helped bring about a social revolution not only by its instrumental, functional, and material force but also by its discursive force. The discourse on network technology has been a centerpiece in the legitimation of the transformation of advanced capitalist societies from Fordism to post-Fordism. The extraordinary social, economic, political, cultural, and personal ramifications of this social revolution are given in this discourse a technologically centered framework that renders those transformations neutral, natural, inevitable, and benevolent. In the digital discourse, network technology is constructed as the axial factor that allows for the overcoming of the core problems associated with industrial,
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age