Bell substitutes the rise to eminence of a new class of professionals and technocrats for the dichotomy of capitalists and proletariats; instead of the dichotomous alternatives of either a market society or a proletariat dictatorship Bell identifies a society, the axis of which is based on the new force of production, knowledge, information, and information technology. Hence, Bell is able to envision the coming of a social order in which technology replaces class struggle. Andrew Ross summarizes the thrust of Bell’s argument as “a dream in which technology, rather than class conflict, would usher in a new realm of freedom for workers” (Ross 2003, 11).
What Bell and the digital discourse suggest is a technological overcoming of what Marx saw as the source of conflict in society: the dialectics of productive forces and productive relations. According to the digital discourse, these dialectic relations—and the type of economy and society they produce—are now being transformed by network technology. The social, this argument goes, is now predicated not on the tension between the two but on the triumphant powers of the forces of production in the form of information technology.
The most promising of these transformations, according to Bell, is the emergence of a technocratic elite (comprised of professionals at the forefront of the information and knowledge sectors) and the technical administration of the capitalist economy. The postindustrial society, he therefore predicts, is a society characterized by the substitution of class struggle by rationalization brought about by technical and technological means and championed by the technocratic elite, which has an inherent tendency to act rationally. The most decisive social ramification of the coming of postindustrialism is the subordination of the market economy to political and technical rationale. Further bureaucratization and technocratization of postindustrial society means that the defining social division is no longer based on property relations between those who own the means of production and those who do not, but “the bureaucratic and authority relations between those who have powers of decision and those who have not, in all kinds of organizations, political, economic, and social” (Bell 1999, 119).
As illustrated in this chapter, the identity of the digerati is constructed around the axis of the forces of production, while production relations are mostly ignored, downplayed, or plastered over. This reformulation helps reconceptualize technology as an axis of change and transcendence of social relations and a tool of personal and social emancipation rather than the alternative, mostly Marxist formula, where technology is always embedded with capitalist social relations and is therefore more likely to reproduce rather than transform them.
The digerati are the carriers of a new spirit, a new subjectivity, which embodies the core characteristics of a classless society. The digerati construct an (occupational) identity based on the separation of technology from social relations. Network technology is substituted for social relations of power as an axis of class composition, class structure, and, ultimately, a sense of identity. The digital discourse features a split between technology and power or, more theoretically, between forces of production and relations of production, with the latter receding into the background and the former constituting the central axis of the social sphere. In the context of this chapter, work, class, and identity are rearticulated as a derivative of technology, and power is taken out of the equation.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age