Fordist society: the bureaucratic organization of work, the heavy-handed interventionist state, the diminishing levels of economic growth, the preeminence of collective interests over personal freedom, the drudgery of industrial work and its incompatibility with humans’ diverse capabilities and needs, and the political culture of competing ideological viewpoints. The integration of network technology into markets and into the process of production allows for the materialization of a friction-free, global, self-regulated market (overcoming national markets hindered by interventionist states); the mobilization of information and networks as new forces of production (overcoming limits to economic growth); the dehierarchization and decentralization of the workplace and the work process (overcoming disenchanting bureaucratic organization and class conflict); and the rendering of work as a creative, cooperative, and personally satisfying process (overcoming alienation from the labor process). Finally, this techno-social constellation of a strong market, a weak state, an empowered individual, and a privatized social sphere is presented as the pinnacle of human progress and as an apolitical situation that has no political alternatives and is hence heralded as the end of history.
The spirit of networks is the new spirit of contemporary techno-capitalism, offering a technologistic framework to the structural transformations of capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism. This hegemonic discourse offers both a critique of Fordist society and its techno-political culture of social empowerment and the overcoming of exploitation, and an affirmation and legitimation of post-Fordist society and its technopolitical culture of individual empowerment and the overcoming of alienation. But as this book shows, while contemporary digital discourse is explicitly critical and emancipatory, it is in fact implicitly the hegemonic discourse of contemporary network capitalism par excellence, legitimating a new trade-off between social emancipation and personal emancipation.
Technology Discourse and Capitalist Legitimation
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