Network technology is benign, transformative, progressive, and inevitable, according to the digital discourse, not simply because it affects human life in positive ways but, more fundamentally, because it is natural, that is, it follows the way things work in nature. Its transformative capacity ensures that society and social formations become better, its structures more adaptable, its potential more fulfilled, and its economy more workable. It also suggests that any intervention in the workings of this technological paradigm is not only futile (the force of natural elements—like a flood, or tornado—is too powerful for humans to resist) but also reactionary. Instead, it suggests that at a social level we should be doing all we can to facilitate these transformations and to accept pitfalls and difficulties arising from network technology as temporary, necessary, and unavoidable obstacles on the way to a brighter horizon.
Unsurprisingly the story of network technology is traced back to nature in the digital discourse. Likewise, the story of nature is told as the story of information and communication; both histories are interwoven. To put it more bluntly, what is traditionally thought of as natural history, dissociated from human history and culture, is retold in the digital discourse as the history of informational codes and network communication, which itself is dissociated from human history. Hence, information and communication become the real teleology of nature, society, and technology. Thus, insights from nature and technology are transplanted to the social field. Our economy, Kelly argues, is only now moving out of the multicellular level: “By the enabling invention of silicon and glass neurons, a million new forms are possible. Boom! An infinite variety of new shapes and sizes of social organizations are suddenly possible” (Kelly 1998, 6). By assuming a direct, causal, and deterministic link between technology and society, and by insisting on their semblance to nature, Kelly constructs a framework where the political dimensions of social structures—in this case, the economy—are uprooted and altogether excluded and where the social is reduced to the technological.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age