• The theologization ofnetwork technology. Not unrelated to the claim of the return of technology to nature is a narrative that assigns network technology transcendental meanings. Network technology is not only progressive in the humanist sense but carries metaphysical and transcendental promises. It is therefore benevolent and right, indeed part of a “divine” plane.
• The teleologization ofnetwork technology. In the tradition of technological determinism, the development of network technology is seen as dissociated from human affairs. While the undertones of technology as nature are present here as well, this narrative offers a distinct voice stressing the asocial character of network technology. It suggests technology to be one with history—a motor of change and an end in and of itself—and implies the inevitability of its impact and the futility of any human and social intervention in its affairs.
According to the digital discourse, network technology constitutes the teleological climax of the history of technological progress, as well as that of information, the universe, and, indeed, being. The new realities of the network market, network work, network production, and the network human, which are in turn predicated on the realities of network technology—such as flexibility, adaptability, emergence, dehierarchization, decentralization, self-regulation, individualization, communication, and spontaneous order—represent a technological (and, in turn, social) revolution in the original (and forgotten) sense of the word (Barney 2000): a return to the very essence of nature and the universe. This new, network condition stands in stark contrast to the previous industrial condition, which represented a breaking away from this essence.
The spirit of networks is not simply a discourse about the overcoming of the discontents of industrial technology and the industrial condition (alienation, centralization, environmental degradation, and so forth) by network technology. More than that, it is a discourse about our civilization, our condition, our society constituting the end of history. This staple of contemporary political culture in advanced capitalist societies—epitomized in the maxim, at once postideological and programmatic, “There is no alternative”—receives technological clothing in the form of network cosmology. Network cosmology provides a technological validation for the crisis of ideological critique in the political culture of capitalist societies, that is, the widespread belief that such critique is futile and that we are living in a postideological time. More than that, network cosmology locates network technology—and with it technological reason, particularity the conflation of means and end, or the colonization of lifeworld by system—at the heart of a new constellation of society.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age