While industrial technology during Fordism was used to legitimize the social compact between capital, labor, and the state, network technology during post-Fordism legitimizes precisely the decomposition of this compact and the constitution of its alternative: privatized relations within the context of a global market and of civil society. While Fordism extolled the power of the old technology in the name of social equity and stability as a public and political project, post-Fordism extols the power of the new technology in the name of individual authenticity and liberation as a private and apolitical (or postpolitical) enterprise.
The new legitimation discourse of networks is woven along the axis of the critique of the techno-political culture of Fordism, that is, its paradigmatic technological forms and the organizational, institutional, occupational, social, cultural, political, and personal constellations that are assumed to stem from it. The responses to the pitfalls and shortcomings of the Fordist techno-political culture are now integrated into the new techno-political culture of post-Fordism. To put it in terms of the framework that had Daniel Bell worry at the turning point between those two phases of capitalism: with the spirit of networks, The Cultural Contradictions ofCapitalism (1976) have now been resolved; the new capitalism does not reject, but quite the contrary—it harnesses self-realization, personal expression, and hedonistic impulses into its mode of operation.
In that context, network technology is constructed in contemporary technology discourse as amending the pitfalls of Fordist production by responding to concerns regarding individual emancipation and harnessing those human facets that have been suppressed during Fordism—individualism, authenticity, creativity, personal expression, and so forth—into the productive process. However, at the same time that network technology is constructed as responding to these individual demands, it is also construed as requiring the downplaying, and even rejection, of the concerns for social emancipation, the response for which has been epitomized by job tenure, employment security, embedded markets, and the provision of welfare and social security, which characterized Fordist society. The spirit of networks offers a new trade-off between the societal and the individual, between socially backed security and individual opportunity, between long-term stability and liberating flexibility; in short, between the social safety net that was the ideological underpinning of the Fordist, Keynesian, welfare state and the promise of the Internet, so to speak, for personal liberation and dealienation (Fisher 2007). The dynamics of the new capitalism powered by network technology—flexibility, adaptability, temporality, spontaneity, and so forth— are constructed in contemporary technology discourse as characteristics that both promise individual emancipation and negate the possibility for social emancipation.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age