I<sub>DEOLOGICAL</sub> T<sub>RANS</sub>F<sub>ORMA</sub>T<sub>IONS</sub>
The shift of capitalism to its post-Fordist phase was accompanied by the rise of a new technology discourse—indeed a new ethos and a new spirit—that wove the threads of a new technological form—network technology—into the fabric of a new capitalism and a new social regime. The transformations that are part of this new regime of accumulation of capitalism pertain not only to structural changes in the economy and in work life but also to a reconfiguration of social, cultural, artistic, scientific, emotional, political, and everyday life (Jameson 1991; Lyotard 1984). Among these is a change in the dominant political culture of advanced capitalist societies: from a political culture of social democracy to that of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005; Peters 2001; Bourdieu 1998a, 1998b; Duggan 2003; Fraser 2003). In this new constellation, the discourse on network technology plays more than a descriptive role. By filtering social reality through the prism of technology, it serves to naturalize and legitimate this reality and, in that sense, constitutes not a neutral description of reality but an ingredient thereof.
As mentioned previously, the history of technology discourse as a legitimation discourse begins with the harnessing of science and technology for capitalist development in the context of the modern state, which began roughly around the rise of industrial capitalism. The digital discourse should therefore be understood precisely in that context not only by locating it on the horizon of a technological change—from a mechanical and centralized industrial technology to a digital and networked postindustrial technology—and not only by locating it on the horizon of the transformation of capitalism—from a Fordist phase to post-Fordist phase—but also by locating it in the context of the ideological transformations that have accompanied these changes.
The rise of the new capitalism entails not only structural and technological transformations but also transformations in the legitimation function of technology discourse. Under conditions of a flexible regime of accumulation, globalization, neoliberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the dismantling of the welfare state, technology discourse no longer legitimates the interventionist welfare state, the central planning in businesses and the economy, the hierarchized corporation, and the tenured worker; instead it legitimates the withdrawal of the state from markets, the globalization of the economy, the dehierarchization and decentralization of businesses, and the flexibilization of production and the labor process.
22
Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age