During Fordism, capitalist legitimation was mediated through the state, that is, through the technical and technological tools at the state’s disposal: taxation, redistribution, centralized planning, fiscal and monetary control, and the provision of employment and welfare programs. In other words, technology played a role of support for state action; technology legitimized the centrality of the state in the reproduction of capitalist society. In post-Fordism, legitimation for capitalism has come to be mediated through network technology. Network technology provides legitimation not so much for an alternative global polity but for the ideology that now—with network technology—such polity is redundant. Such technological legitimation supports the depoliticization and desocialization of markets and the economy in general, or their dissociation from the political sphere.
One can therefore speak of two legitimation models, or two “triangles” of power. In the Fordist condition, the state enjoys political legitimation and exercises technical and technological administration of the economy. In that framework, technological legitimation is mediated by the state. In the post-Fordist constellation, the state loses its political legitimation for the administration of the economy, and instead technological legitimation is not mediated through concrete (and democratic) social institutions but through the internal operation of network technology, as encapsulated in the spirit of networks. In sum, with post-Fordism capitalist legitimation becomes more depoliticized and more instrumentalized; it becomes— quite literally—a technological legitimation rather than a form of political legitimation through technology. Hence, the discourse on network technology is part of a new social constellation where (network) technology is substituted for the political institution that is the state as a container of political legitimation.
TECHNO-PO<sub>L</sub>ITICA<sub>L</sub> C<sub>UL</sub>T<sub>U</sub>RES: THE C<sub>L</sub>OS<sub>U</sub>RE OF THE PO<sub>L</sub>ITICA<sub>L</sub>
These sweeping transformations are detrimental to the scope and nature of the political as such in society. In that context, the discourse on technology has in both eras been an indispensable companion to the dominant political cultures of social democracy and neoliberalism, respectively. The techno-political culture of Fordism, and modernity in general, delivered planning, control, and stability; it rendered politics a project of reason, which leads to proactivity; it assigned politics great molding powers in society, and in that project technology played a central role.
In contrast, the techno-political culture of post-Fordism, and postmodernity in general, is reactive. It acknowledges its limited influence and legitimates a reality of minimum politics, and an adaptivist politics at that, upholding, in fact, the disengagement of politics from social affairs.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age