This stands in contrast to the political culture that characterizes a response to the humanist critique. The demands of the humanist critique are articulated in a language of individualism, personal autonomy, and the privatization of social life; it demands personal expression, authenticity, and individual engagement. While putting forth these demands is political in and of itself, in their effect and to the extent that they diminish a response to the social critique they result in what Marcuse described as “the closing of the political universe” (Marcuse 1991, 19). The response to the humanist critique during post-Fordism through market mechanisms leads to a political culture that is inherently more apolitical and where more facets of social reproduction are excluded from the political process, mediated, and resolved through technologically mediated networks. The closing of the political universe is coupled by an opening up and augmentation of the market universe and of a civil society conceived and fashioned after a market model.
Hence, while the spirit of networks is indeed constructed as a response to the critique of Fordist society, it does so in a manner that results in the depolitization of contemporary social relations: the spirit of networks resolves the social and political concerns that underlie Fordist society technologically. While closing off the political universe it opens a technological universe that reasserts the central role of technology in the resolution of social and political questions, in effect rendering these questions technological in nature.
The spirit of networks, with its explicit critique of the pitfalls of Fordism, legitimates the shift to post-Fordism first and foremost by depicting this shift as progress. Since the contemporary post-Fordist condition is intertwined with network technology—itself a higher development stage in the history of technology (see Chapter 7)—the social formations that stem from it are also conceptualized as being of a higher stage, a social development. The shift to post-Fordism, in other words, is understood as technologically induced and, therefore, as apolitical, asocial, and inherently progressive.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age