These intellectual and political projects all attempt to elucidate and theorize a critical moment in the workings of contemporary, networked capitalist society. These are admirable projects, in my view, committed to one of the core goals of critical theory: that is, to locate the conditions of possibility for transcendence within the immanence. Likewise, both in theory and in practice, what critical potentialities are present in the spirit of networks should be extracted and exhausted in further research.
But what these positions fail to acknowledge is the degree to which the spirit of networks has been intertwined with technology and technological reason. The juxtaposition of the realities of contemporary capitalism and its spirit with the discourse on network technology—which has been a central purpose of this book—illuminates the technological blind spot in such analyses. Boltanski and Chiapello explain this lack as an attempt on their part to avoid the fallacy of technological determinism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, xviii–xix). To be sure, as Chapter 7 has shown, this fallacy is easy to slip into precisely because the new capitalism is so closely intertwined with network technology. The networked organization (Castells 1996), the command and control of headquarters in a global chain of production (Robins and Webster 1999; Harvey 1989), just-in-time production (Harvey 1989), the expansion in space of production, distribution, and consumption processes (Beniger 1986), the increased flexibility of the work process (Greenbaum 1995; Robins and Webster 1999)— network technology has been instrumental in bringing all these changes about, or at least in helping to materialize their full potential. Indeed the prominence of information technology in contemporary society has led many to call ours the “information society” (Bell 1999; Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Duff 2000; Lash 2002; Mackay 2003; Mattelart 2002; May 2002, 2003; Robins and Webster 1999; Webster 2002; Stehr 2001).
However, by leaving network technology out of the realm of contemporary capitalism, such analyses overlook another dimension of the intersection of technology and society, which has been the centerpiece of this book: the role of technology as a legitimation discourse (Marcuse 1991; Habermas 1970), as the “religion” of an instrumental society (Noble 1999), and as the cultural fabric from which the contemporary spirit of capitalism is woven (Mosco 2004). Their analysis therefore fails to notice that the spirit of capitalism, both old and new, is inextricably linked with the discourse on network technology—the digital discourse.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age