The significance of the digital discourse lies not in its overt embrace of free market ideology (as Barbrook and Cameron 1996, for example, point out) but—to use a somewhat harsh rhetoric—precisely in its rejection of ideology as such. The digital discourse strives to be precisely what a free market ideology, like neoliberalism, might have a hard time being—not an ideology at all. Unlike neoliberalism, it is based not on intellectual ideas, cognitive constructs, and abstract metaphors and models, and it has no overt political trajectory. Instead, it builds its foundations on the seemingly technical, materialist, and instrumentalist reading of technology. It is this “technological hermeneutics” that gives it a gloss of an impartial, apolitical rendering of reality.
As an analytical framework to explain and legitimize the realities of free market—that is, as ideology—the digital discourse therefore seems superior to neoliberal theory because it anchors much of the neoliberal arguments in material tools. If rationality is a product of the disparate and selfish wants of individuals, if it emerges spontaneously and is selfregulating, and if it requires a mechanism of communication, then the market, once digitized and incorporated into cyberspace, promises to be the most sophisticated market in the history of humanity. In that sense, the digital discourse not only reiterates but also supersedes the neoliberal arguments regarding the operation of markets by embodying it within network technology. In the digital discourse, economic rationality is redefined as emanating solely from the operation of networks, and so it is inextricably bounded with network technology.
It is therefore no surprise that advocates of neoliberalism are enthusiastic about network technology no less than technological enthusiasts seem excited about neoliberal ideas (Gere 2002, 140–41; Harvey 2005,
Network Market
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