Science and technology are presented as the central axis of social development; this in turn requires the technical administration of system; finally, questions that should have been addressed politically by citizens (through communicative action) are subjected to purposive rational (i.e., technical) considerations to be resolved by system experts. The result of this postindustrial, or technocratic, condition is “the disappearance of the difference between purposive-rational action and interaction from the consciousness not only of the sciences of man, but of men themselves. The concealment of this difference proves the ideological power of the technocratic consciousness” (107). This is then an ideological phenomenon: “The ideological nucleus of this consciousness is the elimination of the distinction between the practical and the technical” (113)—that is, the elimination of the distinction between substantive (ends) and instrumental (means). Technology as ideology “severs the criteria for justifying the organization of social life from any normative regulation of interaction, thus depoliticizing them. It anchors them instead in functions of a putative system of purposive-rational action” (112). The depoliticizing effect of this is quite obvious: “The new politics of state interventionism,” he says, “requires a depoliticization of the mass of the population. To the extent that practical questions are eliminated, the public realm also loses its political function” (103–4).
Now, with the shift to post-Fordism—that is, with the marketization of society and the disorganization of the economy—technology discourse in contemporary times no longer serves as the legitimation for political power to technically manage the capitalist economy. Instead, it serves as the legitimation for political power to take a step back from the capitalist economy. With the rise of neoliberalism as the economic dogma of contemporary society, and as the state withdraws from the economy, market legitimation has now returned to what Habermas identifies as the old model of market legitimation—classical political economy based on the internal workings of the market—but with a technologistic twist.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age