It is in this respect that the digital discourse is most crucial. It offers a renewed confidence in the market as a superior medium of economic and social life based on its improvements by technological means. The reason for the state to recede, and for the market to dominate is due to the materialization and perfection of the workings of the market by technological means. The legitimation of the market can rest entirely on technology. Contemporary technology discourse legitimizes not the intervention of the state in the economy but instead its withdrawal; not the external managing of the market, but the need of politics to let the market self-regulate. The goals have changed, but the underlying depoliticizing ramifications of technology discourse that Habermas was concerned with still persist.
It is in this context that the narratives of the digital discourse discussed in this chapter (as well as in the following chapters) are relevant. The ideas of spontaneous order, infinite prosperity, classless society, and market democratization—woven into network technology, integrated into the very medium where the social now takes place—reassert what for the good part of the twentieth century has been harshly criticized: the superiority of the market—open, frictionless, unhindered, and most importantly insulated from any political intervention—as a medium for social relations. In this respect, the digital discourse has the same ideological thrust as neoliberalism, as succinctly identified by Duggan (2003): “The most successful ruse of neoliberal dominance . . . is the definition of economic policy as primarily a matter of neutral, technical expertise. This expertise is then presented as separate from politics and culture, and not properly subject to specifically political accountability or cultural critique” (Duggan 2003, xiv). Previous critiques of capitalism (most notably Marx’s) were aimed at the political economy underlying market legitimation, from Smith to Hayek. Through recourse to a technologistic framework, the digital discourse offers the rhetorical means by which neoliberal tenets are upheld and the critique of capitalism is bypassed.
Markets are not the only systems that are transformed by network technology; the whole system of production changes as well. The next two chapters present the digital discourse on these transformations. Chapter 4 focuses on the ramifications of network technology for the traditional (or industrial) world of work, mostly within the confines of the workplace and the company. Chapter 5 focuses on new forms of work and production brought about by network technology and taking place outside of these traditional sites.
Network Market
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