Part III of the book is comprised of two concluding discussions that articulate two broad sociological and theoretical dimensions of the digital discourse. Chapter 7 defines and explains the technologistic underpinnings of the discourse on network technology. It presents the new cosmology of network technology that prevails in the digital discourse and asks—in the context of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism—what is the social meaning of a discourse that revolves on technology as its axis of understanding and presentation?
This chapter not only adds another floor to the structure of the digital discourse constructed thus far but also runs across the previous floors like a beam and therefore brings us closer to the conclusion of this book. According to the digital discourse, network technology constitutes the teleological climax of the history of not only technological progress but also information, binarism, and indeed the universe. The new realities of network markets, network work, network production, and network humans discussed in Part II, which are in turn predicated on the realities of network technology—flexibility, adaptability, dehierarchization, decentralization, self-regulation, individualization, communication, spontaneous order, and so forth, represent a technological (and, in turn, social) revolution in the original sense of the word: a return to the very essence of nature and the universe. This is portrayed in stark contrast to industrial technology, which represented a breaking away from nature.
The spirit of networks is not simply a discourse about the overcoming of the discontents of industrial technology and the industrial condition (alienation, centralization, environmental degradation, and so forth) by network technology. More than that, it is a discourse about our late capitalist civilization, our human condition, our society representing the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). This staple of contemporary political culture in advanced capitalist societies—epitomized in the maxim (at once both postideological and programmatic) “There is no alternative,” famously coined by Margaret Thatcher—receives technological clothing in the form of network cosmology. Network cosmology provides a technological validation for the crisis of ideological critique in the political culture of capitalist societies, that is, the widespread belief that such critique is futile and that we are living in a postideological time defined in fact by technology, not ideology.
Technology Discourse and Capitalist Legitimation
9