Marcuse expresses the dialectical sublation of technology and society also as a reconstruction that helps healing society’s wounds: ‘Perhaps technology is a wound that can only be healed by the weapons that caused it: not the destruction of technology but its re-construction for the reconciliation of nature and society’ (Marcuse 1979a, 224).
This means that a truly free society has to abolish repressive uses of the computer, e.g. as automated killing technology operating drones and warplanes, and to transform specific repressive designs of computer technologies. Social media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter are based on complex terms of use that enable the commodification of personal data and the exploitation of users’ digital labour (Fuchs 2011, 2014a, 2014c, 2015). Commons-based social media in contrast also support and do not abolish social networking. They require a redesign of social media in such a way that they are privacyenhancing, advertising-free, user-controlled, not-for-profit, and allow the users a say in formulating the terms of use. Social media are thereby dialectically sublated: they lose their dominative character and simultaneously retain, realise and expand their liberating potentials.
Herbert Marcuse died in 1979 at the age of 81. He did not live long enough to see the rise of the World Wide Web (WWW). When discussing the computer, he therefore predominantly spoke about automation, which reflected a major issue of his times, namely the question – if the computer in production brings about a more repressive or a more liberated economy. Marcuse’s answer was dialectical: he saw the liberating, democratic and common potentials of the computer that were limited by the repressive realities of capitalism and class. Today computer technology has become a networked and mobile means of information, communication and collaboration (Fuchs 2008). Marcuse could of course not analyse mobile phones, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. His critical thought and concepts are however still well suited to be one of the methodological foundations for a critical theory of the Internet, digital and social media.
4.3. Herbert Marcuse, Hegelian Dialectics and Social Media
4.3.1. Soviet Marxism’s Passive Dialectics
Stalinist, Maoist and negative dialectics underestimate the role of human subjects in dialectical processes (Fuchs 2011, chapter 2). They reduce dialectics to a structuralist-functionalist scheme that dominates the will of humans who, it is argued by dogmatic dialecticians, cannot shape the dialectic. ‘Soviet Marxism subjugates the subjective to the objective factors in a manner which transforms the dialectical into a mechanistic process’ (Marcuse 1955a, 89; see also Marcuse 1958). In order to avoid a deterministic dialectic, a conception is needed that is based on the dialectic of subject and object, human actors and social structures. Such a conception can be found implicitly in the philosophical writings of Marx and was in the twentieth century explicitly formulated against deterministic interpretations of Marx by Marcuse. Marcuse opposed passive dialectics by active dialectics – dialectics as the art of ‘not getting captured by the contradictions, but to translate them possibly into directed moving forces’ (Haug 2007, 12).
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Critical Theory of Communication