An example of how this meta-dialectic works: in the mid to late 1990s, lots of new Internet-based businesses were emerging. Many of them attracted venture capital investments and started being listed on the stock market. A substantial amount of them struggled to make profits and with continuous losses a divergence between stock market values and real accumulation emerged. Financialisation resulted in a structural antagonism between real and virtual economic values in the Internet economy. This financial bubble exploded in 2000 and caused the so-called ‘dot-com crisis’. According to estimates, this crisis resulted in a loss of US\$5 trillion in stock market value on the NASDAQ stock exchange, on which many tech corporations’ stocks are traded.1 The structural force of the objective dialectic that resulted in the crisis compelled actors in the Internet economy to rethink and revise their economic strategies. In such situations of crisis, the future is relatively open and depends on the choices made. There would for example have been the choice that Internet corporations turn into non-profit co-operatives in order to reduce the digital economy’s crisis-proneness. Especially in situations of crisis, collective human action as the subjective dialectical force matters in determining the future. But a chance was missed. The most common reaction was rather a new capital accumulation strategy, namely to foster social media businesses that are based on targeted advertising, which has created new economic contradictions centred around the question of how profitable targeted advertising can actually be (Fuchs 2014b).
Just like Lukács and Williams and to a lesser degree Adorno, Marcuse also studies the role of cultural work in society. He adds a psychoanalytic dialectic to the analysis by exploring the relationship of play and labour. In the age of prosumption (consumption that is at the same time labour and production of commodities), the Internet and neoliberalism, the boundaries between play and labour have become blurred. Playbour has become a new management strategy and ideology. Examples are the Google ofices that look like playgrounds and have entertainment and relaxation areas, which hides the fact that the employees work very long hours (Fuchs 2014b, chapter 6). Play has become subsumed under the logic of labour exploitation, i.e. class.
Marcuse speaks of technological rationality as the attempt to turn consciousness into a machine and an instrument that legitimates domination and exploitation. What Adorno based on Horkheimer’s concept of instrumental reason terms identity thinking is in Marcuse’s theory termed one-dimensional thought. Ideology reduces the complexity of reality’s dialectics to just a single dimension.
Marcuse was particularly interested in grounding ethical foundations of critical theory. He did so with the help of Hegel’s dialectic of essence and existence. A state of afairs can only be true if its existence corresponds to its essence. Ideas that try to for example create the impression that reality and interests are diferent from what they are in essence are for example an ideology, the attempt to make reality appear diferent from its essence in order to justify dominant interests. The logic of essence in a more general understanding points towards the potentials of what society could be, its not-yet. The logic of essence can ground a critical ethics of co-operation that allows people to politically question domination and class as forms of alienation. In the world of Facebook, we are confronted with the social, whereas the commodity form is not immediately visible to the user. We do not directly experience how personal data is traded as commodity. This inverse commodity fetishism hides the commodity form behind the social. Communication’s essence appears as ideology that masks Facebook’s commodity form and the exploitation of users’ digital labour. In the world of corporate social media, exploitation is real, but tends to become invisible and only indirectly experienceable.
212
Critical Theory of Communication