{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781349379743","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","id":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","uuid":"8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks","normalized_title":"mediaandnewcapitalisminthedigitalagethespiritofnetworks","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781349379743","isbns":["9781349379743","9780230106062"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":258,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Media%20and%20New%20Capitalism%20in%20the%20Digital%20Age%20The%20Spirit%20of%20Networks","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/8a3d8546-8fbb-485e-b423-37bc08c3284a/search"},"page":{"printed_page":77,"pdf_page":81,"physical_index":81,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"47073599b6be3f1e41d78a2051de41bf8af08b5e3b919ef18c2d6a5e1f1ac830"},"chapter":"Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age","content":"“UPGRADING” HABERMAS’S MARKET LEGITIMIZATION\n\nAs we can see, technology discourse is well linked with the history of political legitimation. In his essay, “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” Habermas (1970) lays out a history of market legitimation whereby a legitimation based on the principles of political economy à la neoclassical economics, that is, on the internal workings of the market, is replaced by another, external legitimation with the emergence of the welfare social democratic state and, more broadly, the emergence of Fordist society. It is from this point onward that political practice is measured in terms of the technical problems at hand rather than in substantive terms. The role of politics is reduced to finding the technical means to achieve goals (such as economic growth) that are in themselves understood to lie outside the realm of politics (Habermas 1970, 100–103). Technology is ideological to the extent that political issues are treated as technical issues: tensions and contradictions are overcome by delimiting the scope of the political, and, as a result, the instrumental rationality of technical language colonizes the sphere of politics.\n\nHabermas writes at the zenith of Keynesianism, when the state is still very much involved in the administration of the capitalist economy. This administration of the economy is in fact the source of political legitimation. But this is politics “light,” in Habermas’s view; it is politics limited to technical administration: “Insofar as government action is directed toward the economic system’s stability and growth, politics now takes on a peculiarly negative character. For it is oriented toward the elimination of dysfunctions and the avoidance of risks that threatens the system: not, in other words, toward the realization ofpractical goals but toward the solution oftechnicalproblems” (102–3). Habermas further outlines the circular and reinforcing relations between technical rationality and politics in the context of the welfare state. Incidentally, he also launches a critique on the postindustrial thesis and its underlying technologistic bent. With minimal modifications, this description might also apply to the operation of the digital discourse in contemporary political culture:\n\nIt is true that social interests still determine the direction, functions and pace of technical progress. But these interests define the social system so much as a whole that they coincide with the interest of maintaining the system. As such the private form of capital utilization and a distribution mechanism for social rewards that guarantees the loyalty of the masses are removed from discussion. The quasi-autonomous progress of science and technology then appears as an independent variable on which the most important single system variable, namely economic growth, depends. Thus arises a perspective in which the development of the social system seems to be determined by the logic of scientific-technical progress. The immanent law of this progress seems to produce objective exigencies, which must be obeyed by any politics oriented toward functional needs. But when this semblance has taken root effectively, then propaganda can refer to the role of technology and science in order to explain and legitimate why in modern societies the process of democratic decision-making about practical problems loses its function and ‘must’ be replaced by plebiscitary decisions about alternative sets of leaders of administrative personnel [i.e., technocracy] . . . it can also become a background ideology that penetrates into the consciousness of the depoliticized mass of the population, where it can take on legitimating power. It is a singular achievement of this ideology to detach society’s self-understanding from the frame of reference of communicative action and from the concepts of symbolic interaction and replace it with a scientific model. Accordingly, the culturally defined self-understanding of a social life-world is replaced by the self-reification of men under categories of purposive-rational action and adaptive behavior. (105–6)\n\nNetwork Market\n\n77","previous_page":76,"next_page":78}