Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks

Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

The Spirit of Networks

Eran Fisher

Media and New Capitalism

in the Digital Age

Media and New Capitalism

in the Digital Age

The Spirit of Networks

Eran Fisher

palgrave macmillan

media and new capitalism in the digital age
Copyright © Eran Fisher, 2010.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2010 978-0-230-61607-3

All rights reserved.

First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN 978-1-349-37974-3 ISBN 978-0-230-10606-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230106062

Fisher, Eran. Fisher, Eran.

Media and new capitalism in the digital age : the spirit of networks / by Eran Fisher. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-61607-3

1. Information technology—Social aspects. 2. Information technology— Economic aspects. 3. Technological innovations—Social aspects. 4. Technological innovations—Economic aspects. 5. Capitalism—Social aspects. I. Title.

HM851.F575 2010
303.48'33—dc22

2009023181

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: April 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Permission to reprint Fisher, Eran. “The Classless Workplace: The Digerati and the New Spirit of Technocapitalism.” Working USA: The Journal of Labor and Society 11 no. 2 (June 2008): 181–98.

Permission to reprint Fisher, Eran. “From Safety Net to the Internet: The Discourse on Network Production in Post-Fordist Society.” In New Media and Innovative Technologies, edited by Tal Azran and Dan Caspi, 98–131. Be’er Sheva: Ben-Gurion University Press, 2007.

Permission to re-print Fisher, Eran. “‘Upgrading’ Market Legitimation: Revisiting Habermas’s ‘Technology as Ideology’ in Neoliberal Times.” Fast Capitalism 2, no. 2 (2007), http://fastcapitalism.com/.

To my mother and father, with love and gratitude

Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Technology Discourse and Capitalist Legitimation 1
I 13
Capitalism, Technology, and the Digital Discourse 15
2 Contemporary Technology Discourse 29
II 43
3 Network Market 45
4 Network Work 81
5 Network Production 107
6 Network Human 145
III 181
7 Network Cosmology and the Exhaustion of Critique 183
8 Networks as the Techno-political Culture of Post-Fordism 211
Notes 229
References 233
Index 247

Illustrations

Figures

4.1 Marx’s formulation of the mode of production as
constituted by the dialectical relationship between
productive forces and productive relations 82
4.2 Bell’s formulation of the mode of production as
determined by two independent factors: productive
forces and productive relations 103
5.1 The superior smartness of the network is conditioned,
according to the digital discourse, by tracing the
source of both the digital discourse and flexible
employment schemes to network technology. 125
5.2 Reserve Army ofEnthusiasts. Cover, Wired, February 2006 131
6.1 Inside/out, outside/in. Artwork by Alba D’Urbano 147
6.2 “Penelope Umbrico and Lila and Rebecca Cohn.”
Artwork by Matthew Pillsbury 155
7.1 Wired to God? Cover, Wired, December 2002 202

Tables

1.1 Two types of critiques of capitalism 24
5.1 Summary of signifiers for workers in network production
in four articles in Wired magazine 129
7.1 The logical assumptions of the technology-nature
society thesis 187
8.1 Key coordinates in the transformation from the Fordist
to the post-Fordist phase of capitalism 220

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped make this endeavor possible, enjoyable, and worthwhile, and it is a pleasure for me to thank them for their friendship and support.

First among them is Efrat Eizenberg, who has been my companion at every twist and turn and whose limitless friendship and support has been my main source of comfort.

Thanks to my family for their unwavering support and encouragement. My first and foremost teachers: my wonderful sister Orit Feinstein, and my mom and dad, Rina and Karol Fisher, for whom I dedicate the book. Thanks also to Lior, Noa, and Nadav Feinstein; Nilli and Hezi Eizenberg; Elad Eizenberg and Nicole Sears; and Ahuva, Tali, Moshe, and Keren Plosker. Lastly I want to acknowledge the new edition to my life, my daughter Roya.

Thanks to my friends Iria Candela, Isabel Cuervo, Elinor Dahan, Nada Gligorov, Sherrie Glass, Tammy Golan, Iris Gur-Arye, Roger Hart, Tsai-Shiu Hsieh, Haddassa and Marion Kosak, Racheli and Amir Kraus, Nicholas Leclercq, Oren Orevi, Ilya Ram, Solen Sanli, Nava Schreiber, Barry Spunt, Moran and Ari Tenenbaum, Zeynep Turan, Didem Yilmaz, Dvora Zak, and Dana Zelinger. Thanks to my friends at the New School, Yuri Contreras and Yoav Mehozay, who have read and commented on parts of this work and were always there to offer encouragement and advice. And to my dear friends Guy Abutbul and Breixo Viejo—with humor and wisdom, they always managed to calm my fears and concerns without ever taking them lightly.

This book began as a doctorate dissertation at the Department of Sociology at the New School for Social Research in New York. At the New School for Social Research, I would like to thank Jeffrey Goldfarb for his support of my project. Thanks to Paolo Carpignano, my dissertation advisor, who has been immensely supportive and encouraging and provided invaluable professional feedback. Special thanks to Stanley Aronowitz of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York for willing to be part of the dissertation committee. It was a great privilege to have him contribute his academic expertise and exhilarating personality.

The publication of this book has been supported by a research grant from the Department of Behavioral Science, The College of Management-Academic Studies in Israel. I want to thank the department and especially Amir Ben-Porat and Tova Bensky for their generous support. I would also like to thank my editors at Palgrave, Julia Cohen and Samantha Hasey, for their professional support and personal courtesy.

I would like to thank my teacher and friend, Yishai Tobin of Ben-Gurion University in Israel, who facilitated my first steps as an aspiring scholar over a decade ago and has not withheld his generous support and care ever since.

Lastly, I want to thank Uri Ram, of Ben-Gurion University and The New School, whose influence and contribution to my scholarly upbringing and to this work in particular is immeasurable. I am deeply thankful for his generosity, thoughtfulness, and sincerity and for his friendship.

xii

Acknowledgments

I N T R O D _U C T I O N

Technology Discourse and Capitalist Legitimation

Technology and Society

Society in the last four decades has witnessed two extraordinary transformations in advanced capitalism. One is the transformation of capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism, involving changes not only in the regime of accumulation—that is, in how production is carried out, where, and by whom—but also in the mode of social regulation, entailing a whole set of political arrangements and cultural practices. This has been a deep social transformation: globalization, the “new economy,” Google, outsourcing, “just-in-time” production, the rise of India—these are just few of the new keywords in the lexicon of the new capitalism. The other transformation was the emergence of network technology (or information and communication technology) and its integration into virtually every sphere of life. This has been nothing short of a technological revolution: indeed, many of the keywords in the lexicon of the new technology parallel those of the new capitalism.

The question then arises: what is the nature of this close affinity between new capitalism and new technology? The answer seems straightforward: a new technology enables a new society. Globalization is carried over networks of communication. The “new economy” is essentially all about new businesses and consumer products centered on the value of information. Google epitomizes such a business model. Outsourcing and “just-in-time” production are hard to imagine as viable economic practices without network technology. India owes its rise as a capitalist miracle to customer-service call centers in Bangalore and to the surge in the number of software engineers and global hubs for the high-tech industry.

This outlook reflects a prevailing assumption: technology makes society. For example, such a view underlies much of the writing of prominent New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, whose image of the world today (i.e., flat and decentralized) follows the imagery of the architecture of network technology. Freidman not only employs network technology as a conceptual framework but also sees the unique features of such technology percolating into social dynamics, claiming, for example, that “the Internet offers the closest thing to a perfectly competitive market in the world today” (Friedman 2000, 81).