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# Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age The Spirit of Networks
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The emerging discourse on the industrial human at the beginning of the twentieth century was intertwined with practices that in effect created a new type of human, of which Gramsci talked. Rabinbach tells of how “the emergence of a physiological approach to labor coincided with important changes in work during Europe’s second industrial revolution,” which involved the introduction of “electric power, of steel and chemical steel and chemical production, and of the rise of industries producing heavy machinery” (Rabinbach 1992, 122). The new factory introduced new types of workers (unskilled immigrants, leading to rapid turnover) and a new labor process that eliminated craftsmanship and was determined by new technologies (Rabinbach 1992, 123; see also Noble 1984). Discourses, as Foucault has taught us, are practices “that systematically constitute the subjects and objects of which they speak” (Schwandt 2001, 58).
THE INTEGRATION OF HUMANS INTO NETWORK CAPITALISM
This theoretical framework and historical precedents should encourage us to highlight the compatibility of the network human to contemporary capitalism. In light of the detailed description of the digital discourse in the previous chapters of Part II, these should render the compatibility almost self-evident: a network market, network work, and network production require the reconceptualization of humans as commensurable with network technology as informational, flexible, and distributed and as nodes in a techno-human network.
One of the corollaries of the network human’s inessentiality and flexibility is the understanding of humans as constructed, indeterminate, unstable, and multiple. These can be conceived as prescriptive characteristics for successfully living in the network (and for becoming, in Boltanski and Chiapello’s terms, “a great man,” [2005, 112–21]), as they are a description of the true essence of humans. This can be exemplified with the changing work ethics of the new capitalism. The new, flexible, and networked capitalism demands workers to constantly move between multiple tasks and ad hoc projects that demand multiple and varying skills. The old work ethics of apprenticeship and ever-deepening craftsmanship in a single skill is therefore replaced by an ethics of superficiality and multiplicity (Sennet 2000, 98–117, 2006, 83–115). Under these new circumstances, characteristics such as “proficiency” and “understanding” receive a new meaning. In the aforementioned article by Sherrie Turkle, she introduces us to the subjective experience of thirteen-year-old Tim, a gamer of the virtual reality game SimCity: “The goal [of the game] is to make a successful whole from complex, interrelated parts . . . The game is about making choices and getting feedback . . . [about] zoning restriction and economic development, pollution controls and housing starts” (Turkle 1996).
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Tim, in other words, learns multitasking, which involves working in multiple sites with only superficial understanding and minimal skills. Tim, says Turkle “is able to act on a vague intuitive sense of what will work even when he doesn’t have a verifiable model of the rules underneath the game’s behavior . . . Tim can keep playing even when he has no idea what is driving events.” Note the following exchange between Turkle and Tim, after she asks him why one of the species of his virtual planet became extinct:
Tim: I don’t know, it’s just something that happens.
Turkle: Do you know how to find out why it happened?
Tim: No.
Turkle: Do you mind that you can’t tell why?
Tim: No. I don’t let things like that bother me. It’s not what’s important.” (Turkle 1996)
After the game sends Tim a message, “your orgot is being eaten up,” Turkle asks him “‘What’s an orgot?’ He doesn’t know. ‘I just ignore that’, he says. ‘You don’t need to know that kind of stuff to play’.” Later Tim has to appease Turkle again, saying “Don’t let it bother you if you don’t understand. I just say to myself that I probably won’t be able to understand the whole game any time soon. So I just play it” (Turkle 1996). Turkle celebrates Tim’s approach as a sign for a new liberated human; after all, humans are natural multitaskers, adaptable, flexible, and pragmatic.
The compatibility of the network human to network capitalism is evident also in the discourse on prosumption. Chapter 5 registered the construction of prosumption (as a process) and prosumers (as a social category) and elucidated the significance of these in the context of the new capitalism. The discourse on the network human further cements these categories with the narratives pertaining to the commensurability of humans and network technology. Commensurability interjects humans into the loop of production and consumption in a radically intimate fashion. The network human is in fact constructed as a site of prosumption. Through commensurability and distribution, the body, self, and identity are reconstituted as sites not simply of independent practices of production and consumption but of prosumption (Lowe 1995). Such an intimate human-technology loop is described, for example, in the aforementioned Wired article on Mattew Nagle (Martin 2005). The implication of the blurred boundaries between humans and network technology is that intelligence, creativity, self, identity, and experience are not limited to the demarcated structure of the human but overflow to the network.
Network Human
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The list of compatibilities of the network human to the network capitalism could go on: the disembodiment and distribution of the network human (i.e., the separation of thoughts, feelings, and experiences from the body) and network capitalism’s demand for work to be performed everywhere; the network human’s fragmentation and flexibility and the reconceptualization of worker not as a whole but as a part of a business project; and the underdetermination and instability of network identity and the demands for constant flexibility and adaptability to system’s needs.
Reconstructing the narratives of the information revolution through an examination of the “visions,” or Technomanifestos (Brate 2002) of some of its protagonists, such as Norbert Wiener and Alan Turing, Adam Brate (2002) notes that “the goal of the information revolutionaries [was] to create new systems—technological, social, political, and economic—that adapt to people instead of the other way around” (Brate 2002, 4). Put in the language of this book, the narratives that Brate registers assign network technology with the purpose of creating a new human that transcends the industrial human. In a similar fashion, albeit critically, Jodi Dean sums up this project thus: “Technoculture is an ideological formation that uses democracy, creativity, access, and interconnection to produce the subjectivities of communicative capitalism” (Dean 2002, 103).
Informationalization, disembodiment, distribution, fragmentation, inessentiality, instability, flexibility, interactivity, play—according to the digital discourse, it is precisely these authentic human potentialities that industrial-mechanical technology suppressed and can now be unleashed and flourish with network technology. These are also the human characteristics that, as Dean (2002) points out, render the new kind of network capitalism possible.
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Part III
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C H A P T E R 7
Network Cosmology and the Exhaustion of Critique
Part II of the book offered an analysis of the digital discourse pertaining to the intersection of network technology with key sites of the new capitalism: the market, work, production, and the human. It underscored how the digital discourse constructs a spirit of networks that legitimizes new constellations of power, new modes of work, new relations of production, and new ways of being. Part III of the book offers two concluding discussions that highlight two theoretical and sociological dimensions of the digital discourse. Chapter 7 registers and explains the technologistic facet of the discourse on network technology. It further asks, “What is the social meaning of a discourse that revolves on technology as its axis of understanding and presentation?” Chapter 8 summarizes the main findings of the book, reiterates its central arguments, and delves into the ideological and political dimensions of the digital discourse as the new spirit of network capitalism.
After the four previous chapters examined central loci of the digital discourse concerning the new capitalism, we turn now to another level of analysis. Here, I focus not on the socially informed themes of the digital discourse but on the technologically informed framework with which these themes are analyzed. To use a metaphor, this chapter focuses not on the bodies of knowledge on which the digital discourse operates but rather on the scalpels it is using. The chapter cuts across the substantive themes of the previous four chapters in order to uncover the underlying epistemological coordinates of the technologically centered discourse of the digital discourse. As such, it also serves as one of the two concluding chapters of this book.
This chapter examines the digital discourse on what I call the cosmology of network technology, that is, the discourse on the ontological, historical, and social status of network technology itself. We have seen network technology starring in the leading role of almost every article in Wired. It is, as I have indicated in Chapter 2, the raison d’être of the magazine: to capture the world through the prism of network technology. Underlying this description of the world is a particular theory, or a set of assumptions about the nature of network technology, the relations between technology and society, and most importantly, about the nature of society itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The purpose of this chapter is to present and analyze this theory and uncover the assumptions about network technology that underlie and inform the digital discourse’s analysis of the digital society.
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At the foundations of such cosmology is an answer to “the question concerning technology,” as Heidegger puts it (1977): what is technology, or, more sociologically speaking, what are the relations between technology and society? The answer—both in the social sciences and in public discourse— has overwhelmingly been that technology is the chief agent of social change, that is, that technology makes society (Murphie and Potts 2003, 11). This view—termed by Robins and Webster as “technologism” (1999), that is, making technology the axis of social explanation—makes three assumptions:
1. Neutrality. Technology has a history of its own, and its development stems from an internal dynamic; in that sense, it is an asocial force, external to social power struggles. The development of technology is seen as stemming from an internal logic. Technology comes into being in a sphere external to society. This is a Machina ex Deus approach, which perceives technology to be the love child of technology, stemming from thin air or the otherwise nonsocial. The genius inventor, struggling in his (and, rarely, her) laboratory to come up with an invention—usually for the sake of innovation itself—is an epitome of that perception. According to that, in order to understand technology we need to adopt an “internalist” approach (Bijker 1995, 9–10), that is, we need to examine its minute technical details. Technology is fetishized (Robins and Webster 1999, 51–53) as a force completely autonomous from society (Webster 1991, 1). Since technologies are conceived as having their own autonomous functional logic they can therefore be explained and analyzed without reference to the “external,” or social factors (Feenberg 1995).
2. Inevitability. Technology largely and unidirectionally determines the shape of society, reconfiguring it in accordance with its internal working; once a technology is presented and adopted by society, it generates an outcome, which is inscribed in the essence of that technology. It might not always be forecasted, but social change can always be traced back to technological factors. According to this proposition, technology is an autonomous entity (Winner 1977) that drives history (see Smith and Marx 1994). Thus, technology is perceived as a fait accomplis, something to which society has to adopt passively. The reaction to technology can only be conceived within a dichotomous framework of “love it or leave it” (Feenberg 1991).
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3. Benevolence. Technological progress is human progress; it is positive and benign in and of itself. Some formulations go so far as suggesting that only technology can promise human and social transcendence; progress is technological advancement, hence the longstanding strand of technological utopianism in the most technologically advanced societies (Segal 1985). This makes critical views of technology especially difficult to voice, since they are automatically framed as conservative, romantic, and reactionary, or—the designated derogatory—Luddite (Robins and Webster 1999, 39–41; Postman 1993, 43).
This chapter presents the digital discourse on network cosmology along three narratives. These narratives both echo the tenets of technologism in general and update them to the specificities of network technology. The digital discourse, the chapter shows, naturalizes, theologizes, and teleologizes network technology. It argues that network technology is more akin to nature than any previous technological paradigms. With the added premise that technology largely determines society (so that technological characteristics are inscribed in society), it creates a trinity whereby society itself is presumed to take on a more natural form with network technology being the medium between the natural and the social.
Related to the rhetoric of naturalization is the idea that technology offers a form of transcendence almost spiritual and religious in nature. According to this theological narrative, the increased digitalization and networking of social life (i.e., its rationalization) does not entail a process of disenchantment (the hallmark of rationalization during industrial technology) but rather offers a road to transcendence. As Weber’s “iron cage” (Weber 1958) becomes digitized and networked, it also wins back the soul it had lost with the emergence of industrialism. Lastly, the digital discourse constructs a cosmology in which humans recede to the background and occupy a supporting role in a new history, where technology is the protagonist. In such a history, network technology is seen as the teleological climax not simply of the history of technology but of the history of the universe. It is in this sense that technology is teleologized, that is, becomes the subject of its own history, and is dissociated from the social context within which it is developed and deployed.
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Naturalizing Technology: The Trinity of Nature, Technology, and Society
The idea that technology is the prime motor of social change is a cornerstone of technologism. It has certainly been a central thread in technology discourse throughout modernity; indeed it has been a central thread of the discourse on modernity. But in the digital discourse, this argument is made even more forcefully, upgraded from a general theory of technology, and suggested as the quintessential characteristic of network technology in particular.
According to the digital discourse, network technology is truly socially transformative, since it resembles the workings of nature more than any technological paradigm before it, specifically, more than industrial technology. By replicating the ways nature works, network technology serves as a bridge between the natural and the social, hence transforming social dynamics in ways that accord more with nature. This technology-nature theory suggests that the binary language on which information technology is founded complies with the laws of nature. In other words, the process of informationalization—that is, the process whereby the material and social world are translated into digital language and hence integrated into information technology—is not a capricious imposition of some technological or mathematical invention on the world but a long-overdue uncovering and return to the natural order of things.
In the same vein, the architecture and operational modes of the network and the communicative and organizational forms that sprout from it—such as chaos, spontaneous order, decentralization, and flexibility— are all seen as natural insofar as they replicate the workings of nature. To the degree that nature has been reified and depoliticized through much of modernity—that is, constructed as lying outside of human affairs—the association and conflation of network technology with nature is meant to depoliticize technology by quite literally naturalizing it. Table 7.1 summarizes the abstract logical assumption at the heart of the naturalization argument of the digital discourse.
It is therefore commonplace in Wired to conflate technology and nature, to find confirmations for one by its homologous affinity to the other, and to suggest that information technology is natural and, vice versa, that nature is informational. Hans Moravec, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon’s Mobile Robot Laboratory and the author of Robot (1999), goes a long way in converging biology and technology, predicting that “mechanical minds are about to replay the evolution of biological minds” (Davis 1998). The development of information technology, Moravec suggests, got on track with biological entities and their evolution, and natural evolution is now replayed in the technological domain. In the same vein, in a review of a book on the history and future of the information revolution—The Soft Edge: A Natural History and Future of the Information Revolution (Levinson 1998)—William Goggins also likens the evolution of media to biological evolution. The book, he writes in a McLuhanite language, suggests how newer communication technologies “outpaced their ancestors’ limitations, gradually extending human faculties across space and time” (Goggins 1998).
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LIFE IS INFORMATION
But the conflation of network technology and nature is more than casual and metaphoric, as evident from “Revolutionary Evolutionist” (Schrage 1995), an exposition to the work of Richard Dawkins, the author of the best-selling The Selfish Gene (1976), an oft-cited book on the pages of Wired.1 I will leave the “selfish” aspect of the argument aside and focus here on the nature and technology nexus. According to the article, Dawkins’s book argues that “living things are little more than corporal vessels impelled to heed the primal dictates of selfish genes hellbent on their own replication and propagation.” Taking this reductionism a little further, Dawkins argues that “genes themselves are expressions of particularly elegant code manipulating the world around it to its own productive end” (Schrage 1995; emphasis mine).
Life’s dynamics, Dawkins argues, are determined not at the level of “animals,” “beings,” or “society” but at the much simpler and smaller level of genes, which are nothing more than an informational code. “All life,” he argues, “at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer” (Schrage 1995). Information and communication are the backbone not simply of computer programs, social life, or global financial institutions; they are in fact the backbone of life itself. Dawkins’s theory shifts the focus “away from the individual animal as the unit of evolution” to the gene and to the group (or network) communication of genes. He concludes that the way genes behave over time “is the very definition of an evolution based on the flow of information” (Schrage 1995). The article hails Dawkins for redefining “the fundamental doctrines of ‘natural selection in ways that transform the vocabulary ofevolutionary biology into the new realms ofdigital media” (Schrage 1995; emphasis mine).
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Dawkins considers his theory, which in some respects takes after Darwin’s, to be the ultimate explanation of life; that is, of both biological and social life, which are really surface phenomena of a deeper, informational code. Most significant for our discussion here, “Dawkins has been extremely effective in probing the boundaries between natural evolution and artificial evolution as created in computers” (Schrage 1995). The very distinction between natural and technological evolution is, according to Dawkins, artificial and redundant. Artificial life researchers, for example, believe that “life is an information process that can be ported from one matrix to another.” Advancements in information technology seem to facilitate such exploration and reaffirm the nature and technology nexus: “The rise of cheap processors and parallel architectures creates the ideal digital ecosystems to spawn software rather than build it. Nature—not rational cognitive planning—becomes the guiding force for the next generation of software solutions” (Schrage 1995).
Since genes cannot sufficiently explain the complexity of human life, Dawkins’s theory introduces another concept, “memes,” which are ideas, or other informational codes, that “are to cultural inheritance what genes are to biological heredity.” Human evolution can be explained as the coevolution of genes and memes. “This idea,” the author suggests, “offers a powerful intellectual framework for a new understanding of life as an information process” (Schrage 1995). In this framework, humans are redefined as mediums of coded information and its communication. The real protagonist of human social history is that which is at the heart of natural history, which in turn is exactly that which is at the heart of the digital revolution: informational code.
This, we should note, is not simply a matter of metaphors or semantics. Since models and metaphors are really all we have to grasp the world, they very much determine our view of the world, the associations we make, and the impressions that we are left with. The associations of technology with nature, of technological advances with natural history, and of digital media with natural selection reaffirm this technologistic point of view.
TECHNOLOGY AS A NATURAL FORCE
Like Dawkins, Kevin Kelly, too, equates network technology with nature and, in fact, converges natural and technological history. In Chapter 3 I dealt extensively with Kelly’s discussion regarding the social forms of the network society. Here I will focus on the technological assumptions on which these social forms are presumed to be predicated. Examples are taken from Kelly’s New Rules for the New Economy (1998). Right at the outset Kelly asserts the centrality of technology in society: “No one,” he says in the opening sentence of the book, “can escape the transforming fire of machines” (Kelly 1998, 1), and he therefore suggests applying a simple rule to understand social and economic reality: “Listen to the technology . . . find out what it is telling you,” he says (8), upholding what Bijker identifies as the “internalist” view on technology (Bijker 1995, 9–10). The socially transformative trajectory of technology, Kelly implies, lies in its internal essence and history.
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