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

According to this view, to talk about digital technology is both transparent and instructive. It is transparent because the discourse on technology is merely a reflection of the realities of digital technology (to say, for example, that network technology allows flexibility and interactivity is to merely state the obvious). It is instructive because the discourse ultimately describes the operation of society (e.g., the flexibility of digital technology creates a flexible economy). However, I argue here, the discourse on technology is not a transparent vignette on reality but rather a particular outlook on it and is therefore worthy of analysis in its own right. Moreover, technology not only constitutes the material foundations of modern societies but also functions as its legitimation. The prevailing outlook regarding the relationship between technology and society is partial and, as such, ideological as well. It is the ideological nature of these relationships between (a new network) technology and (a new, post-Fordist) capitalism that I want to make the center of my investigation.

Historical Transformations in Technology Discourse

This book offers an inquiry into the contemporary discourse on network technology in advanced capitalist societies—in short, the digital discourse—that is located between a new capitalism and a new technology. I will argue that the sociopolitical constellation of our current network society is the result not only of economic and technological transformations but also of ideological transformations. That technology functions ideologically in modern societies is evident at almost all social levels, from the cultural realm where technological gadgets and engineering feats are celebrated and seen as pinnacles of the human spirit, to the political realm where instrumental reason reigns and technological means overwhelm substantive rationality.

But beyond this general critique of a technologistic outlook are the particular forms of technology discourse that are historically and sociologically contingent. Hence, while technology discourse can be said to function ideologically, its particular role and content are dependent upon specific social constellations and are variably integrated into the political culture of modern societies. At the center of this book is the argument that the role of technology as a legitimation discourse has gone through radical transformations concurrent with the transformations of capitalism in the last few decades. During Fordism, technology discourse legitimated the interventionist welfare state, the central planning in businesses and the economy, the hierarchized corporation, and the tenured worker. However, during our contemporary, post-Fordist society, technology discourse legitimates instead the withdrawal of the state from markets, the globalization of the economy, the dehierarchization and decentralization of businesses, and the flexibilization of production and the labor process. This new legitimation discourse of technology marks a transformation in the spirit of capitalism (Weber 1958) to use Max Weber’s famous expression, from its industrial phase, which emphasizes the capacity of capitalism to bring about social emancipation by alleviating exploitation, to its postindustrial spirit-of-networks phase, which focuses on the capacity of capitalism to enhance individual emancipation by alleviating alienation.

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Bringing together ideas from the Frankfurt School’s critique of instrumental reason and technocratic legitimation with Boltanski and Chiapello’s recent revival of a critical economic sociology, I argue that the legitimation of capitalism and its transformations are closely intertwined with the critique of capitalism in general and technology in particular. That is, that the shift from a Fordist to post-Fordist society has also entailed a shift in the legitimation discourse of technology. During Fordism, technology served to legitimate a regime of accumulation that favored a response to the social critique of capitalism while downplaying, and even ignoring, the humanist critique of capitalism. Industrial technology, the assembly line, the bureaucratic corporation, the statist regulation of the economy, and the provision of welfare were all conceived in technology discourse during Fordism as techniques and technologies that respond to concerns put forth by the social critique, such as social security, stability, and equality—that is, those geared toward mitigating exploitation.

Hence the critique of Fordism targeted precisely the oppressive nature of the administered state and the bureaucratic corporation, the loss of personal authenticity, and the de-eroticization of the productive process, that is, the harmful ramifications of Fordism and industrial machines and techniques in terms of alienation. One of the brilliant articulations of that type of critique of industrial capitalism appears in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936). The poor tramp finds it hard to keep up with the pace of work, which is dictated by the assembly line, gets hit by a feeding machine, which is supposed to make his work more efficient by cutting out his lunch breaks, and is ultimately swallowed up by the machine and gets integrated into the clockwork that propels the industry. According to this prominent critique, the rationalization of society by technological means may have oiled the wheels of capitalism, but that came at the price of hindering personal freedom and creativity, alienating workers, and, more generally, creating a centralized, bureaucratized society.

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With post-Fordism and with the development and integration of network technology into virtually all spheres of life, technology discourse has come to legitimate a new social regime that responds to the humanist critique of capitalism, while it downplays the social critique. Network technology (primarily the Internet), the lean and decentralized corporation, and flexible modes of employment and production are all conceived in the discourse on network technology during post-Fordism (i.e., the digital discourse) as technologies that respond to concerns put forth by the humanist critique, such as individual empowerment, authenticity, and creativity—that is, those geared toward mitigating alienation.

The ramifications of these transformations go beyond the relatively limited scope of a technological sphere, or even that of capitalism. Rather, they should be understood within the wider scope of the constellation of power and the political culture of the post–World War years of Western capitalist societies. While the discourse on industrial technology during Fordism was used to legitimize the social compact between capital, labor, and the state, the discourse on network technology during post-Fordism legitimizes precisely the decomposition of this compact and the constitution of its alternative: privatized relations within the context of a global market and civil society. The two political cultures of Fordism and post-Fordism should also be distinguished by the very different political significance they assign to technology in society. While Fordism extolled the power of technology in the name of social equality and stability as a public and political project, post-Fordism extols the power of technology in the name of individual authenticity and liberation as a private and apolitical (or postpolitical) enterprise.

The articulation and substantiation of these arguments is the task of this book. Part I lays out in further detail the theoretical, sociological, and empirical foundations. Chapter 1 locates the transformations in technology discourse within the contours of the legitimation of capitalism in general and lays out the theoretical foundations for the study of technology discourse as a legitimation discourse. It then presents the main transformations in capitalism in the last few decades along two lines: a shift in the mode of accumulation from the Fordist phase of capitalism to its flexible, post-Fordist phase and a shift in the mode of regulation encompassing a new constellation of power between three central social actors: labor, capital, and the state. The chapter concludes by tying the arguments together around the notion of the “spirit of networks,” which characterizes our contemporary brand of techno-capitalism.

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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age

The book offers not only a theoretical framework to account for the new spirit of networks but also a detailed empirical account of one of the most crystallized voices of the digital discourse—Wired magazine. Chapter 2 discusses the centrality of the digital discourse in contemporary public discourse and establishes the centrality of Wired in the emerging digital discourse in contemporary political culture and, hence, its adequacy as a case study of the digital discourse.

Four Loci of Network Capitalism

The digital discourse is crystallized around four key transformative sites at the intersection of network technology and the new, post-Fordist capitalism: the market, the world of work, production, and the conception of humans. The analysis of these sites is presented in Part II of the book. Chapter 3 examines the discourse at the intersection of network technology and the market. According to the digital discourse, as markets are integrated into network technology they become more frictionless and rational, demand almost no external political regulation, become more chaotic and unstable, and, in turn, require nodes—both individuals and companies—to be flexible and adaptive to an ever-changing environment. These narratives describing a network market are understood to be an ideological articulation of the transformation from the embedded liberalism of the Fordist era to the neoliberalism of the post-Fordist era. Within a technologistic framework, this discourse legitimates the trend whereby markets become more autonomous and disembedded from social regulation and are seen as an ideal mechanism for the administration of social reproduction.

Through a comparison of the digital discourse (centered on technological arguments) and the explicit neoliberal discourse (centered on economic arguments), Chapter 3 deconstructs the ideological foundations of the notion of network markets in the digital discourse. In the digital discourse, the notion of networks is rooted and constructed within the paradigm of markets—that is, as a template to understand not only economic markets but also society as a market. Set within the theoretical framework of this book, this chapter argues that the discourse on network markets legitimizes and depoliticizes the withdrawal of the Keynesian welfare state and the emergence of a new regime of neoliberalism. The chapter also serves as a general introduction to the key words that dominate the digital discourse as a whole, such as network rationality, spontaneous order, chaos, decentralization, and dehierarchization.

Markets are not the only systems transformed by network technology: the whole system of production changes as well. The analysis of the digital discourse on these transformations is presented in the next two chapters. Chapter 4 examines the digital discourse at the intersection of network technology and the world of work. According to the digital discourse, as the traditional world of work is integrated into network technology, the boundaries between work life and personal life become indistinguishable; work space and work time are intermingled with their private, personal counterparts. These novelties allow workers to bring their personal, lifeworld qualities of creativity, intimate relationships, and deep personal engagement to bear on their work activities and reeroticize the disenchanted world of (industrial) work. They also render the workplace flat—that is, decentralized and dehierarchized—and eradicate hierarchies between workers and managers and owners. What results is a regime of meritocracy and professionalism based on one’s proficiency with network technology. These narratives of network work signal a radical break from the narratives of work alienation in the bureaucratized organization. Network technology is situated at the pivotal axis of rendering work—the work process, work relations, and the workplace—more humane and more liberating for the worker.

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At the macro level, these narratives also signal a shift from a Fordist discourse of class to a post-Fordist discourse of networks. In the discourse of networks, individuals are construed as autonomous nodes and defined by their connections to other nodes in the network; the social is seen as a flat, decentralized sphere of ever-flowing, multiple, and ad hoc assemblages. This is a stark contrast to the Fordist conception of the social sphere as consisting of a hierarchized, stable, and category-defined arena. While the discourse of class stresses structural power relations, the discourse of networks is devoid of such forms of power (except, admittedly, the lack of power that results from being cut off from the network, i.e., being at the dark side of the digital divide) and instead associates power with the characteristics of autonomous nodes (i.e., power resulting from ingenuity and entrepreneurship). In the same vein, the central mode of social action in the discourse on networks is that of cooperation rather than struggle or competition, which characterizes the discourse on class. Hence, the notion of network work and its grounding in a technological reality allow for the substitution of a hierarchical, competitive, and antagonistic model of class by a dehierarchized, cooperative, agreeable, and inherently inclusive model of networks (at least in the long run, once the digital divide is bridged).

While Chapter 4 focuses on the ramifications of network technology for the traditional (or industrial) world of work, mostly within the confines of the “company,” or the “workplace,” Chapter 5 focuses on new forms of work and production brought about by network technology and taking place outside of these traditional sites. Chapter 5 examines the digital discourse at the intersection of network technology and the process of production. The integration of production into network technology results in the blurring of the boundaries between companies and the network and between producers and consumers. The network becomes the prime locus and axial coordinator of production, replacing the company, the workplace, and the assembly line. It facilitates new productive modes that are predicated on the ability to harness the working power of autonomous and dispersed nodes into the productive process.

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From the point of view of individuals, these new productive modes allow more people to engage more meaningfully with—and to bring their skills, talents, and passions to bear more fully upon—the productive process. The productive process becomes more democratic and collaborative and is geared more fully toward personal fulfillment of the lifeworld rather than toward the fulfillment of system’s ends. Moreover, network production makes possible the perfect fusion of the needs of personal emancipation with the system’s needs of capitalism. These narratives amount to a discourse where the very notions of work, workers, and certainly the working class are undermined and in fact eliminated. Work is reconceptualized as an eroticized, playful activity of production and consumption, involving creativity, deep engagement, interactivity, and interpersonal communication. Likewise, the category of worker is substituted by a new category of the prosumer: an individual and autonomous unit of production, consumption, and entrepreneurship. Therefore, the discourse on network production legitimizes a shift to a post-Fordist organization of labor and production. The sites where the social organization of work during Fordism were contained and anchored—the company, the union, the professional, and the cadre—are rendered obsolete with the emergence of the prosumer. At the same time that work becomes more meaningful and humane, allowing greater outlet for personal potential and harnessing amateurish skills and leisure time into social reproduction, it also becomes more privatized and individualized, shifting more risks from capital to labor and dismantling the social buffer zone offered during Fordism—a buffer zone that favored social equity and personal security over the development of individual potential. The digital discourse presents network production as making the production process both more democratic and more engaging and, at the same time, undermining the institutional arrangements that made those processes more stable and protective. As such, the digital discourse is understood here to legitimate more flexible and precarious employment arrangements, which have become pervasive in post-Fordist capitalism.

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The transformations in the discourse on the network market, network work, and network production lead to and are dependent on a fundamental shift in the perception of the individual, that is, how humans are perceived and understood in the context of a technological revolution. The perception of humans is intimately linked with the dominant technology with which humans engage (either in production or communication) and is therefore historically contingent and changes concurrent with technological transformations. Chapter 6, therefore, examines the digital discourse at the intersection of network technology and the individual. In this discourse, humans are understood to share the same essence and characteristics of network technology: both are seen as technologies that store and process information, and both are deemed to be flexible and indeterminate. The commensurability of network technology and humans allows them to interact more tightly and even converge. The integration of humans into network technology results in a new conception of the individual as network and cyborg. The blurring of the boundaries between humans and network technology allows for a more meaningful, emancipatory, and natural interaction of humans with the technology and unleashes the emancipatory potential of humans: their intellectual, psychological, and communicative abilities. The network human is seen as an emancipated version of the previous industrial human: the network human is now able to engage with the technology and harness his mental skills for network production. This contrasts with the industrial human, who was dominated by technology and was able to harness merely her physical and manual skills for industrial production.

These narratives are weaving a spirit of networks for post-Fordist society. Humans are reconceptualized to fit within the new mode of production: contrary to the Fordist human characterized by spatial and temporal bodily presence and physicality, the post-Fordist human is characterized by virtuality and disembodiment. The post-Fordist human—her body, mind, and identity—are informational, hence flexible and multiple. Network technology is thus seen as a response to the humanist critique regarding authenticity; network technology complements the network human.

The Political Culture of Network Capitalism

Together, the narratives of the digital discourse explored in Part II of the book amount, I contend, to a new spirit of networks that legitimizes the new constellation of power that characterizes post-Fordist society: the withdrawal of the state from the planning, management, and regulation of the economy and from its welfare obligations; the move from a national, protective economy to a globalized, deregulated, and unitary market; the privatization of work; the eradication of work and the working class as viable social categories; the disembeddedness (a term coined by Karl Polanyi) of markets from society or, more specifically, the insulation of the economy from the democratic political process; new employment schemes that are more precarious and flexible; a new, decentralized, dehierarchized disciplinary regime of production; a shift to a placid and technocratic political discourse of a classless society, devoid of antagonism and contradictions; the increased flexibility of working life and of labor processes; and the depolitization of economic affairs as technical, technological, and instrumental.

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Part III of the book is comprised of two concluding discussions that articulate two broad sociological and theoretical dimensions of the digital discourse. Chapter 7 defines and explains the technologistic underpinnings of the discourse on network technology. It presents the new cosmology of network technology that prevails in the digital discourse and asks—in the context of the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism—what is the social meaning of a discourse that revolves on technology as its axis of understanding and presentation?

This chapter not only adds another floor to the structure of the digital discourse constructed thus far but also runs across the previous floors like a beam and therefore brings us closer to the conclusion of this book. According to the digital discourse, network technology constitutes the teleological climax of the history of not only technological progress but also information, binarism, and indeed the universe. The new realities of network markets, network work, network production, and network humans discussed in Part II, which are in turn predicated on the realities of network technology—flexibility, adaptability, dehierarchization, decentralization, self-regulation, individualization, communication, spontaneous order, and so forth, represent a technological (and, in turn, social) revolution in the original sense of the word: a return to the very essence of nature and the universe. This is portrayed in stark contrast to industrial technology, which represented a breaking away from nature.

The spirit of networks is not simply a discourse about the overcoming of the discontents of industrial technology and the industrial condition (alienation, centralization, environmental degradation, and so forth) by network technology. More than that, it is a discourse about our late capitalist civilization, our human condition, our society representing the end of history (Fukuyama 1992). This staple of contemporary political culture in advanced capitalist societies—epitomized in the maxim (at once both postideological and programmatic) “There is no alternative,” famously coined by Margaret Thatcher—receives technological clothing in the form of network cosmology. Network cosmology provides a technological validation for the crisis of ideological critique in the political culture of capitalist societies, that is, the widespread belief that such critique is futile and that we are living in a postideological time defined in fact by technology, not ideology.

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Chapter 8 recapitulates the central narratives of the digital discourse about contemporary society, demonstrates how these narratives crystallize into a coherent “spirit of networks,” and situates this spirit within the broader context of contemporary political culture, specifically the discursive shifts that have been occurring in the last four decades—shifts from distribution to recognition, from equality to diversity, from political economy to identity politics, and from the social critique to the humanist critique of capitalism.

The digital discourse, I argue, represents a radical transformation in the techno-political culture between modernity and postmodernity. While the political metanarrative of modernity and, more specifically, the modern welfare state has been that of promise, in postmodernity political action has been reconstrued as a necessity and unavoidable adjustment. No longer is politics the management of social projects; now it is a degovernmentalization of the state. In this context the digital discourse offers a new technological metanarrative of postmodernity, which stands in stark contrast to that of the modernist era. During modernity, the discourse on technology delivered a utopia of planning, control, and proactivity; it situated technology as the axis of a sociopolitical project. The new metanarrative of technology during postmodernity is one of technology as a tool for flexibility, adaptability, and reactivity. In addition, this chapter offers concluding discussions regarding contemporary political culture and the role that the discourse on technology plays in it.

The New Spirit of Techno-capitalism

To conclude, at the center of this book is the argument that network technology has helped bring about a social revolution not only by its instrumental, functional, and material force but also by its discursive force. The discourse on network technology has been a centerpiece in the legitimation of the transformation of advanced capitalist societies from Fordism to post-Fordism. The extraordinary social, economic, political, cultural, and personal ramifications of this social revolution are given in this discourse a technologically centered framework that renders those transformations neutral, natural, inevitable, and benevolent. In the digital discourse, network technology is constructed as the axial factor that allows for the overcoming of the core problems associated with industrial,

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Fordist society: the bureaucratic organization of work, the heavy-handed interventionist state, the diminishing levels of economic growth, the preeminence of collective interests over personal freedom, the drudgery of industrial work and its incompatibility with humans’ diverse capabilities and needs, and the political culture of competing ideological viewpoints. The integration of network technology into markets and into the process of production allows for the materialization of a friction-free, global, self-regulated market (overcoming national markets hindered by interventionist states); the mobilization of information and networks as new forces of production (overcoming limits to economic growth); the dehierarchization and decentralization of the workplace and the work process (overcoming disenchanting bureaucratic organization and class conflict); and the rendering of work as a creative, cooperative, and personally satisfying process (overcoming alienation from the labor process). Finally, this techno-social constellation of a strong market, a weak state, an empowered individual, and a privatized social sphere is presented as the pinnacle of human progress and as an apolitical situation that has no political alternatives and is hence heralded as the end of history.

The spirit of networks is the new spirit of contemporary techno-capitalism, offering a technologistic framework to the structural transformations of capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism. This hegemonic discourse offers both a critique of Fordist society and its techno-political culture of social empowerment and the overcoming of exploitation, and an affirmation and legitimation of post-Fordist society and its technopolitical culture of individual empowerment and the overcoming of alienation. But as this book shows, while contemporary digital discourse is explicitly critical and emancipatory, it is in fact implicitly the hegemonic discourse of contemporary network capitalism par excellence, legitimating a new trade-off between social emancipation and personal emancipation.

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