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

Part I

C H A P T E R 1

Capitalism, Technology, and the Digital Discourse

Expressions of wonder and awe in the face of new technology dominate public discourse and are indeed hard to contain. From new media technology to the Internet, from Google to global positioning systems (GPS) and cellphones—the overwhelming feeling of novelty and ingenuity embodied in these technologies—many of which are experienced firsthand by millions of individuals around the world—can easily slide toward what Vincent Mosco calls The Digital Sublime (2004), a fascination with (if not fetishization of) technology and its tremendous impact on our everyday life experience. The digital discourse is indeed precisely that body of knowledge that epitomizes this contemporary awe and the feeling that network technology changes everything, remaking society in its own image. But, as I have already pointed out in the Introduction, notwithstanding the tremendous ramifications of network technology on contemporary society, technology is not only the material basis of society but also its ideological foundation. Technology discourse is not a transparent vignette on reality but rather a direct influence on the construction of reality and is therefore worthy of analysis in its own right.

The Discourse on Technology

T_{ECHNOLOGY AND} “P_OST” T_HEORIES

I understand the discourse on technology as a cognitive map, a structure of feelings, and an episteme; that is, a body of knowledge that is inextricably intertwined with technological reality, social structures, and everyday practices (Foucault 1994; Jameson 1991; Williams 1978). The digital discourse is a public discourse that situates network technology at the center of an emancipatory social transformation. This thesis has been crystallized within a few theoretical frameworks, most notably postindustrialism, postmodernism, and posthumanism, and is the bedrock of media studies and, more recently, cyberstudies (Webster 2005). For the postindustrialists, the determining role of knowledge, information, and technology in the productive process and the corollary decline of the working class and rise of a professional-technocratic elite—bent on rational planning and affiliated with neither capitalists nor workers—also implies the substitution of a rational, technocratic political sphere for the ideological politics of class struggle and the strengthening of civil society (Bell 1999; Machlup 1962; Porat and Rubin 1977; Touraine 1971).

For the postmodernists, the dissociation between signifier and signified and the constitution of an “empire of signs” (Barthes 1982) or a “hyperreality” (Baudrillard 1983) “media-ted” (Lash 2002) by network technology is at the heart of a radical social break and a move to a new “mode of information” (Poster 1990). Like the postindustrialists, they, too, uphold the emancipatory potential of this informational transformation: liberation from grand narratives, from essentialist and authoritarian bodies of knowledge about the world, from metaphysical ontologies, and from the determination of signs (Baudrillard 1975, 1981; Foucault 2002; Lyotard 1984). In the same vein, posthumanists are excited about the constitution of new subjects defined by new advances in information and communication technology. The informationalization of the body and the networking of identities allow for a more negotiated and indeterminate construction of one’s identity, for the overcoming of essentialist categories not just in discourse but in practice, and for more degrees of freedom in choosing one’s identity, which in turn opens up new opportunities for equality, especially for previously underprivileged subjectivities, such as women (Gaggi 2003; Haraway 1991, 1997; Hayles 1997, 1999; Turkle 1997). To sum up, postindustrialists, postmodernists, and posthumanists all locate network technology at the heart of a radical break in social life that helps transcend the Achilles’ heel of industrialism, modernism, and humanism, respectively.

THREE APPROACHES TO THE RE_LATIONS BETWEEN TECHNO_LOGY AND SOCIETY

The approach I take in this book can be seen as a critique of these three prominent theoretical formulations inasmuch as I ask to shift our attention from the social effects of the materiality of technology to the social effects of the ideological facet of technology and investigate technology discourse. To understand the status of “technology discourse” as a sociological object of study, we need to locate this mode of analysis within the broader field of the social study of technology. Three theoretical approaches have been proposed to account for the relationship between technology and society. The most prevalent approach is that technology shapes society, thus framing the inquiry in terms of the effects of technology on society. Underlying this “technologistic” approach (Robins and Webster 1999) are three assumptions: neutrality—technology has a history of its own, its development stems from its internal dynamics, and it is therefore an asocial force, external to social power struggles (Bijker 1995; Robins and Webster 1985; Feenberg 1995); inevitability—technology determines the shape of society, reconfiguring it in accordance with its internal workings (Winner 1977; Smith and Marx 1994; Feenberg 1991); and benevolence—technological progress is human progress, as it is positive in and of itself (Robins and Webster 1999; Postman 1993).

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The uncovering and overcoming of these problematic assumptions (often denounced as “technological determinism”) have underpinned critical approaches to technology, which suggest that society shapes technology. Such approaches seek to introduce social coordinates into the analysis of technology construction, dissemination, and use.¹ These critical approaches share “an insistence that the ‘black-box’ of technology must be opened, to allow the socio-economic patterns embedded in both the content of technologies and the processes of innovation to be exposed and analyzed” (Williams and Edge 1996). Likewise, late Marxist analysis has been particularly fruitful in uncovering the extent to which technologies of production have been means in the arsenal of class struggle, rather than the mere implementation of universal instrumental rationality (Braverman 1974; Noble 1984; Aronowitz and DiFazio 1994; Huws 2003).

Despite the contrast between these two approaches, both share an engagement with technology as an instrument. The third intervention into the relationship between technology and society—and the one that informs this book—focuses on technology as discourse—cultural, social, political, and ideological. According to this approach, the discourse on technology is not simply a reflection of the centrality of technology in the operation of modern societies; rather, it plays a constitutive role in their operation and enables precisely that centrality. Some see technology discourse as a form of “projection” (Heffernan 2000) of social realities or a “technological vision” (Sturken and Thomas 2004) through which transformations of a political, economic, and social nature are filtered. Thus, for example, popular science fiction of the late twentieth century has articulated the new, post-Fordist relationship of production between capital and labor (Heffernan 2000), just as the emerging technology of the mechanical clock in seventeenth-century Europe played a central role as a metaphor and cognitive framework to deliberate the ideological debate between authoritarian and liberal conceptions of political order (Mayr 1986).

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A stronger version of that approach sees technology discourse as assuming a more active role in the construction of reality, a reality that it presumes merely to describe. Here, technology discourse is seen as central to shaping the political, cultural, and social Zeitgeist. Nye, for example, argues that the “American technological sublime”—the reverence of technology in and of itself—has become at the turn of the twentieth century “one of America’s central ‘ideas about itself’” (Nye 1994, xiv), functioning to reaffirm and bind multicultural individuals into a society by celebrating and admiring technological achievements in the public sphere. Technology discourse played an equally central role in the construction of nationalistic culture in Germany’s Third Reich, where technological rationality was co-opted by irrational politics to create a political culture of “reactionary modernism” (Herf 1984), with technology helping to define the emerging German national fascist identity. Lastly, the emergence of the discourse on “the human motor” (Rabinbach 1992) during the nineteenth century was interwoven with scientific and technological transformations: the scientific “discovery” of the laws of energy was central to a revolution in the perception of humans as containers of energy, leading to new practices, such as Taylorism, which in effect rendered the human body a motor and mobilized it to the mechanical process of mass production.

The discourse on technology is anchored in the material and functional aspects of technology. It is precisely this anchoring in objective reality that renders it a discourse in the strong Foucauldian sense: a quasi-scientific set of truths, which are beyond dispute and hence serve as assumptions for further reflection on reality and engagement with it. It also points to the fact that a discourse is not an ideal construction—imposed on reality in order to veil it—but a lens through which reality is understood and acted upon. Such an approach, I believe, allows us to bypass the deadlock of causality (does the discourse on technology create a certain social reality or vice-versa?; does technology drive history?; and so forth; Smith and Marx 1994; Castells 1996, 5) and points to the dialectic relationship between the discourse on technology and social practices that are part of a new social totality (Rabinbach 1992, 52; Kern 1983).

THE DISCOURSE ON TECHNO_LOGY AS LEGITIMATION DISCOURSE

The strongest version of this approach to the social study of technology sees technology discourse as a particular outlook, an ideology. According to this view—developed particularly by members of the Frankfurt School as part of a broader critique of instrumental reason—with modernity, and specifically with the harnessing of science and technology for the needs of capitalism and the modern state, technology discourse has come to play a central role in the legitimation of a techno-political order, that is, a political order that is legitimated by technology and techniques (see Horkheimer and Adorno, 1976). In this political context technology becomes an unquestionable “good,” a “religion” (Noble 1999), and a “myth” (Robins and Webster 1999, 151; Mosco 2004), which suggests that virtually any social problem is subject to a technical or technological fix (Aronowitz 1994; Segal 1985). It entails the substitution of technical and technological discussions, with their emphasis on instrumental rationality, for political debate based on communicative rationality and aimed at arriving at substantive rationality (Marcuse 1991; Habermas 1970; Feenberg 1991; Pippin 1995; Borgmann 1984b). The idea (indeed, the ideal) of technology gains in itself a constitutive role in society, becoming the point of departure and the yardstick against which other realms of society are examined and worked out; technology becomes “both means and the ends, the instrument of progress but also its fulfillment” (Robins and Webster 1999, 151). In sum, with modernity, “technology has become not just the material basis for society but in a real sense its social and ideological model as well” (Segal 1994, 3).

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Furthermore, technology functions as an “ideological tool that mystif[ies] mechanisms of power and domination” (Best and Kellner 2000) and is “one of the major sources of public power in modern societies,” commonly used as an alibi “to justify what are in reality relations of force” (Feenberg 1995). One of the most eloquent theoretizations of the ideological functions of technology discourse is offered by Jürgen Habermas (1970). Habermas points to the substitution of technical and technological discussions, with their emphasis on instrumental rationality, for political debate, which is based on communicative action and aimed at substantive rationality (see also Marcuse 1991; Feenberg 1991, 1996; Pippin 1995). In his seminal article “Technology and Science as ‘Ideology,’” Habermas (1970) lays out a history of capitalist legitimation whereby a legitimation based on the internal workings of the market (as articulated in neoclassical economics) is replaced by a political legitimation with the emergence of the Keynesian welfare state and the central planning of the economy. From this point onward, 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 (especially economic growth) that are understood to lie outside the realm of politics (Habermas 1970, 100–103). Technology discourse is “ideological” to the extent that political issues are treated as technical ones: 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.

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Habermas’s formulation of technology discourse as legitimation discourse carries two arguments: a general argument regarding the depoliticizing ramifications of a technologistic consciousness and a historically specific argument regarding the legitimation of capitalism in its Keynesian stage, or, in our terminology here, in its Fordist phase. This book offers both a revival of the general argument and an updating of the historically specific argument. A revival is needed because the role of technology discourse in the legitimation of contemporary society is no less central and ubiquitous now than it has been in the past. An updating is called for because the historical circumstances that inform Habermas’s thesis have since changed: both capitalism and the dominant technological paradigm have gone through sweeping transformations. It is to these transformations that I turn next.

Transformations in Capitalism

ST_RUCT_URAL-T_ECHNOLOGICAL T_RANSF_ORMAT_IONS

The last few decades have been marked by transformations in capitalism pertaining to how production is carried out, where, and by whom. According to one dominant view—offered by Régulation School theory and neo-Marxian analysis—the restructuring of capitalism has been the result of a crisis in the mode of capital accumulation that reigned in Western capitalist societies since the 1930s and came to be known as Fordism and its substitution by an emerging, more flexible mode of capitalist accumulation, post-Fordism (Aglietta 2001; Boyer 2002). Post-Fordism—the emergence of which is usually dated in the early 1970s—entails shifts from mass production to “just-in-time” production and mass customization (Harvey 1989) and from the large-scale, hierarchized, and centralized corporation that controls all aspects of production to lean, decentralized production with a core company that outsources most facets of production to other small and midsize companies (Castells 1996). The process of production has also become global, involving a global division of labor run by multinational corporations (Sklair 2002). Flexibility has come to dominate the labor process both at the micro level, with workers asked to shift between multiple tasks and ad hoc projects, and at the macro level, involving more flexible and precarious employment schemes (Greenbaum 1995; Castells 1996; Sennet 2000, 2006; Bauman 2000; Jessop 1994). Concurrent with the new regime of accumulation arose a form of social regulation that encompasses not only the mode of production but also “a facilitating shell” (Fraser 2003) of economic, social, and political arrangements, cultural and artistic sensibilities, the world of ideas and bodies of knowledge, everyday life experiences, and the conception of the individual in society. Following Gramsci (1971), we can therefore speak of a post-Fordist society.

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The shift to a post-Fordist society is not only economic but also structural and entails a transformation in the relationships among three key actors: capital, the state, and labor. Fordist society was characterized by a strong social compact between capital and labor within the framework of a strong state. Capital made concessions to labor in the form of high wages, job security, and high levels of employment; labor conceded to capital’s needs by curbing its most militant demands for a radical social revolution and providing capital with labor power for production and consumption power to purchase increasing volumes of products. The state gained political legitimacy from both groups by transforming itself into an interventionist, Keynesian, welfare state that protected capitalism from both internal failures and an external overthrow and, at the same time, provided a buffer zone between labor and the harsh realities of markets (by providing social services and installing various security schemes), hence further embedding markets in society. Appropriately, Fordist society was dominated in advanced capitalist societies by a political culture of social democracy (Harvey 2005; Polanyi 2001; Offe 1984a; Ram 2007).

Post-Fordist society is characterized by a new constellation of power among these three actors, with capital gaining increased independence from both labor and the state. This has brought about all but the demise of the Fordist social compact. Capital has become more mobile, global, and detached from particular localities and polities, leaving labor weaker. The state, likewise, lost much of its leverage to exert control over capital, which now operates on a global free market, and thus it reacted by enacting measures of self-discipline—deregulation, privatization, and downsizing. As labor became weaker vis-à-vis capital, it all but evaporated discursively, institutionally, and sociologically in Western societies. The power of the working class as a frame of reference for political mobilization or for the construction of political identity has been diluted as was the power of the labor movement and big unions. Collective bargaining was substituted by individual contracts, and tenured, long-term employment schemes were substituted by untenured, temporary ones (Piven and Cloward 1997; Bauman 2001; Beck 2000). Post-Fordist society is appropriately dominated by a political culture of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005).

The emergence of the new capitalism has been closely intertwined with a transformation in the dominant technology system from mechanical and centralized to informational and networked. The networked organization (Castells 1996); the command and control of headquarters in a global chain of production (Robins and Webster 1999; Harvey 1989); “just-in-time” production (Harvey 1989); the expansion in space of production, distribution, and consumption processes (Beniger 1986); and the increased flexibility of the work process (Greenbaum 1995; Robins and Webster 1999)—network technology has been instrumental in bringing about and materializing all these changes, which is precisely why so many have called ours the information, or network, society (Bell 1999; Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Duff 2000; Lash 2002; Mackay 2003; Mattelart 2003; May 2002; Robins and Webster 1999; Webster 2002; Stehr 2001; Barney 2004).

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I_DEOLOGICAL T_RANSF_ORMAT_IONS

The shift of capitalism to its post-Fordist phase was accompanied by the rise of a new technology discourse—indeed a new ethos and a new spirit—that wove the threads of a new technological form—network technology—into the fabric of a new capitalism and a new social regime. The transformations that are part of this new regime of accumulation of capitalism pertain not only to structural changes in the economy and in work life but also to a reconfiguration of social, cultural, artistic, scientific, emotional, political, and everyday life (Jameson 1991; Lyotard 1984). Among these is a change in the dominant political culture of advanced capitalist societies: from a political culture of social democracy to that of neoliberalism (Harvey 2005; Peters 2001; Bourdieu 1998a, 1998b; Duggan 2003; Fraser 2003). In this new constellation, the discourse on network technology plays more than a descriptive role. By filtering social reality through the prism of technology, it serves to naturalize and legitimate this reality and, in that sense, constitutes not a neutral description of reality but an ingredient thereof.

As mentioned previously, the history of technology discourse as a legitimation discourse begins with the harnessing of science and technology for capitalist development in the context of the modern state, which began roughly around the rise of industrial capitalism. The digital discourse should therefore be understood precisely in that context not only by locating it on the horizon of a technological change—from a mechanical and centralized industrial technology to a digital and networked postindustrial technology—and not only by locating it on the horizon of the transformation of capitalism—from a Fordist phase to post-Fordist phase—but also by locating it in the context of the ideological transformations that have accompanied these changes.

The rise of the new capitalism entails not only structural and technological transformations but also transformations in the legitimation function of technology discourse. Under conditions of a flexible regime of accumulation, globalization, neoliberalization, deregulation, privatization, and the dismantling of the welfare state, technology discourse no longer legitimates the interventionist welfare state, the central planning in businesses and the economy, the hierarchized corporation, and the tenured worker; instead it legitimates 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.

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This new legitimation discourse of technology marks a transformation in the “spirit of capitalism” from its industrial phase, in which the legitimation discourse emphasizes the capacity of capitalism to bring about social emancipation (by alleviating exploitation) to its postindustrial “spirit of networks” phase, in which the legitimation discourse focuses on capitalism’s capacity to enhance individual emancipation (by alleviating alienation and inauthenticity and allowing more creativity and personal expression). My distinction between these two types of emancipation— social emancipation, concerned with alleviating social exploitation, and individual emancipation, concerned with alleviating personal alienation—is based on a longstanding tradition in the social sciences. It was most recently evoked by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), who distinguish between two threads of discontent with and critique of capitalism: a social critique, focused on the harmful consequences of capitalism to the social body, that is, exploitation and inequality; and an artistic critique (variably referred to in this book as a humanist critique), focused on the harmful consequences of capitalism to the person, that is, alienation and inauthenticity. Indeed, the notion of a dual critique of capitalism is deeply rooted in the history of social thought. Marx’s concept of exploitation (the extraction of surplus value) closely concurs with the artistic critique, while his notion of alienation (particularly that which emerges between workers and their labor process and between workers and their speciesbeing) falls under the rubric of the social critique. Marcuse’s notion of the deerotization of the work process and, more generally, the introduction of psychoanalysis into the analysis of modern society by the Frankfurt School informs much of the artistic critique. Weber’s lament of the disenchantment of the world brought about by the iron cage, or rational instrumental bureaucracy, echoes artistic themes. Finally, in response to postmodern concerns with identity, these two types of critiques have been rearticulated as demands for redistribution and recognition (Fraser and Honneth 2003). Table 1.1 summarizes the central distinctions between these two types of critiques.

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