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

The spirit of networks does not simply describe the new realities of post-Fordism. It also legitimizes them by framing them within a technologistic framework, that is, by tracing them to their roots in network technology. By doing so, it depoliticizes, neutralizes, naturalizes, and universalizes social processes that are politically charged and particularistic. This is perhaps most readily evident in the keywords that dot the discourse and that are taken quite directly from the technical terminology of information networks professionals: “networks,” “distribution,” and “nodes.” Simply put, the spirit of networks legitimizes the wholesale transformation entailed by the shift from the Fordist phase of capitalism to its post-Fordist phase. Table 8.1 summarizes these transformations along some key coordinates.

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What we see with the spirit of networks is a discourse that is able to respond to both the systemic concerns of capitalism and its humanist critique. The digital discourse is the legitimation discourse of a new phase of capitalism. It offers a spirit of capitalism that on the one hand sustains, cements, and legitimizes capitalism and on the other hand sets new tests for its legitimacy. The spirit of networks is still very much committed to the end of the old versions of capitalism inasmuch as it is ultimately about the endless accumulation of capital. But it is also a new spirit of capitalism to the extent that it provides new guidelines for the means of the new capitalism, demanding more participation, more democratization, more personal expression, and more interpersonal relations.

THE SPIRIT OF NETWORKS AND THE DECOMPOSITION OF THE FORDIST C_LASS COMPACT

The spirit of networks should be understood not only in terms of the new particular and “local” demands of capitalism (such as the demand from workers to be flexible) but also in terms of a wholesale and “global” transformation in the political culture of post-Fordist society. At that level, the spirit of networks should be understood as a new legitimation model that responds to the crisis of the old legitimation model—that of the welfare state—and substitutes it (Habermas 1973). The spirit of networks facilitates the crystallization of a new constellation of power that characterizes the post-Fordist phase of capitalism. The tripartite social compact that characterized the Fordist, national phase of capitalism—laborstate-capital—has been flipped, as Ram (2006) puts it, substituting one actor—the state—with network technology as the third tip of the triangle. With network technology—and the social, economic, cultural, and political networks that it underlies—capital’s route to labor (and vice versa) in post-Fordism is mediated by networks, thereby bypassing the state. The post-Fordist and global phase of capitalism is characterized by the constitution of (technological) networks as the containers, organizers, and mediators of the social relations between capital and labor (Ram 2007).

This new constellation is highly consequential for the question of legitimacy. By partaking in the social compact of Fordism, the state enjoyed a high level of legitimacy based on the power it could exert vis-à- vis capital and labor. In fact, the state enjoyed legitimacy to such a degree that it not only managed large parts of economic life but also played a central role in social and cultural life as well. Under post-Fordism, as the state is cut off from this tripartite compact, its legitimacy is hampered and in turn it loses its leverage as a dominant actor in social life, including in spheres pertaining to the management of material reproduction: work and the economy.

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During Fordism, capitalist legitimation was mediated through the state, that is, through the technical and technological tools at the state’s disposal: taxation, redistribution, centralized planning, fiscal and monetary control, and the provision of employment and welfare programs. In other words, technology played a role of support for state action; technology legitimized the centrality of the state in the reproduction of capitalist society. In post-Fordism, legitimation for capitalism has come to be mediated through network technology. Network technology provides legitimation not so much for an alternative global polity but for the ideology that now—with network technology—such polity is redundant. Such technological legitimation supports the depoliticization and desocialization of markets and the economy in general, or their dissociation from the political sphere.

One can therefore speak of two legitimation models, or two “triangles” of power. In the Fordist condition, the state enjoys political legitimation and exercises technical and technological administration of the economy. In that framework, technological legitimation is mediated by the state. In the post-Fordist constellation, the state loses its political legitimation for the administration of the economy, and instead technological legitimation is not mediated through concrete (and democratic) social institutions but through the internal operation of network technology, as encapsulated in the spirit of networks. In sum, with post-Fordism capitalist legitimation becomes more depoliticized and more instrumentalized; it becomes— quite literally—a technological legitimation rather than a form of political legitimation through technology. Hence, the discourse on network technology is part of a new social constellation where (network) technology is substituted for the political institution that is the state as a container of political legitimation.

TECHNO-PO_LITICA_L C_ULT_URES: THE C_LOS_URE OF THE PO_LITICA_L

These sweeping transformations are detrimental to the scope and nature of the political as such in society. In that context, the discourse on technology has in both eras been an indispensable companion to the dominant political cultures of social democracy and neoliberalism, respectively. The techno-political culture of Fordism, and modernity in general, delivered planning, control, and stability; it rendered politics a project of reason, which leads to proactivity; it assigned politics great molding powers in society, and in that project technology played a central role.

In contrast, the techno-political culture of post-Fordism, and postmodernity in general, is reactive. It acknowledges its limited influence and legitimates a reality of minimum politics, and an adaptivist politics at that, upholding, in fact, the disengagement of politics from social affairs.

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Here, too, technology is at the throne: network technology is constructed as a facilitator of self-regulation, delivering a flat playing field and democratic access without privilege—that is, a variety of mechanisms and dynamics that at one time needed a strong polity and now demand minimum, if not a complete insulation from, politics.

This brings us back to Jürgen Habermas and to the adaptation of his thesis to contemporary political culture. Habermas was particularly concerned about the closing down of the political and critical horizons in the administration of society; the collapsing of the lifeworld into the rationale of the system (Habermas 1984). Habermas’s concern was raised—to use the conceptual framework of this book—at a time when the political culture was constructed as a response to the social critique of capitalism and, thus, was given the form of social democracy. The contemporary situation is not only different—founded on a neoliberal political culture, which is constructed around a response to the humanist critique—but also more troubling in terms of the political.

From the point of view of political critique, I argue, not all types of critique are created equal. There is a fundamental difference between the social critique and the humanist critique in terms of the political space that they allow, a difference that Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) ignore. Those two different types of critique create not simply two different political cultures (social democracy and neoliberalism), but rather they create political cultures that are qualitatively different precisely in the space they allow for meaningful political critique and action (for a critique on Boltasnki and Chiapello see Callinicos 2006).

This point has recently been elucidated by David Harvey (2005) in his rereading of Karl Polanyi’s 1944 analysis of The Great Transformation (2001 edition). To a large extent, the demands for personal freedom—the core of the humanist critique—is in conflict with the demand for equality and solidarity—the core of the social critique (Harvey 2005). In the same vein, we can say that the response to the humanist critique, which dominates the spirit of networks, comes at the expense of responding to the social critique. Such analysis leaves us not only with the question of which critique is better—to which one can only respond with a normative answer—but also with the question of which critique is more political. This latter question can be given a theoretical response as well. A political culture founded on the social critique is inherently more political.

By its very definition and its very demands, the social critique opens up a political and critical space. The demands of the social critique are articulated in terms that are always-already society-wide, universalist, and political. Its demands for redistribution, equality, and welfare also require the embeddedness of the economy within political arrangements. The social critique cannot be responded to without strong political institutions and mechanisms. It is precisely this understanding that led the reformist (i.e., nonradical) strand of the working class to direct such enormous energies of legitimation in the direction of the state during Fordism. The response to the social critique during Fordism through a democratic process led to a political culture that is inherently more political where more aspects of society (particularly those concerning its reproduction) are embedded in the political process.

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This stands in contrast to the political culture that characterizes a response to the humanist critique. The demands of the humanist critique are articulated in a language of individualism, personal autonomy, and the privatization of social life; it demands personal expression, authenticity, and individual engagement. While putting forth these demands is political in and of itself, in their effect and to the extent that they diminish a response to the social critique they result in what Marcuse described as “the closing of the political universe” (Marcuse 1991, 19). The response to the humanist critique during post-Fordism through market mechanisms leads to a political culture that is inherently more apolitical and where more facets of social reproduction are excluded from the political process, mediated, and resolved through technologically mediated networks. The closing of the political universe is coupled by an opening up and augmentation of the market universe and of a civil society conceived and fashioned after a market model.

Hence, while the spirit of networks is indeed constructed as a response to the critique of Fordist society, it does so in a manner that results in the depolitization of contemporary social relations: the spirit of networks resolves the social and political concerns that underlie Fordist society technologically. While closing off the political universe it opens a technological universe that reasserts the central role of technology in the resolution of social and political questions, in effect rendering these questions technological in nature.

The spirit of networks, with its explicit critique of the pitfalls of Fordism, legitimates the shift to post-Fordism first and foremost by depicting this shift as progress. Since the contemporary post-Fordist condition is intertwined with network technology—itself a higher development stage in the history of technology (see Chapter 7)—the social formations that stem from it are also conceptualized as being of a higher stage, a social development. The shift to post-Fordism, in other words, is understood as technologically induced and, therefore, as apolitical, asocial, and inherently progressive.

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Moreover, the ideological thrust of the spirit of networks lies in interweaving this new trade-off between social emancipation and individual emancipation around the axis of network technology. The promise of the spirit of networks in terms of increased individual emancipation and dealienation is presented as conditioned by the reorganization of social practices and social relations in accordance with networks. Simply put, emancipation is constructed as demanding the further flexibilization and privatization of work.

NETWORKS AS CRITI_QUE?

The discourse on networks in its broadest understanding has recently become the centerpiece not only in discussions on the economy, labor, globalization, and production but also in the discursive and analytical toolkit with which much of the contemporary world is understood, talked about, and ultimately constructed. Moreover, the idea that the discourse on networks is of significant critical potency has been making strides in diverse social milieus, from popular culture to political theory and philosophy. Thus, dehierarchization, decentralization, emergence, and distribution are seen as inherently critical to the established power structures, as undermining them, and, hence, as socially transformative, progressive, and even revolutionary. For example, much of the discourse and practices of the so-called antiglobalization movement is founded on the spirit of networks. It entails the decentralized assemblages of disparate groups, which convene ad hoc around a specific political project. The movement is also dehierarchized: there is no overdetermination for any essentialist political analysis, project, or identity (Castells 1996). It is worth noting that to a large extent the target of this movement has been post-Fordist capitalism itself, and perhaps for that reason the spirit of networks is commonly assumed to harbor a critical potential.

Likewise, recent social theory has also employed the discourse of networks and elaborated on its critical potential. This is certainly true for academic and political discourses on cyberculture, hybridity, and cyberfeminism. But such approach also appears in theories concerned with critique of contemporary capitalism. Hardt and Negri (2001, 2005), for example, conceive of a decentralized, network-like “empire” and hope that the nonessentialized, atomized nodes of the “multitude” come together in meaningful political action (Hardt and Negri 2001, 2005). Others have offered a revival of the Italian autonomist tradition and note how the network structure of global capitalism might offer openings for a reconstitution of labor struggles (Dyer-Witheford 1999). And Christian Fuchs (2008) theorizes that the Internet facilitates two dialectically antagonistic tendencies of competition and cooperation. The hegemonic competitive form of contemporary social relations thrives on the network structure of the Internet but also gives rise to an emerging cooperative potentiality.

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These intellectual and political projects all attempt to elucidate and theorize a critical moment in the workings of contemporary, networked capitalist society. These are admirable projects, in my view, committed to one of the core goals of critical theory: that is, to locate the conditions of possibility for transcendence within the immanence. Likewise, both in theory and in practice, what critical potentialities are present in the spirit of networks should be extracted and exhausted in further research.

But what these positions fail to acknowledge is the degree to which the spirit of networks has been intertwined with technology and technological reason. The juxtaposition of the realities of contemporary capitalism and its spirit with the discourse on network technology—which has been a central purpose of this book—illuminates the technological blind spot in such analyses. Boltanski and Chiapello explain this lack as an attempt on their part to avoid the fallacy of technological determinism (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005, xviii–xix). To be sure, as Chapter 7 has shown, this fallacy is easy to slip into precisely because the new capitalism is so closely intertwined with network technology. 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), the increased flexibility of the work process (Greenbaum 1995; Robins and Webster 1999)— network technology has been instrumental in bringing all these changes about, or at least in helping to materialize their full potential. Indeed the prominence of information technology in contemporary society has led many to call ours the “information society” (Bell 1999; Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Duff 2000; Lash 2002; Mackay 2003; Mattelart 2002; May 2002, 2003; Robins and Webster 1999; Webster 2002; Stehr 2001).

However, by leaving network technology out of the realm of contemporary capitalism, such analyses overlook another dimension of the intersection of technology and society, which has been the centerpiece of this book: the role of technology as a legitimation discourse (Marcuse 1991; Habermas 1970), as the “religion” of an instrumental society (Noble 1999), and as the cultural fabric from which the contemporary spirit of capitalism is woven (Mosco 2004). Their analysis therefore fails to notice that the spirit of capitalism, both old and new, is inextricably linked with the discourse on network technology—the digital discourse.

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The introduction of the digital discourse as a sociological object into the analysis of contemporary capitalist society and its understanding as a legitimation discourse point to the limited critical potential of the spirit of networks. The spirit of networks is too inextricably intertwined with instrumental rationality and systemic demands to offer a truly critical platform. As this book has shown, the spirit of networks is not a critical discourse, but precisely the opposite: it is the discourse of the new capitalism par excellence.

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Chapter 1

1. The various threads of the critical analysis of technology are commonly referred to as “science and technology studies” and include the social shaping of technology, the social construction of technology, and actor-network theory (see, for example, MacKenzie 1996; MacKenzie and Wajcman 1999; Law and Hassard 1999; Latour 2005; and Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch 1989).

Chapter 2

1. Since its inaugural issue, Wired has christened McLuhan as its “patron saint.”

Chapter 3

1. The article later appeared in an extended book form with the same title (1998). References in the chapter refer to book pages.

1. Throughout this book emphasis is always in the original, unless specified otherwise.

1. By arguing that the digital discourse constructs individual nodes as irrational, I do not mean that the individual nodes are constructed as decidedly antirational, but simply that they are devoid of system-wide, big-picture, theoretical, and abstract rationality.

1. It is worthwhile to point out the rhetorical tool used here in order to legitimize the idea of chaos. It is reminiscent of a joke about a borrowed kettle evoked by Freud (1963)—and recently retold by Žižek (2005)—to account for the nature of logic in dreams. In the joke, the kettle owner accuses his friend of returning the kettle damaged, an accusation to which the friend replies, “I have never borrowed your kettle; I retuned it to you unbroken; it was already broken when I borrowed it.” In a similar fashion, Kelly suggests flux, chaos, and churning (along with their corollary social effects of instability and unpredictability) should not be opposed to or mitigated for three reasons: this cannot be done (flux in the network economy is inevitable; a transfer of a natural phenomenon into the social realm through network technology), it is better not to do it (flux is benevolent, yielding good results for everyone); and it is dangerous to do it (since it will result in knocking the system out of its self-regulating, natural imbalance). For these three, not necessarily compatible reasons, economic flux should be, respectively, duly accepted, enthusiastically celebrated and encouraged, and not tempered with.

Notes

1. The term “neoliberalism” has come to occupy two meanings in common parlance. On the one hand it denotes an economic and political theory. On the other hand the term stands for the realities of contemporary capitalism, a political project. Harvey, for example, distinguishes between utopian and political neoliberalism (2005, 19). While those two constructs are highly correlated, they are not one and the same, and in fact at times the realities of neoliberalism as a political project conflict with its theory (Harvey 2005, 21). As a matter of clarity and simplicity and since this book is concerned with the realities of discourse, I limit my discussion here solely to the theoretical discourse of neoliberalism, not its political implementation.

1. In narrow disciplinary terms, Schumpeter is not part of the neoliberal school. But his ideas have been the intellectual bedrock of much of what is ultimately known today as neoliberalism.

1. It is important to emphasize that lessons and metaphors were drawn from the most mechanical aspects of the technology, how it is constructed, its minute components, their operation, and so forth, rather than any abstract or literary trope the clock might symbolize, such as “time” or “life.”

Chapter 4

1. In this chapter, I am not using Wikipedia as an authoritative resource but as a way to tap into what concepts denote in the popular culture.

1. A search of the Wired archive yields a few hundreds references to the term “digerati” in the magazine.

1. See http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.06/office\_spc.html. Most of the photos and illustrations referred to in the book can be accessed via the Web. A link is provided whenever that is that case.

1. Coincidentally, but noteworthy, the term “Generation X,” which in Campbell’s view became “generation equity,” was popularized in 1991 by a book titled Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture written by Douglas Coupland, author of Microserfs. Generation X is characterized by nihilism, cynicism, a postmodern attitude to life, a “so what” and “who cares” attitude, distrust on societal institutions, a “take the money and run” attitude toward work, childlessness, pessimism for the future, a carpe diem attitude toward living, and slacking (Wikipedia: Generation X).

Chapter 5

1. IPO stands for initial public offering: the first sale of a corporation’s common shares to public investors.

1. An updated version of the older prosumer is the “produser,” a hybrid of producer and user. The difference is mainly technical: the consumer of goods of yesteryear has become the contemporary computer user who both uses and produces informational content.

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