From Technoethics.
Technocapitalism’s increasing dominance of the public sphere, particularly through its incarnation in electronic media, presents a significant threat that we should be aware of and counteract.
An important part of this threat lies in technocapitalism’s ability to supercharge consumerism. It is not just that—as per traditional consumerist critiques—capitalism creates in us desires for artificial needs, but that advanced technologies are used to transform these artificial needs into essential needs on which new layers of artificial needs are then sedimented. Social media, for example, has made itself ubiquitous to the point where a presence there has become almost a requirement. And now firmly installed in our lives, it has become the foundation on which new commercial desires are created that push us ever further towards a state of constant consumption.
This is facilitated by the progression of “globalization”, technocapitalism’s means of consumerizing ever larger conglomerations of groups. And this subjection of the global citizen to a global consumerist culture requires an ever more intense process of cultural overcoding, the comprehensibility and use of which code must be entrained through attention capture and processing. All of this translates, in market economic terms, to the technological marriage of advertising and entertainment that largely defines contemporary existence and substitutes for traditional alternatives.
This is not only a threat to our cultures, but to our individuality. Central to the logic of this global (anti)-culture is to deny us opportunities to actively self-potentialize. Behaviour is channeled towards passive modes of entertainment which instrumentalize and process leisure, effacing opportunities for creative self-expression. This, in French philosopher Bernard Stiegler’s terms, is a form of “disindividuation” where we become subject to a degrading mental “proletarianization”
Given this, we have a responsibility for intellectual, artistic, and ethical work aimed at fostering productive political dialogue on how best to control and positively utilise the technological power at our disposal. Such a dialogic orientation must, of course, be grounded in inter-recognition, and this is precisely what is threatened by the simultaneously individualistic and disindividuating forces of technocapitalism. Having normalized an aggressive and polarising form of economic competition, it is critical we seek now to mitigate the damage caused.
This is all to say that we ought to work towards combating the reductive transformation of knowledge into information instrumentalized solely as a means of competition, a process which threatens a politics of pure market power—i.e. the totalizing of anti-sociality as culture. To achieve this and potentialize realistic alternatives, we require a counter-potency concentrated enough to combat the behemoth the market has become. And this calls on us all, insofar as we can, to become social teachers as well as social subjects rather than the obedient children the market would have us be. That there is no guarantee of success in the face of technocapitalism’s ever more intense attacks on our freedom only makes more poignant and urgent this task.