Technocapitalism
= the synthesis of capital and technology to point out both the increasingly important role of technology and the continued primacy of capitalist structures. [1]
Source: Douglas Kellner, 1997. "Intellectuals, the new public spheres, and techno–politics," at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/newDK/intell.htm, accessed 8 July 2000.
Description
Consilience Project:
"A central premise of technocapitalism is that technological innovation is the fundamental driver of history. Adherents of this ideology believe, consciously or not, that it is technology that determines the shape of social life and the fate of civilizations—rather than the actions of individual humans, coordinated groups, cultural trends, or structural forces. Furthermore, they believe that technological innovation is necessarily created by private enterprise, and in particular through the institution of the startup, funded by private venture capital funds. This worldview has found no greater proponent in recent years than the investor Marc Andreessen, who, for example, wrote an essay crediting the technology industry with “saving the world” during the COVID-19 pandemic, going so far as to predict that the introduction of remote work through Zoom, Slack, and other apps was “a permanent civilizational shift.”
This ideology is unsurprisingly most common among those who work in the technology and venture capital industries, particularly in Silicon Valley but also in secondary tech hubs like Seattle or Austin. To explain their beliefs, technocapitalists will often point to Moore’s Law, which states that the number of transistors on a microchip should double every two years. This idea is often generalized to mean that technological advancement occurs at an exponential rate, with accompanying exponential decreases in costs.
Many commercial technologies have indeed followed this pattern of improvement but technocapitalists extrapolate this process of exponential, technology-driven progress further to encompass all parts of society, not just technological progress. This view does not fully capture the complex and highly evolved relationship between technology, society, and economics. In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the increasing complexity driven by globalization, bureaucracy, and automation has given rise to an economic system in which theories such as Moore’s Law no longer scale.[4] Though technological progress provides industrialized nations with near-universal increases in standards of living, it also brings side effects such as labor shortages, increasing wealth inequality, and artificial scarcity.[5][6]
Global wealth is increasingly concentrated, with 1% of the world’s population controlling approximately 46% of all wealth.[7] This wealth gap persists both despite and because of technological progress: economic surplus driven by increased technological capabilities concentrates wealth at the top rungs of society. This is because owners of large fortunes and creators of intellectual property reap the largest financial returns, even as new technology increases standards of living. Yet many technologies can be radical social equalizers despite their effect on wealth concentration, due to their accessibility and wide adoption. A study of 120 countries between 1980 and 2006 found that a 10% increase in access to broadband could increase GDP by up to 1.3%, and these technologies are ever-easier to employ and distribute.[8] Similarly, it is possible that technological solutions could mitigate catastrophic risks such as climate change, which would have a profound impact upon future global standards of living.
Though technology is a powerful equalizing force, if money is involved, someone always stands to profit. Technocapitalists believe that innovative technology can be used to bypass restrictive socioeconomic conditions. In this view, intellectual property (in the form of patents or inventions) is the backbone of social progress. Intellectual property (IP) is commoditized and distributed via corporations, but in a manner that appears to upend the stakeholders-first corporate ethos.
Technocapitalism is the “innovation economy”: the ecosystem of entrepreneurial organizations, startup accelerators, and grant funders, all of which provide the infrastructure for quasi-utopian social hacking experiments. In response to global crises, the technocapitalist economy acts as a benevolent experimental force, generating solutions from corporate money but often taking revenue from traditional corporate stakeholders, such as department stores and newspapers. Because the driving force of wealth and progress is a matter of information and social systems rather than physical infrastructure and material goods—as seen most clearly in “platform” companies like Uber or Airbnb—many otherwise intractable problems are overlooked. Despite these pro-social aims, technocapitalism is potentially too tied to the capitalist model to fully deliver on them. Throughout history, free market capitalism has led to the social issues that technocapitalism now seeks to address. Technocapitalist interventions may prove little different, allowing corporations to participate in a superficial charade of social change rather than addressing the root problems. Though technology is a powerful equalizing force, if money is involved, someone always stands to profit. Exactly who, in this case, is a matter of debate.
...
Technocapitalism is comparable to the theories of early liberal economics described above. At the core of its ideology is a similar belief that the machinery of wealth—that is, the technological innovation spurred by private enterprise—is what drives social progress. The Silicon Valley entrepreneurial class first began to believe in technology’s potential to catalyze social change in the 1990s. Having witnessed early online communities bring people together in novel ways, this new techno-optimism held that a knowledge-based, technology-driven economy could oust the capitalist mode of production. Instead, it was thought that the course of progress would promote a stateless, collaborative counterculture similar to that of the 1960s, but with a sense of the possibility of the transcendence of humans from the merely physical world to a higher state, enabled by advanced technology. This new line of thinking was perhaps best exemplified by the cyberactivist John Perry Barlow’s 1996 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” in which, among other things, he declared that “we will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace.”[22]
In this experimentalist economy, creativity would replace commodities, and would be distributed through online networks to consumers. In this way, innovative information (rather than surplus) could drive improvements in living standards. This ideology is exemplified by then-contemporary media such as Wired magazine or the anti-consumerist Adbusters, which also drew on the work of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, emphasizing aesthetic and cultural critiques of pop culture as a means of “escaping” from the capitalist mindset. This social movement is often categorized as a libertarian one, but it is ideologically distinct from the more culturally conservative tendency of the Tea Party movement and other right-wing subgroups that emerged during the 2000s.
A critique of this “dotcom neoliberalism” by Andy Cameron and Richard Barbrook titled “The Californian Ideology” suggests that the movement is simply technological determinism and cannot be considered radical at all. Since it originated with the technology industry’s elite such as Netscape’s Marc Andreessen or Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and was dependent on their for-profit technology, it could only serve to maintain the class rigidity of capitalism. In effect, these early stages of technocapitalism strengthened the privileged positions of its proponents, ultimately upholding Western capitalist hegemony.[24][25] Cameron and Barbrook go so far as to say that Silicon Valley technological optimism is a form of reactionary modernism similar to that of Nazi Germany, with its rejection of liberal democratic values in favor of futurist social engineering.
There is a contradictory nature to this claim, in that Silicon Valley’s ideology is closely aligned with Enlightenment conceptions of economics, particularly those of Adam Smith. Both have in common an emphasis on the self-determination of the individual through market participation, as well as the idea that the system can regulate itself into producing social progress by the very nature of its existence. In this way, 1990s technological optimism embraces contrasting left- and right-wing ideas about the nature of progress. It needed capitalism’s mass-market distribution of products to enable the flow of information. Yet it found that same flow of information to be a usefully disruptive force, with the potential power to circumvent the woes of capitalist society. This conflict is still apparent in technocapitalism today."
(https://consilienceproject.org/the-case-against-naive-technocapitalist-optimism/)
History
Consilience Project:
"To understand the economic landscape that made technocapitalism possible, it is important to begin with the historical movements that gave rise to capitalism in the first place. The Enlightenment of 18th-century Europe was the critical period in which the power of capital began to take hold. Prior to this point, the West was largely agrarian, with estates sustained by the labor of the serf class. The Enlightenment brought about a redefinition of societal power structures. During this period, figures such as Rousseau and Locke invented social contract theory, which stated that individuals freely consent to organize into states, voluntarily sacrificing certain rights in exchange for the protection of others under the law and ultimately the persistence of the social order.[9] At the same time, the emergence of mercantilism—the economic policy of maximizing a nation’s exports while minimizing imports—began to increase global connections, tying the social order and its products directly to national power. Ocean voyages for the purposes of trade increased, and international commerce agreements were established by the growing merchant classes. Though the mercantilist era is often described as the ‘Age of Discovery,’ it would be more accurate to describe it as the age of trade. This trade was often the first step on the path to conquest and colonial subjugation.[10]
In a profound change from agrarian economies, the primary source of value under mercantilism was not basic subsistence, but production. Instead of economies centered on farming, mercantile commerce generated value by serving as an intermediary, with natural resources processed and refined for export in for-profit enterprises. By maximizing exports and minimizing imports, a state could reduce its deficits via tariffs, and in the process promote colonial expansion and enforce imperial hegemony. Mercantilism’s success as a protectionist doctrine was based upon a large, employed population that contributed to the nation’s system of trade, as participation in labor was tied directly to the persistence of the state.
Under mercantilism, the foundations for capitalist ideologies began to form. Competition was the driving force of a mercantilist economy, with governments safeguarding proprietary tools and equipment against export, using their role as the sole possessors or producers of these goods as a means of capital exclusivity. The foremost aim of trade during this period was the accumulation of gold and silver, as there could only be a fixed amount in circulation. The movement of valuable resources through global economies was almost a direct stand-in for conquest. A country drained of value was unlikely to wage war, whereas a country flush with it could ensure its own supremacy. The total wealth of the world was considered stable; it could only be tugged in various directions by enterprising states.
The work of Adam Smith was central to the establishment of the era of free trade. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith refuted the idea that a nation’s security was tied directly to the size of its treasury, and that total extant wealth was fixed. Instead, Smith argued that free trade benefited all parties more than the hoarding of resources, and that protectionist policies should decrease in developed economies. Complex systems of manufacturing and commerce introduced interdependency to the market, distributing ownership and allowing for greater efficiency. These changes led to the interconnectedness of global supply chains today, as demonstrated by current international reliance on China and India for raw materials processing."
(https://consilienceproject.org/the-case-against-naive-technocapitalist-optimism/)