media and new capitalism in the digital age:(3)

about daniel bell p104 The most promising of these transformations, according to Bell, is the emergence of a technocratic elite(comprised of professionals at the forefront of the information and knowledge sectors) and the technical administration of the capitalist economy. The postindustrial society, he therefore predicts, is a society characterized by the substitution of class struggle by rationalization brought about by technical and technological means and championed by the technocratic elite, which has an inherent tendency to act rationally. The most decisive social ramification of the coming of postindustrialism is the subordination of the market economy to political and technical rationale. Further bureaucratization and technocratization of postindustrial society means that the defining social division is no longer based on property relations between those who own the means of production and those who do not. but "the bureaucratic and authority relations between those who have powers of decision and those who have not, in all kinds of organizations, political, economic, and social." p105 Boltanski and Chiapello 2005 The new spirit of capitalism "artistic critique" This type of critique of capitalism emerges from artistic and bohemian circles of Europe's nineteenth century and is closely linked with the values and mentality, and critical distance from prevailing social order,particularly from its most systemic structures: the market and the state. This culture of critique, the negation of and resistance to prevailing bureaucratic and capitalist norms and to the "system" at large, has found its way into the spirit of networks, most noticeably in the presentation of digerati, particularly the digerati entrepreneur. p195 Industrial technology versus network technology The digital discourse is manifestly reflexive of, and responsive to, the general critique of technology, particularly the strain of dystopian critique that views technology as dehumanizing or as coming between humans and their nature, a critique most famously crystallized by Martin Heidegger and Jacques Ellul. By evoking the radical break that is network technology, the digital discourse is able to incorporate and respond to this type of critique of technological utopianism and, by extension, respond to the critique of instrumental rationality in general. It is not technological utopianism per se that the digital disourse advocates but a new utopianism based on a new technological paradigm.