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the virtual class

Originally posted on sciy.org by Rich Carlson on Wed 09 Nov 2005 05:04 PM PST  

The following notes, are Arthur Kroker's description of the virtual class. For Kroker, the virtual class is the new technological class. It came or is coming to power on the back of cyberspace or the internet. This is the class that expresses the dominant interest of information technology. Representatives of this class may claim that it is time for a real austerity budget. But this means bludgeoning the working and the middle class and shifting the economic pie so that more money goes into high tech industries, and there is no discussion of the consequences of this. For example, what happens when there is no work for much of the population? Virtualization means moving to a society that requires less labour and more and more people become surplus. More people become a surplus class and today there are some countries which could be considered to be surplus countries.

Alvin Toffler is a representative of the virtual class. Toffler proclaims a third wave, after the first wave of the Industrial Revolution and the second wave of capitalist industrial expansion following the Second World War and continuing through the 1970s. Toffler argues that those in the third wave have common interests and should cooperate, promoting cyberspace. In contrast, Kroker argues that the virtual class may speak the language of democracy but their real purpose is to have an ideology of facilitation (come on board info highway with global access and global communication) and this feeds on the view that technology can create utopias and humanism. But by the mid1990s, the time for the age of net utopia is over and now corporations such as Disney and Time-Warner claim that we need to make money on the internet. This will stop our relation as users and turn us into passive consumers.

https://www.ctheory.net/will/future.html

The virtual class:

  • is obsessed with technology.
  • prevents critiques of technology.
  • views digital technology as a source of salvation.
  • has an impuse to nihilism, assuming that will to virtuality is will to good, so that the good is "the disintegration of experience into cybernetic interactivity."
  • predatory capitalism and technological rationalizations for cost and deficit cutting. New form of ethics, an ethics of the virtual class -- predatory capitalism, restructuring, deficit cutting.
  • projects its class interests into cyberspace.
  • exerts absolute control over intellectual property.
  • views the body as a passive archive to be processed, entertained, and stockpiled.
  • reduces human intelligence to a circulating medium of cybernetic exchange, i.e. a set of digital codes that can race around the internet. Destroys creativity and does not distinguish creativity from information.
  • diminishes human experience. The virtualizers attempt to "disappear human subjectivity" by replacing the "data trash of experience" with "the war-machine of cyberspace." Note how the disappearance of the subject is a favorite post-modern theme, ...

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