The Role of Technology in Thana-Capitalism

Introduction

We live in digital times, where events are covered and disseminated and consumed by a wider audience in seconds. This instantaneity paved the ways to the rise of a new digital culture where we can travel without even moving. The virtual reality has situated as the hallmark of a new 4.0 society (Warschauer & Matuchniak, 2010). To put the same in other terms, technology not only changed our current means of production but also the lifestyles as well as our habits, behaviours and social interaction with others (Gold 2012). The introduction of robots and virtual reality may very well erode the social ties since lay-citizens are certainly pressed to interact with an artificial “Other”. Doubtless, this is the end of hospitality as we know it (Korstanje 2017). In a seminal text, Jacques Ellul exerts a radical critique on “the technological society” shedding light on the negative effects of autocracy which are imposed by the logic of instrumentalism proper of the capitalist system. The legitimacy of the ruling elite is enhanced while the workforce passively accept the notion of efficacy as a form of genuine development. This creates a climate of extreme competence where only there is one winner and the winner of course takes it all. Ellul alerts that someday, humankind will be strictly controlled by Machines which move per their own ends. These automat robots are the direct result of an excess of rationality. He even toys with the belief that technology was conducive to the culture of capitalism in which case the logic of instrumentality mediates between citizens and their respective institutions (Ellul, 1964). Scholars are divided respecting to the role played by digital technology in the liberal world of consumers. Notably influenced by the legacy of Max Weber, Ellul was a pioneer in warning the grim future of humanity which may be subordinated to the exploitation of the liberal market. However, other voices like Guy Sorman (2008) claim that the forces of progress activate conservative counter-reactions that are oriented to prevent a more egalitarian society. Detractors of technology and its progress only are limited to tell part of the truth, which means the aftermaths of new techniques in the fields of the economy but ignoring those achievements promoted by technology as the expansion of life expectative or the improvements in healthcare overt recent years. As Korstanje and Skoll put it, neither good nor bad technology depends on the use people did. Concerned by the paradoxes of Chernobyl, modernity showed that technology enrooted in a world of complexities and uncertainness would be as “a runaway train” very hard to control. The paradox was that the same instrument will make of our life a safer place to dwell become in a global threat that very well jeopardizes our existence on this planet (Korstanje & Skoll 2014). Here some questions arise: what is the role of Technology in our modern World, is technology a mechanism of control or censorship in democratic societies? in what way?