"Upgrading" Market Legitimation: Revisiting Habermas's 'Technology as Ideology' in Neoliberal Times

This paper revisits Habermas’s notion of ‘technology as ideology’ in the context of contemporary political culture. It argues that the methodological and substantive contours of Habermas’s framework are still valid today. However, the role that technology plays as ideology has changed dramatically in the context of contemporary capitalism. No longer does it provide a legitimation for the political administration of the economy in the context of the Social Democratic state; instead, it legitimizes a new, neoliberal regime, whereby political intervention in the workings of the market is highly prohibited. This argument is substantiated with an empirical analysis of contemporary discourse on information technology, or the ‘digital discourse’. It shows how neoliberal tenets regarding the workings of the market are rearticulated as technological realities, and their ideological undercurrents are neutralized. According to this digital discourse, with information technology the promise of a self-regulating market has been materialized. As the market becomes more rational and frictionless by the force of information technology it also gains and further deserves more autonomy from political intervention. This new (network) ‘technology as ideology’, therefore, legitimizes key processes entailed in the shift from a Keynesian welfare state to a neoliberal state: the insulation of the market from political intervention and the corollary trends of the marketization of society and the disorganization of the economy.