Can the Digital Fix What the Digital Breaks?

 

Author: Zac Rogers

In 1995, John Gray wrote “The cultural void that yawns when the secular meliorism of the religion of growth founders is as yet too far away to be on any intellectual or political agenda.”[1] As the “religion of growth” Gray referred to found new life, temporarily, during the late 1990s and first half of the 2000s, in the various forms of financialized casino-capitalism practiced in the western world and beyond, it remained so.[2] The 2008 financial crisis forced the briefest of reckonings onto official agendas, but soon the status quo was restored. By then, an idea which had emerged in the mid-1970s in the US, of managing the world as one enormous financial and monetary system, underpinned by neo-liberal market ideology which, at the point of a gun, attempted to legitimize the management of people in terms of price signals disembodied from culture and politics, had reached such hegemonic intellectual and institutional status that few seemed to notice the numb silence emanating from that yawning cultural void. And fewer still understood its dangers.

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Dr Zac Rogers is a lead researcher at the Jeff Bleich Centre for the US Alliance in Digital Technology, Security and Governance (JBC).

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors.

 

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Digital Governance