The Digital Condition: Class and Culture in the Information Network
Rob Wilkie
The acceleration in science, technology, communication,
and production that began in the second half of the twentieth century—
developments which make up the concept of the “digital”—has brought us
to what might be the most contradictory moment in human history. The
digital revolution has made it possible not only to imagine but to
actually realize a world in which social inequality and poverty are
vanquished. But instead these developments have led to an unprecedented
level of accumulation of private profits. Rather than the end of social
inequality we are witness to its global expansion.
Recent cultural theory tends to focus on the intricate
surface effects of the emerging digital realities, proposing that
technological advances effect greater cultural freedom for all, ignoring
the underpinning social context. But beneath the surfaces of digital
culture are complex social and historical relations that can be
understood only from the perspective of a class analysis which explains
why the new realities of the “digital condition" are conditioned by the
actualities of global class inequalities. It is no longer the case that
"technology" can take on the appearance of a simple or neutral aspect of
human society. It is time for a critique of the digital times.
In The Digital Condition,
Rob Wilkie advances a groundbreaking analysis of digital culture which
argues that the digital geist—which has its genealogy in such concepts
as the “body without organs,” “spectrality,” and “différance”—has
obscured the implications of class difference with the phantom of a
digital divide. Engaging the writings of Hardt and Negri, Poster,
Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Haraway, Latour, and Castells, the
literature and cinema of cyberpunk, and digital commodities like the
iPod, Wilkie initiates a new direction within the field of digital
cultural studies by foregrounding the continuing importance of class in
shaping the contemporary.
"Outstanding scholarship that is
at once comprehensive, relevant, provocative, and necessary."—Steven
Wexler, California State University, Northridge
"Through a dense and layered
study which seamlessly connects sustained philosophical readings of
Plato, Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Jameson, and Negri with a critical
analysis of some of the changes resulting from technological innovation
and globalization, and incisive interpretations of some of the icons of
digital culture, including the iPod, post-cyber/nano-punk and films like
The Matrix,
Wilkie offers in his book a cutting-edge theorization of digital culture
that will instantly establish him as one of the most exciting new voices
working in critical and cultural theory today." —Peter McLaren,
University of California, Los Angeles