(Excerpt from: Digitalism
vs. Capitalism, The New Ecumenical World Order: The
Dimensions of State in the
Digital Age, RoyalPlato, 2024 at Amazon.)
Instead of socialism or communism the human history,
after capitalism, is now entering to a new political structure: The Ecumen. Why?
Because, there is a new mode of consumption and production,
I call Digitalism, being born via technology.
This is how it looks like:
Capitalism is selling. Digitalism is sharing.
Capitalism is distribution. Digitalism is contribution.
Capitalism is exchanging. Digitalism is publicizing.
Capitalism is profiting. Digitalism is earning.
Capitalism is privatization. Digitalism is communalization.
Capitalism is exploitation. Digitalism is burden-free labor.
The significance of these
dichotomies lies not in their contrasting functionality as more compassionate
and humane, but rather in the fact that digitalism requires far less money and
effort to accomplish these conflicting consequences—if any at all.
There is a question that has
to be asked.
Where does the money for
digitization originate from?
On the surface, it appears
that capitalistically structured businesses and the wealth of the capitalist
elites generate economic revenue and income. However, this is just a cursory
examination. We have seen that there are views about when there are no people
to buy something at the end of the digitalization of the production process without
employers. The “Basic Income” doctrine, now discussed and proposed, is thought
to be the remedy. Upon closely examining the revenue produced by the digital
realm, which accounted for approximately 30% of the global productive economy
at the current time, it becomes evident that the majority of financial products
are developed within the digital realm itself, including digital currencies,
digital exchanges, and single clicks of digital buttons. Compared to analog
commodities and services, the results of digital business and income are
significantly less expensive and less time-consuming. This is spreading quickly
and deeply within the capitalist method of production, much like a lethal
vaccination on the capitalist arm.
From Global Village
As a
result of wasteful and needless production and decisions that are left to the
regulations of the market economy or political economy spectrum, we are
witnessing a peculiar time and space interconnectedness in three levels of
sociological structures (cultural, economic, and political) where
"little" individuals are trying to survive or "big"
individuals are trying to accumulate. This abstraction accurately describes the
mode of production today. We are unable to recognize that digitalism is causing
capitalism to become absolute during this hazy, temporary moment.
Why?
Here is why:
Regarding the cultural
structures, McLuhan postulated in the late 1960s that the impending
"information age would be a transitional era of profound pain and tragic
identity quest," based on his assertion that "all social changes are
caused by the introduction of new technologies." According to him,
technologies are "self-amputations of our own being" or extensions of
ourselves. McLuhan's thoughts and observations appear shockingly realistic and
clearly applicable to the world we live in now because technologies extend
bodily reach to space and time. Our consciousness is transmitted artificially
by the intelligence we have in the machinery. This is hard to grasp from the
androcentric life view. The general paradigm until the digital age is existence
in dichotomies: body-soul; material-ideal; ruler-ruled; oppressed-oppressor;
human-nature; analog-digital; muscle-machine; and so on.
Marx and Freud were two of the
many thinkers making the dichotomy in trinity. Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis or
Id-Ego-Superego. Most of the time, and still, they are outcast from the general
paradigms. Digitalism makes us see much deeper than trinity. Today’s trinity
consists of The Globalist Economist
Mother, The Sapiens Son and the
Google’s Suleyman.
When it comes to the economic
structures, we almost always encounter technology as the extension of war with
"civil [democratic] society turns into civil strife, civil war, regional
war, domestic violence, rape, child abuse, an increase in prison populations,
embezzlements of all sorts, and most dramatically of all, criminal
'phantom-states (Comaroff, Jean, and John L.
Comaroff, 2000)
However, ironically, the
Second World War paved the way for digital technology through Turing's
innovations, namely the deciphering of Nazi Germany’s Enigma crypto machine,
which is now excavating the grave of capitalism.
David Orr’s (2024) description
of the ruler class ideology exerted on the masses is prevalent, but with
digitalism, it is withering away. According to Orr, the rulers rule today
largely on the conviction of the masses that “prosperity is best achieved by
privatization, union busting, corporate welfare, tax evasion and deregulation,
etc., and safety is best secured by the military, preemptive war puppet
regimes, and neocolonialism.”. It is a fact that most of the mentioned areas
are digitalized today, but digitalization gives the most power -- not to
centralized governance and production but to people who use the end products of
digitalization. YouTube interactive content, AI, networking hacking (WikiLeaks,
etc.), and social media in general are democratizing and emancipating what has
been pressured into a collective unconsciousness. Nevertheless, this is still
the most puzzling phase of the new digital mode of production.
In the political structures,
the new phase is demarcated by the fall of the Soviet Union and the
transformation of the PRC to the “socialist market economy [“capitalism” in an
“open” disguise], amalgamating them both into a pure capitalistic society. The
polarization of international relations entered a catastrophic and muted social
space, and groupings of electronically digitalized communicational entities
produced most of the social interactions, so-called social media. This is also
hard to grasp, given the axial paradigm.
These are the reasons why most
of the postmodernist, late capitalist, and critical thinking theories make it
hard to understand that digitalism is coming.
Unlike
the enormous street protests, government coups, resistance, communist states,
and trade union strikes, etc., of the 19th and 20th centuries, today's
political and commercial protests and announcements are made entirely through
digital media, and meetings and rallies take place more often on these
platforms than in public squares. However, social media is used to publicize
and network demonstrations. Nation-states face the greatest threat from this
type of opposition, both internationally and locally. Paradoxically, they are
equally susceptible to manipulation by nation-states or forces hostile to
nation-states in order to provoke the desired reactions.
To Digital Cave
In this catastrophic arena of
the “Global Village," war and peace are a matter of digitalized
communication and weaponry. In 1968, Marshall McLuhan predicted that the “3rd
World War is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and
civilian participation.” This assertion is a way of defining the digital world
as a unique structure in which the weaponry of war is information rather than
ballistic nuclear heads. The cave is inevitable given the fact that the 3rd
World War devastation could create a catastrophic world that is unimaginable
from now on.
The global village within the framework of McLuhan is applicable,
defining all social structures, cultural, economic, and political networks as
the world’s ecumens.
Ecumens would be providing how comfortable the “cave” would be in the
future!
It is unfolding similarly to how Venice in the 8th century served as a model for capitalism in the 15th century.
(Excerpt from: Digitalism
vs. Capitalism, The New Ecumenical World Order: The Dimensions of State in the
Digital Age, RoyalPlato, 2024 at Amazon.)
