(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 3^rd 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.)