Our Future Is In Their Hands

While doing the readings for the finals, I find this article very interesting because it provokes me to critically assess our technoculture society.

- Robins & Webster: "Prospects of a Virtual Culture." In: Times of the Technoculture. From the information society to the virtual life.

In this article, it is said that capitalists are engineering our future and financing it into existence. They promised to give us a future using information technology, but what they want is actually to ensure our compliance in their schemes. It is Microsoft emperor's virtual new clothes. Technologies change, but society stands still. What capitalists find exciting are the vast commercial possibilities inherent in a new technological product - the internet or digital broadcasting or virtual reality games. Change is really the last thing they want. They want a future that just perpetuates the past. What they express is the drive to subjugate more and more elements of social life to a logic of rationality and control. This has made the world a more closed and diminished space - a space of constriction and even incarceration. The information society is obsessed with the future, but the future is merely the endless continuation of the present. It just manifests the desire of those in power to control and secure the future for themselves. Information society in fact works to foreclose the real productive possibilities inherent in the future - the capitalist enclosure of the future.

Therefore our postmodern society will just reflect the notions of Western society:

1. Captalism - The characteristic and obsession with spending money in order to consume products. (consumerism)

2. Cartesianism or the notion of transcendence - Western's concept of the mind that is valued over the body. This concept is superimposed onto information technology, making more products that appeal more to our experiences, then to physical needs. Hence, the creation of the hyperreal - empty signifiers that connotate several irrelevant concepts that correlate with capitalism and consumerism such as MTVs, pop idols, fast foods, etc.