John Armitage (2002), 'Resisting the Neoliberal Discourse of Technology: The Politics of Cyberculture in the Age of the Virtual Class', <http://www.textz.com>


The dominant political philosophy extends into what John Armitage calls the 'neoliberal discourse of technology' (2002). The discourse that relies upon ideas of telematics and virtuality serve to emphasise that human labour is no longer at the centre of production but technology itself - perhaps labour has been reduced to technology (for more on this, see Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1995). Armitage wishes to redefine the terms here to develop a critical account of this neoliberal discourse to exposes the economic and social interests and their underlying political dynamics at work. There is both authoritarianism and democracy latent in technological systems. What is worrying is that currently there is a virtual class 'rewriting the history of virtual and other technologies while simultaneously controlling their organized production, distribution and consumption' (2002).