Critical Digital Theory

The relevance of critical theory in the digital age is linked to a continuous reflection and challenge to emerging technological and computational paradigms and their impacts on society and culture (see Berry 2014). However, critical theory has tended to be slow to take up the challenge of digital critique, and consequently the possible need to rethink its concepts and theoretical frameworks for understanding both the changing political economy but also computational culture and meanings. This encourages us to think about the future of critical theory, keeping in mind that it remains crucial to recognise, as Harry Braverman observed, that “the more science is incorporated into the labour process, the less the worker understands of the process” (Braverman 1974: 17). This insight, while originally applied to industrial labour, takes on new significance in the digital age where algorithms and artificial intelligence increasingly mediate and obscure the labour process.

One way to think about this is through the concept of “the computational turn” which I argue changes the way in which we can approach thinking about culture and the cultural record (Berry 2014: 3). The need for a computational turn in critical theory and for an urgent critique of recent idealist approaches to digital theory and digital methods is required to provide a negative dialectic to academic work that either offers untethered speculation on the digital – what Geert Lovink called the “metaphysics of so-called ‘digital theory’” (Lovink 2022: 56) – or else reflects an underlying digital positivism (for example, compare Digital Theory Lab 2024; Halpern et al., 2022, with Fuchs 2014, 2015; Mosco 2017: 8; Sadowski 2020). 

New critical approaches should enable a reconstruction of critical theory by working through the contributions of digital methods, data analytics, network analysis, and other computational techniques in the examination of social and cultural phenomena. Indeed, critical theory for digital society must grapple with the ways algorithms, artificial intelligence, and big data are reshaping power dynamics and social relations. This expansion necessitates engagement with related issues such as digital surveillance, algorithmic bias, and the societal impact of big data. For example, there has been examples in media theory where AI systems, and particularly recent LLM models, have been compared to human forms of consciousness or intelligence without sufficient care and attention to the specifics of the underlying computational, and usually statistical processes, of generative models which have no understanding of the materials they are combining (Vincent 2024). This often involves “blurring the concept of general intelligence with the concepts of mind or consciousness” (Golumbia 2019). It also tends to involve the reification of the human cognitive labour within computational systems. 

The future trajectory of critical theory is therefore likely to be characterised by a renewed and deeper return to the engagement with classical Marxist thought, reinterpreted for the digital age. Marx's analysis of capitalism and its contradictions will therefore remain foundational to critical theory after the computational turn. Marx’s assertion that “the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life” (Marx, 1970: 4) takes on new significance in the digital era, where the means of production increasingly include data and algorithms, increasingly mediated through artificial intelligence and intelligent agents. This perspective necessitates a re-evaluation of concepts such as labour, ideology, value, and class in their application to digital capitalism.

A significant focus is therefore the analysis and critique of economic models employed by major technology corporations and their societal impact. This aligns with Marx's (1976: 10) observation that “the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities'.” In recent years, it is claimed that data has become a primary commodity. Similarly, Fuchs has argued that we need to apply Marxist categories to the new digital economy as the notion of digital labour/digital work will be crucial for understanding contemporary capitalism and its crises (Fuchs 2014, 2015; Sadowski 2020). Indeed, digital labour is a specific form of labour that produces digital media technologies, contents, and data and requires careful theoretical and empirical work to trace its incorporation and exploitation in and through digital technologies (Fuchs 2014, 2015). The increasing global connectivity facilitated by digital technologies necessitates that critical theory must connect global perspectives to local ones.

Similarly, it is important to avoid the tendency to view digital technologies as inherently democratising, arguing that the computational perspective actively thwarts and even undoes the kinds of leftist political engagement that people assume it supports (Golumbia 2009: 4). This perspective challenges critical theorists to scrutinise the political implications of digital technologies more closely and not make simple causal assumptions about a democratising tendency in digital media. Critical theory must therefore examine new forms of resistance and activism within digital spaces and against power and authority but not assume a form of computational tendency towards progressive outcomes. As Dean argues “new media advocates often fetishistically proceed as if networked and participatory media-blogging, the introduction of videos onto the Web, the independent journalism associated with indy media are necessarily progressive, as if radical left politics is somehow built into the technology…  They act as if those who come into contact with this new information will make it credible, as if common standards for the assessment and evaluation of this information exist and are widely, rather than tribally shared” (Dean 2009: 22). Indeed, the internet is not just a tool for protest and political organisation, but it has itself increasingly become an object of political struggles and as it has done, it has broken into shards of competing and overlapping, often incommensurable, domains of unstable explanatory discourses (see also Fuchs 2015).

The development of new ethical frameworks for the digital age also represents an important area of theorisation for philosophers. For example, Nissenbaum has argued that what people care most about is not simply restricting the flow of information but ensuring that it flows appropriately. This indicates the need for engagement with issues of privacy, consent, and the ethical implications of data and AI utilisation but we also need to work to actualise the potential of computational approaches and digital technologies to transform the way we produce, distribute, and consume knowledge and culture (Berry 2014). This is crucial because critically exploring the moral adequacy of ethical codes is important because of the way in which they can often be used as rationalisations to justify self-serving practices – something we have seen with the recent AI Ethics debates.

The application of Marxist theory to digital capitalism also raises questions about alienation in the digital age. Marx's concept of alienation, where the worker is related to the product of their labour as to an alien object, can be extended to users' relationships with their data and digital labour (Marx 1978). Indeed, Fuchs (2019) argues that digital capitalism is based on an objective form of alienation where users’ digital labour creates a surplus product. As I have argued elsewhere, the digital itself often functions as an ideology shaping our understanding of social and political realities in ways that often reinforce existing power structures (Berry 2014). This is the reification of a social relation and as Marx argues,

in order … to find an analogy we must take flight into the misty realm of religion. There the products of the human brain appear as autonomous figures endowed with a life of their own, which enter into relations both with each other and with the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of [one’s] hands. I call this the fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities (Marx 1976: 165)

Consequently, critical theory needs to develop new methods, new concepts and new ways of relating to computational objects and processes. We must reframe our entire discussion of computation to better understand its social and political implications. As Winner (1997) has described, the contemporary merging of discourses of libertarianism and computation has produced a new constellation of ideas he called cyberlibertarianism. This is a “a collection of ideas that links ecstatic enthusiasm for electronically mediated forms of living with radical, right wing libertarian ideas about the proper definition of freedom, social life, economics, and politics.” This Barbrook and Cameron (1995) memorably described as the “Californian Ideology,” which argues “that human social and emotional ties obstruct the efficient evolution of the machine” and that “the cybernetic flows and chaotic eddies of free markets and global communications will determine the future.”

This is where critical theory offers a new ground for understanding the digital society as response to either abstract digital theory, that fails to engagement sufficiently with either political economy or ideology, or digital positivism, which merely moves to document and describe its object. Similarly, we cannot have merely an affective response or a mode of appreciation towards a kind of new media or digital object, although a critical response can include this. Rather, critical theory has to be able to move beyond the surface of the digital provide signposts towards uncovering the processes of computational society through new methods of critique and understanding.

David M. Berry

References:

Barbrook, R. and Cameron, A. (1995) “The Californian Ideology.” Mute. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideology 

Berry, D.M. (2014) Critical theory and the digital. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Braverman, H. (1974) Labor and monopoly capital: The degradation of work in the twentieth century. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Dean, J. (2009) Democracy and other neoliberal fantasies: communicative capitalism and left politics. Durham: Duke University Press.

Digital Theory Lab (2024) Digital Theory Lab. Available at: https://hlabs.nyuhumanities.org/digital-theory/ 

Fuchs, C. (2014) Digital labour and Karl Marx. New York: Routledge.

Fuchs, C. (2015) Culture and economy in the age of social media. New York: Routledge.

Fuchs, C. (2019) Rereading Marx in the age of digital capitalism. London: Pluto Press.

Golumbia, D. (2009) The cultural logic of computation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Golumbia, D. (2015) The politics of Bitcoin: software as right-wing extremism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Golumbia, D. (2019) “The Great White Robot God: Artificial General Intelligence and White Supremacy.” Medium. https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/the-great-white-robot-god-bea8e23943da

Halpern, O. et al. (2022) ‘Surplus Data: An Introduction’, Critical Inquiry, 48(2), pp. 197–210. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1086/717320.

Lovink, G. (2022) Extinction Internet. Institute of Network Cultures. Available at: https://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/extinction-internet/

Marx, K. (1978) Economic and philosophic manuscripts of 1844. In: R. C. Tucker (ed) The Marx-Engels reader. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, pp. 66-125.

Marx, K. (1970) A contribution to the critique of political economy. Progress Publishers.

Marx, K. (1976) Capital: a critique of political economy, Volume I. London: Penguin Books.

Mosco, V. (2017) Becoming Digital: Toward a Post-Internet Society. United Kingdom: Emerald Publishing Limited.

Nissenbaum, H. (2010) Privacy in context: technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Sadowski, J. (2020) Too smart: how digital capitalism is extracting data, controlling our lives, and taking over the world. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vincent, J. (2024) ‘Horny Robot Baby Voice’, London Review of Books, 10 October. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n19/james-vincent/horny-robot-baby-voice 

Winner, L. (1997) “Cyberlibertarian Myths and the Prospects for Community.” https://www.langdonwinner.com/other-writings/2018/1/15/cyberlibertarian-myths-and-the-prospects-for-community.