The New Spirit of Capitalism solves now by incorporating the cybernetic ideas of the alt. The critique of semiocapitalism and semiocapitalism itself is one and the same.

A first finding concerns the professed normative beliefs of digital elites themselves. Figure 1 shows which normative ideas – operationalized as orders of worth – these elites most often refer to in their public speeches and interviews. It clearly shows that solutionist ideas are a central normative reference point for digital elites. Around a quarter of normative references digital elites make are about the ability of technology to address central problems humanity faces. In addition, normative references that express a faith in the blessings of the market and the value of efficiency are also very common. References to green polity, by contrast, are remarkably absent. This, however, is not entirely surprising. Reminiscent of older discussion on applying knowledge and engineering to managing the environment in the Anthropocene (e.g. Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000: 485), Silicon Valley’s emerging ‘green brand of capitalism’ (Bialy et al., 2022) views ecological problems largely through the normative lens of solutionism. That is, it views them as problems to be solved with technology, rather than through a stronger emphasis on the green polity’s values of sustainability and sufficiency. Overall, these findings chime well not just with what we might expect, but also with other quantitative and qualitative research on tech elites.

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First, a survey of tech entrepreneurs from 2017 shows that while they have culturally progressive, cosmopolitan, even socially redistributive attitudes, they strongly oppose government regulations and public services (Broockman et al., 2019). Digital elites are more concerned about social problems than other business elites, but they don’t think that addressing them should just or primarily be the government’s responsibility. Instead, they trust the invisible hand of the market steered by the helping hand of solutionist businesses. Hence there is no need for regulators to meddle with the world-improving endeavors of digital companies. Second, a quantitative analysis of tweets and philanthropic documents of digital elites also finds that they have a distinct mindset that distinguishes them not only from the general population but also from other wealthy elites – a mindset that is particularly ‘meritocratic’ and ‘mission driven’ (Brockmann et al., 2021).

Third, detailed qualitative analyses that focus on Facebook specifically have also found that Mark Zuckerberg displays an almost ‘prophetic ethos [when trying to] persuade the public about Facebook’s vision for the future of sociality’ (Hoffmann et al., 2018: 214); and that Facebook strategically constructs a ‘corporate future imaginary’ (Haupt, 2021: 239) in which Facebook itself plays a crucial infrastructural role in connecting the ‘global community’. In doing so, it uses a solutionist ‘corporate prophesy’ (Haupt, 2021: 254) to make itself appear essential in bringing about a ‘better world’. We also find many references to the solutionist – in addition to the civic and project-based – polity in an additional analysis of Zuckerberg’s public utterances (compiled in the ‘Zuckerberg Files’). This further corroborates the centrality of solutionism to how digital elites publicly talk about their values and ambitions (see online Appendix D).

Given the central roles of these ‘celebrity tech founders and their networks of power’ (Little and Winch, 2021) in contemporary economies and societies, understanding the beliefs they hold – or even profess to hold – is crucial to understanding the course and character of digital capitalism more broadly. For example, through the role in shaping the moral and ideational background of political debates (cf. Abend, 2014), solutionist beliefs can help us understand the discursive politics of economic policymaking in the digital age, namely why the Silicon Valley model had such outsized influence on policymakers’ expectations about future growth and how it can help performatively create and sustain hegemonic social blocs (Rothstein, 2021). Likewise, solutionist beliefs are a ‘constitutive element’ of a ‘scalability zeitgeist’ that increasingly permeates public policy thinking and its newfound interest in ‘mission-oriented innovation’ or experimental ‘living labs’ (Pfotenhauer et al., 2022: 3, 6).

A second finding concerns the questions of whether solutionist beliefs have spread beyond the exclusive circle of digital elites and affected the wider digital milieu. Figure 2 depicts the evolving importance of different orders of worth in Wired, widely considered ‘the mouthpiece of the digital revolution’ (Wolf, 2003: 52). First, we find many references to the values of non-conformity, authenticity, flexibility, and antiregulationism of the inspiration, market and partly also project polity – especially in the 1990s. But we also find significant references to the solutionist polity which, while lower than in the statements by digital elites themselves, increase after the bursting of the dot.com bubble and again after the financial crisis, just when the market and the project-based polity lose importance.

This chimes well with the argument about the triangular relationship between capitalism, its spirit, and its critics (Chiapello, 2013). After all, the idea that the purpose of business is not just to make profits but to solve social problems is

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a powerful counterpoint to social critics who decry the moral parochialism of the shareholder-value doctrine and the self-referential and crisis-prone nature of financial capitalism (Kazmi et al., 2016: 749).4 Thus, at a time when capitalism was increasingly criticized for producing private but not public wealth and for creating rather than solving social problems, solutionism lent legitimacy to entrepreneurs who promised to harness the power of technology for the common good. The new spirit of capitalism had incorporated the artistic critique of managerial capitalism as overly hierarchical and bureaucratic by singing the praises of flat hierarchies, de-centralization, flexibility, and self-reliance – all highly congenial to the demands of a postindustrial economy. Similarly, the spirit of digital capitalism responds to the charge of selfishness and lack of concern for the common good by highlighting the ability of digital companies to solve social problems. This return of social critique can also be seen in the ‘post-neoliberal subjectivity’ of tech workers, namely their desire for being ‘middle-class wealthy and morally worthy’ (Dorschel, 2022: 1303), although many of them are more critical of naïve forms of solutionism

This suggests that starting in the early 2000s, we have seen a shift in the dominant technology discourse, which is ‘inextricably linked’ (Fisher, 2010: 243) to the capitalist spirit itself. For example, whereas Fordist technology discourse had extolled the ability of technology to mitigate the exploitative aspects of capitalism (instability, insecurity, inequality), post-Fordist technology discourse promised to overcome ‘the alienating components of capitalism’ while downplaying ‘its exploitative components’ (Fisher, 2010: 235). Indeed, many have argued that the internet has amplified the appeal and reach of the new spirit of capitalism, with a ‘spirit of networks’ (Fisher, 2010: 243) making ‘the network a normative model’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007: xxii) and serving as the ‘ethical foundation of the network enterprise’ (Castells, 2010: 214). Drawing on a long history of cybernetic and countercultural ideas, the digital entrepreneurs of the late 20th century believed that the internet would help them do

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By joining ‘the cultural legitimacy of the counterculture to the technological and economic legitimacy of the computer industry’ (Turner, 2006, 219), these cybercultural apostles not only legitimized a hands-off approach to internet regulation. They also articulated a broader vision of a society – the Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron, 1996) – in which digital technologies would ‘marry the competitive demands of business with the desire for personal satisfaction and democratic participation’, achieving ‘productive coordination without top-down control’ (Taylor, 1994). The internet promised an escape from the iron cage of Fordism; it ‘became both a metaphor for [a post-Fordist society] and a means to bring it into being’ (Turner, 2006: 219)