Technocapitalism

Technocapitalism

Technocapitalism is a term used to cover the relationship between information technology and the capitalist economy. (See New Economy and dot com). It has been used at least since 1997, to denote the differences in production, culture and organizational systems, particularly in Silicon Valley (For one early example see [[1]).

Prof. Luis Suarez-Villa, in his 2000 book The Invention and Rise of Technocapitalism argues that it is a form of capitalism in which intangibles such as creativity and knowledge play the parts that raw materials, factory labor and capital played in industrial capitalism.

Dinesh D'Souza, writing about Silicon Valley, uses the term to describe the corporate environment and venture capital relationships of the high tech economy.

The term was probably coined by Douglas Kellner in 1997, as part of an examination of trends in production from the perspective of the Frankfurt School, and is used in a Marxian context to describe the use of technology to prop up capitalism and its social relationships, generally in negative terms.