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One of the things I love most about being a social scientist is that in the course of pursuing one research project it is almost inevi­table that the idea for another one will arise. Such is the case with this book. The idea for this book emerged as I was conducting research on the transhumanist movement in the United States. Transhumanists are committed to using science and technology to overcome the biological limitations of human beings and usher in an enhanced posthuman species and society. As futurists and techno-utopians, transhumanists share a firm belief that science and technology can be used to solve our most intractable problems. But when it comes to other ideological commitments, they are divided. Some transhumanists, for instance, believe democratic socialism provides the best way to ensure that the benefits of science and technology will be shared by all. By contrast, the most influential and outspoken members of the movement, and those who have emerged as some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful techno-elites, proclaim free-market capitalism is the only economic system that can efficiently and effectively realize the promise of a radically enhanced future. In the spirit of “laying my cards on the table,” I will confess that my sympathies lie more with the first group, that is, to the extent that I am interested in exploring the possibilities of democratic socialism rather than ushering in a new and enhanced posthuman species. But it was this latter group of transhumanists, those devoted to the promise of capitalism, which led me towards the questions I examine in this book. As I traced the ways transhumanists defend and promote their faith in the free-market system, despite mounting evidence that inequality and economic suffering are rapidly on the rise, I began to ask myself what are the dominant justifications that are used to support and sustain capital accumulation in the current techno­logical age?1 For those who have made their fortunes by investing in new technologies, and for those who deploy new technologies with the hopes of enhancing corporate profits, what ideas and representa­tions do they use to portray capitalism as the “only possible” or even “best of all possible” economic orders?

Taking these questions as a departure point, in this book I synthesize two approaches to the study of contemporary capitalism with the aim of ultimately demonstrating how social life in the digital age is permeated by a novel set of cultural contradictions. On the one hand, I explore how digital technologies are making possible new forms of capital accumulation, extraction, and domination. On the other hand, I examine the ideological formations that are used to justify the machinations of digital capitalism. As anthropologists and sociologists have long observed, the reproduction of capitalism is never just an economic or technological affair: the reproduction of capitalism requires and gives rise to sets of beliefs that enable its participants to justify and legitimate their participation in “the system.” And yet the meanings and ideas that sustain the accumu­lation of capital, that provide justification for the ongoing circulation of M‒C‒Mʹ as the organizing logic of the capitalist economy, can vary quite considerably across different times and places.2 As the social and technological composition of capital changes, so too does its “spirit.”

This book seeks to explore the spirit of digital capitalism as it is being developed and deployed by business gurus, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and philanthropists in the contemporary United States.3 In the pages that follow, I demonstrate how the spirit of digital capitalism justifies and legitimates new forms of capital accumulation, extraction, and domination. I argue that it does this not just by valorizing the spirit of competition, as has long been the case in the capitalist past, or by extolling the role that capitalism plays in the protection of freedom and democracy, another old “trick” from the capitalist “playbook.” In addition to drawing upon both of these long-standing and well-examined ideological “moves,” the spirit of digital capitalism makes new claims about the way digital technologies contribute to the common good, foster collabo­ration and connectivity, and render life more convenient, even if this convenience comes at the expense of once cherished values such as privacy and liberty. Thus the central argument of this book is that the spirit of digital capitalism is indeed Janus-faced, and it reveals a new set of cultural contradictions at the heart of contemporary American society.