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the two ontological orientations to technology prevalent within digital capitalism

An interesting set of distinctions from this great Frank Pasquale paper:

Beneath the surface of Internet policy disputes, there is a deeper, even ontological set of orientations to technology. On one side are advocates of “mastery,” who try to resurrect old legal principles and public values to order cyberspace. On the other are adepts of “attunement,” who caution the legal systematizers. When the “masters” propose a new constraint on the network, the “attuners” tend to parry with calls for humility. Law should adapt itself to the emergent order online, they say, should respect its inner music, its patterns of information exchange and hierarchy.

Both mastery and attunement can map to generally “conservative” or “progressive” policy positions. In privacy policy, the “masters” are often progressive, trying to impose some fair information practices on a Wild West of data brokers. The “attuners” are usually “free market” advocates, disciples of Friedrich Hayek who want to see spontaneous order online. Given the importance of intermediaries, attuners can be either privacy advocates (vis-à-vis government) or detractors (with respect to rules for companies). One year, they may press Congress not to force cable companies to track and stop music file-sharing; the next, they may fight for “deregulation” that permits the same companies to degrade quality of service for those deemed pirates by automated detection systems. As corporate media interests strike more deals with intermediaries, the politics of “attunement” have become increasingly neoliberal. The “online order” to which policymakers are told they must adapt is one comprehensively ordered by giant firms.

http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2015_Spring_Pasquale.php

I’m particularly interested in the final proposition and how this manifests itself in emerging forms of digital social science: the invocation of  “online order” naturalises digital capitalism, presenting it as an inexorable reality which is foundational to digital social science, rather than something which can become an object of interrogation and critique through digital social science.

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