Estrangement 2.0 Mark Andrejevic The critique of alienation is alive and well in some unexpected places in the digital era. Conservative columnists invoke Marx to tell us, for example, that blogs allow anyone with Internet access to “seize the means of production.” 1 Time magazine might as well have been invoking Marx in its announcement that we—all of us—are the “person of the year,” thanks to a digital revolution that is all “about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing.” 2 This is a twofer: not only a promise to overcome the reader’s exclusion from access to the means of publishing and distribution, but also to rehabilitate a sense of communal support. Over and over again, we encounter the “now-it-can-be-told” promotional strategy of the new media economy. It turns out that critical theorists were right about industrial capitalism all along: it is oppressive, top-down, and alienating after all. We can finally admit this because now that we have the technology to leave it all behind. In an almost step-by-step rejoinder to Karl Marx’s account of alienation in the Paris manuscripts of 1844 we learn that the new culture of interactivity will allow the “increasingly empowered prosumer” to “win back her freedoms and sense of self”; rehabilitate community and sociality online; foster self-expression and thus self-knowledge; and even overcome the longstanding diremption of nature and technology. 3 If, as Frederic Jameson has argued, ideological manipulation necessarily taps into “genuine social and historical content” for its effectiveness, it is perhaps worth taking seriously the way in which the promise of new media frames the problems it allegedly overcomes. 4 Jameson notes that even the falsest of resolutions offered by popular culture—if it is be compelling—targets a real problem and thereby invokes a Utopian moment: “we cannot fully do justice to the ideological function or works like these unless we are willing to concede the presence… of what I will call, following the Frankfurt School, their Utopian or transcendent potential—that dimension of even the most degraded type of mass culture which remains implicitly, and no matter how faintly, negative and critical of the social order from which, as a product and a commodity, it springs.” 5 One way of interpreting superhero movies or advertisements for sports utility vehicles, for example, is to consider the nature of their Utopian promise by exploring the problems they offer to overcome: a sense of the injustice of contemporary society or anxieties about feeling out of control, oppressed, threatened by the environment. In their own way each of these snippets of popular culture presents an intimation of Utopia: a world in which, for example, those who believe that might makes right are definitively defeated, or one in which we seize control of our own world, evading the forces that hem us in or oppress us. By the same token, the promotional hype of digital media incorporates its Utopian moment in the form of what Vincent Mosco has described as the rhetoric of the digital sublime. 6 More pointedly, though, the dimensions of this Utopia provide us with a negative image of the depredations it leaves behind—and these in turn outline a contemporary constellation of alienation from self, others, and our productive activity. To recall Marx’s formulation in the 1844 Manuscripts, alienated labor “estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect. An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man...What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.” 7