I
Evolution

Many authors have interpreted the new cultural realities that characterize our daily lives as a direct consequence of technological developments: the internet is to blame! This assumption is not only empirically untenable; it also leads to a problematic assessment of the current situation. Apparatuses are represented as “central actors,” and this suggests that new technologies have suddenly revolutionized a situation that had previously been stable. Depending on one's point of view, this is then regarded as “a blessing or a curse.”1 A closer examination, however, reveals an entirely different picture. Established cultural practices and social institutions had already been witnessing the erosion of their self-evident justification and legitimacy, long before they were faced with new technologies and the corresponding demands these make on individuals. Moreover, the allegedly new types of coordination and cooperation are also not so new after all. Many of them have existed for a long time. At first most of them were totally separate from the technologies for which, later on, they would become relevant. It is only in retrospect that these developments can be identified as beginnings, and it can be seen that much of what we regard today as novel or revolutionary was in fact introduced at the margins of society, in cultural niches that were unnoticed by the dominant actors and institutions. The new technologies thus evolved against a background of processes of societal transformation that were already under way. They could only have been developed once a vision of their potential had been formulated, and they could only have been disseminated where demand for them already existed. This demand was created by social, political, and economic crises, which were themselves initiated by changes that were already under way. The new technologies seemed to provide many differing and promising answers to the urgent questions that these crises had prompted. It was thus a combination of positive vision and pressure that motivated a great variety of actors to change, at times with considerable effort, the established processes, mature institutions, and their own behavior. They intended to appropriate, for their own projects, the various and partly contradictory possibilities that they saw in these new technologies. Only then did a new technological infrastructure arise.

This, in turn, created the preconditions for previously independent developments to come together, strengthening one another and enabling them to spread beyond the contexts in which they had originated. Thus, they moved from the margins to the center of culture. And by intensifying the crisis of previously established cultural forms and institutions, they became dominant and established new forms and institutions of their own.

The Expansion of the Social Basis of Culture

Watching television discussions from the 1950s and 1960s today, one is struck not only by the billows of cigarette smoke in the studio but also by the homogeneous spectrum of participants. Usually, it was a group of white and heteronormatively behaving men speaking with one another,2 as these were the people who held the important institutional positions in the centers of the West. As a rule, those involved were highly specialized representatives from the cultural, economic, scientific, and political spheres. Above all, they were legitimized to appear in public to articulate their opinions, which were to be regarded by others as relevant and worthy of discussion. They presided over the important debates of their time. With few exceptions, other actors and their deviant opinions – there has never been a time without them – were either not taken seriously at all or were categorized as indecent, incompetent, perverse, irrelevant, backward, exotic, or idiosyncratic.3 Even at that time, the social basis of culture was beginning to expand, though the actors at the center of the discourse had failed to notice this. Communicative and cultural pro­cesses were gaining significance in more and more places, and excluded social groups were self-consciously developing their own language in order to intervene in the discourse. The rise of the knowledge economy, the increasingly loud critique of heteronormativity, and a fundamental cultural critique posed by post-colonialism enabled a greater number of people to participate in public discussions. In what follows, I will subject each of these three phenomena to closer examin­ation. In order to do justice to their complexity, I will treat them on different levels: I will depict the rise of the knowledge economy as a structural change in labor; I will reconstruct the critique of heteronormativity by outlining the origins and transformations of the gay movement in West Germany; and I will discuss post-colonialism as a theory that introduced new concepts of cultural multiplicity and hybridization – concepts that are now influencing the digital condition far beyond the limits of the post-colonial discourse, and often without any reference to this discourse at all.

The growth of the knowledge economy

At the beginning of the 1950s, the Austrian-American economist Fritz Machlup was immersed in his study of the polit­ical economy of monopoly.4 Among other things, he was concerned with patents and copyright law. In line with the neo-classical Austrian School, he considered both to be problematic (because state-created) monopolies.5 The longer he studied the monopoly of the patent system in particular, the more far-reaching its consequences seemed to him. He maintained that the patent system was intertwined with something that might be called the “economy of invention” – ultimately, patentable insights had to be produced in the first place – and that this was in turn part of a much larger economy of knowledge. The latter encompassed government agencies as well as institutions of education, research, and development (that is, schools, universities, and certain corporate laboratories), which had been increasing steadily in number since Roosevelt's New Deal. Yet it also included the expanding media sector and those industries that were responsible for providing technical infrastructure. Machlup subsumed all of these institutions and sectors under the concept of the “knowledge economy,” a term of his own invention. Their common feature was that essential aspects of their activities consisted in communicating things to other people (“telling anyone anything,” as he put it). Thus, the employees were not only recipients of information or instructions; rather, in one way or another, they themselves communicated, be it merely as a secretary who typed up, edited, and forwarded a piece of shorthand dictation. In his book The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States, published in 1962, Machlup gathered empirical material to demonstrate that the American economy had entered a new phase that was distinguished by the production, exchange, and application of abstract, codified knowledge.6 This opinion was no longer entirely novel at the time, but it had never before been presented in such an empirically detailed and comprehensive manner.7 The extent of the knowledge economy surprised Machlup himself: in his book, he concluded that as much as 43 percent of all labor activity was already engaged in this sector. This high number came about because, until then, no one had put forward the idea of understanding such a variety of activities as a single unit.

Machlup's categorization was indeed quite innovative, for the dynamics that propelled the sectors that he associated with one another not only were very different but also had originated as an integral component in the development of the industrial production of goods. They were more of an extension of such production than a break with it. The production and circulation of goods had been expanding and accelerating as early as the nineteenth century, though at highly divergent rates from one region or sector to another. New markets were created in order to distribute goods that were being produced in greater numbers; new infrastructure for transportation and communication was established in order to serve these large markets, which were mostly in the form of national territories (including their colonies). This enabled even larger factories to be built in order to exploit, to an even greater extent, the cost advantages of mass production. In order to control these complex processes, new professions arose with different types of competencies and working conditions. The office became a workplace for an increasing number of people – men and women alike – who, in one form or another, had something to do with information processing and communication. Yet all of this required not only new management techniques. Production and products also became more complex, so that entire corporate sectors had to be restructured. Whereas the first decisive inventions of the industrial era were still made by more or less educated tinkerers, during the last third of the nineteenth century, invention itself came to be institutionalized. In Germany, Siemens (founded in 1847 as the Telegraphen-Bauanstalt von Siemens & Halske) exemplifies this transformation. Within 50 years, a company that began in a proverbial workshop in a Berlin backyard became a multinational high-tech corporation. It was in such corporate laboratories, which were established around the year 1900, that the “industrialization of invention” or the “scientification of industrial...