High-Tech Modernism: Limits & Extensions

Abstract High-tech modernism is a powerful construct for reading the broad range of effects of digitalization on society. This response to Henry Farrell and Marion Fourcade's essay “The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism” first notes that high-tech modernism seems initially specified for application to advanced, quasi-liberal political economies. It then identifies three dimensions along which that construct could usefully be extended: 1) to take account of the limits of machine learning techniques of data analysis; 2) to consider the manner in which algorithmic digitalization transforms both the content and the management of work; and 3) to examine political responses to high-tech modernism, reminiscent of Karl Polanyi ‘s “double movement,” increasingly observable across a spectrum that runs from competition policy to the labor market.