Technoliberalism and the Network Social

This article explores the role played by a reconfigured version of the modern social in the genesis of contemporary digital computational technological systems. Drawing on Michel Foucault's notion of "transactional realities" as well as Karen Barad's notion of intra-action, it postulates three main aspects of the modern social (scientific, governmental and oppositional) as well as a specific historical trajectory (rise, decline and return). On this basis, it argues that contemporary digital computational networks are not generically shaped by social forces (as in the notion of the sociotechnical), nor do they simply shape them (as in technological determinism), but that there is an ongoing process of mutual constitution and entanglement of the social and the technological – producing new modes of the social that can be described as ‘technosocial’. While there are different types of technosocial in circulation (including those enacted by the state), this article focuses on one particular inflection – that is, the network social – which it sees as implicated in the formation of a variation of liberalism as a political rationality that it calls technoliberalism.