Digital socialism beyond the digital social: Confronting communicative capitalism with ethics of care

Abstract

This paper analyses the role of the “social” in communicative capitalism. It shows how the digital social is situated in the context of ideology, exploitation, and alienation. Based on the ethics of care, the essay outlines foundations of an alternative concept and reality of the social in digital socialism. It borrows the key concept of “care” from feminist theory and ethics and uses it to explore alternative paths to rethink “digital socialism” in the age of social media ubiquity and the pervasiveness of communicative capitalism. We need imaginative efforts to think beyond “capitalist realism” as a “pervasive atmosphere” (Fisher 2009, 16) that impacts not just the economy and cultural production, but also the domain of the ideas to the extent that it seems “impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it” (Fisher 2009, 2).