Cultural Capitalism and Global Robotic Plots. The case of Japan

Abstract

Global “robotic plots” and their social impact on the new typologies of “governmental innovations” are the content and experimentum crucis for my assumption and the core of my contribution. The main source of inspiration is the need to adopt a new (cultural-)embedded variant of post-Marxian cultural criticism in order to tackle and analyse properly the alliance between cultural capitalism and cultural imaginary, which is to be considered as an autonomous and fruitful field of research.

The so-called cultural capitalism is assumed to have carried out the shift from the markets of things to web connections. Therefore, we have the appearance of unprecedented relations that produce fidelity marketing of clients as regards global, transnational enterprises. Going far beyond the controversial twenty- year-old prognosis of Jeremy Rifkin (Rifkin, 2000) we should check to which extent the progressive dematerialization of property, spaces and borders between goods, once upon a time identifiable with material objects in discrete succession, takes place in the world of the markets, economics and finance, and with repercussions on the daily life of millions of persons.